Incase

Our friends at Mash are crazy, they decided to ride the Tour of California on their track bikes (or “fixies” as some of you kids still like to call them). Josh Kadis will be blogging live from the road for us. Here is his first report.

A brief introduction… The Tour of California is a 9-day, 750-mile world-class bike race that invites only the top professional teams in the world. Taking inspiration from this competition of the world’s greatest cyclists, we’ll be expressing our own love of the bike with a parallel journey covering the same courses as the race, only on our track bikes.

Although MASH CA is non-competitive, carrying a hard tempo throughout will require the highest levels of performance from our equipment, bodies, and minds. Hopefully we’re up to the challenge. Incase has been a great supporter of our project and we’ll be posting more content here over the next 9 days.

Saturday was just a 2.4 mile warm up. We rolled 10 deep from Clif Bar HQ in Berkeley this morning and got to downtown Sacramento in time to watch the pros race. It was Lance Armstrong’s first major race on US soil since 2005. The crowd was huge, but it was really inspiring to see that almost everyone was there for the bike racing first and Lance second. He got the biggest cheers of course, but not by much.

After the finish, we checked out the course for ourselves. Garrett and I crashed, taken out by a wayward passerby. No injuries sustained, although we’re down a front wheel now.

The real test starts Sunday. About 100 hilly miles from Davis to Santa Rosa and the forecast does not look good.