MASH CA is complete. As we began the journey, I wrote that “carrying a hard tempo throughout will require the highest levels of performance from our equipment, bodies, and minds.” That certainly was the case but, looking back, I realize that I was thinking primarily about the point-A-to-point-B and much less about the context of our efforts.

The Tour organizers have claimed that almost two million spectators watched the race. Whether or not you believe that particular number, you can’t deny that there were a lot of people, every day. It was interesting to see how varied the crowds were from stage to stage. Some days, it was all about Lance. Other cities had mainly local crowds, drawn by the novelty of the race coming to town. In a few places, like Solvang and Mt. Palomar, the majority of the spectators could be considered “true” cycling fans.

Photo by Mike Martin

There was something about this race that appealed to everyone, and it was awesome to see how many people – especially hardcore road riders – appreciated what we were doing. People saw us every day on the road and cheered when we came by. For me at least, that was one of the goals of the trip: to show that track bike culture is about more than bombing traffic and doing tricks, that it’s respectful of and connected with other forms of cycling. I’m proud of how we were able to demonstrate that without losing the essentials of MASH’s city roots and artistic vision.

We didn’t see anyone else riding fixed this week, but I hope that we will next year. There’s no ride that can’t be done on the track bike, although frankly I had my doubts going into the trip. It’s a tool with which you can explore not only the city, but also the world beyond.

All that being said, the point of our undertaking wasn’t to change the world or raise awareness for anything. What appealed to us was taking a road trip where we could challenge ourselves, generate great content, and hopefully see a little bit of pro bike racing. Everything else was incidental.

Photo by Mike Martin

A few thank-yous:

Will Meeker flies below the radar, but he’s an integral part of MASH. From driving the scooter, to working on bikes, to processing photos until 2am, Will was the glue that held this trip together. None of us would have completed this trip in one piece without him. Hopefully his professor at CCA will cut him a break for missing that one class…

No matter how tired he was or how late he’d stayed up completing his non-MASH duties as Clif Bar’s senior sports marketing manager, Matt Sharkey was always quick with a joke or a story about his friends in a certain industry. In addition to his help with logistics and general road trip know-how, Matt’s positive energy was a key to this trip.

MASH has received incredible support from many sponsors. Incase, Clif Bar, Cinelli, Vittoria, Selle San Marco, Lazer, Prowheelbuilder.com, North Face, SAG, SRAM, Specialized, and others. Thank you for sharing our vision.

Finally, I’d like to thank Mike Martin. He has carried this project on his shoulders and his photos and videos bring it to life. Balanced with his dedication to friends and family, Mike pours everything into his work and the results speak for themselves. I wish him all the success in the world. And some rest.

Photo by Mike Martin

See you on the road,

-Josh Kadis

Friday was a different kind of race for the pros and a different kind of day for us. It was a time trial stage, meaning that riders are timed individually over a short distance, rather than racing in a pack over long courses like the one’s we’ve been covering. Because there were only fifteen miles to ride, the MASH crew was able to sleep in and cruise around at the venue for a while.

Time trial days are great for spectating because you get to see so much. On the road stages, the teams have been showing up about an hour before the start and leaving within minutes of the finish. But at the time trial, the riders took off at 1-3 minute intervals, starting with last-place Francesco Chicchi at 12:00:00 and concluding with race leader Levi Leipheimer at 14:07:00.

Plus, the course started and finished in Solvang, so the pro squads were posted up there all day. Each team roped off an area around their vehicles for working on bikes, warming up, and hobnobbing with sponsors and media. For us bike nerds, it was pretty overwhelming.

Photo by Josh Kadis

By far, the best moment of the day was checking in with the Garmin-Slipstream crew that we met last week at the Clif Bar event. Jonathan Vaughters, the man behind the program, hadn’t been able to attend the Clif thing, so it was great to meet him finally. He has done amazing things to grow that program intelligently and set the bar really high not just in terms of clean racing but also in the quality of his organization.

Photo by Josh Kadis

Allen Lim is the team’s physiologist; he writes the riders’ training programs and analyzes their power data from racing and training.

Photo by Josh Kadis

Finally, Christian Vande Velde was rad. Hearing the guy who placed fourth in the Tour de France asking, “Are the MASH guys here yet?” was actually kind of embarrassing. Christian’s dad, a former Olympic cyclist himself, was there as well and told us stories about how he used to make Christian do intervals on the track bike on the road. Maybe we’ll get to tape a bit with him some day…

-Josh

Photo by Josh Kadis

We usually meet in the hotel lobby at 7am and head out to breakfast at Denny’s, IHOP, or something like that. A couple of the hotels have had edible breakfast in-house, which has been rad. By the time we eat, fiddle with our bikes, load up the vehicles, and drive to wherever we’re starting from, it’s usually between 9am and 9:30.

We have a great setup in terms of vehicles and support. The riders and photo/video equipment are transported in a rental passenger van, while the bikes and luggage roll in a biodiesel Dodge Sprinter provided by Clif Bar with a trailer. A lot of the taping happens from a Honda PS250 scooter, which travels inside the trailer as well.

Photo by Josh Kadis

Mike Martin is shooting video and photos, along with Gabe Morford for the first few days. They’re the two filmmakers behind MASH. Will Meeker plays the role of production assistant and gets a litany of little things done. Steve MacDonald has been driving the passenger van and making sure that all the riders have what we need during the day. Matt Sharkey from Clif Bar has been with us the whole time, driving the Sprinter and helping us in innumerable ways. All the support has been awesome. It’s what makes this trip possible, really.

Photo by Mike Martin

The riders, by the way, are Rainier Schaeffer, Jonathan Burkett, Garrett Chow, Blake Van Knopka, Walton Brush, Andy Peterson for the first couple days, and myself, although I won’t be riding all the stages due to some other commitments at the Tour.

Anyways, once we hit the road it’s pretty free-form. Sometimes we ride in a paceline and sometimes the group breaks up, it depends on the terrain and how people are feeling. We eat a lot of Clif product, supplemented by “real food” like ham and cheese sandwiches. I’ve been drinking 6-8 bottles per day.

Photo by Josh Kadis

The pro peloton usually passes us during the ride. It’s kind of amazing how many cars are required to shepherd them. There’s a “rolling enclosure” around the race, meaning that CHP officers shut everything down before the race comes through, then the roads open back up. We just have to wait. If there’s a breakaway with a big lead on the main field, it can take well over half an hour.

A few of the pro riders know what we’re up to, especially the Garmin-Slipstream team since we did an event with them at Clif Bar HQ in Berkeley last week. Svein Tuft always gives a head-nod. And it’s been surprising how many spectators know MASH. A lot of people have seen us out there every day and cheer when we come by.

Photo by Josh Kadis

We’re treating this as a road trip, not an official race. So we just ride as far and as fast as we can until we get as close as we can to where the race finished that day. Our arrival time has varied, but it’s usually dark by the time we climb off our bikes, mill around for a minute, put on dry clothes, and load up the vehicles. We’ll grab some dinner on the way to the hotel, and then get some rest.

-Josh

Slow going on Wednesday’s stage. We rolled around 9:15 and reached the top of the final climb at maybe 5pm, having covered just 70 miles. At that point, the consensus was to pack it in for the day. We were still 45 miles from the finish.

A few of the delays:

• Cleat broken while skidding – 20 minutes
• Waiting for the race entourage to pass through – 40 minutes
• Many, many gear changes – 20 minutes

We started off under clear skies on gently rolling roads through the orchards outside Merced with the mountains on the horizon. But after the course left the valley floor, we didn’t cross a mile of flat ground the rest of the day and there wasn’t a climb or descent too small to warrant changing gears. I switched between 44×21 and 44×17, but I probably should have replaced the 17 with a 15. Oh well.

Photo by Mike Martin

That said, there was some amazing riding over snow-covered passes that had to be plowed earlier in the day because of the Tour. Mike got some gnarly descending shots from the scooter.

At least we knocked off all the day’s difficulties; from where we stopped, it was all downhill to the finish. I guess that riding track bikes during the Tour is an inherently slow method to cover these courses. Sure, It was disappointing not to complete the stage but that’s part of the adventure. Not every day is going to work out perfectly.

But one can always hope.

-Josh

Other than the weather, gearing is probably our most frequent topic of conversation. These courses are throwing a really wide range of terrain at us; finding the perfect setup will be essential to make it all the way through the trip. But most of the roads are completely unknown to us and you can only learn so much from the course profile, so there’s a lot of guesswork involved.

Tuesday’s 100-mile stage* from San Jose to Modesto started with the super steep Sierra Road climb right off the bat, followed by some gradual descending, a smaller climb over Patterson Pass, another gradual descent, and then about 50 miles of pancake flat, windy roads through the Central Valley.

Our gear selections:

• Garrett: 44×20 and 44×15
• Blake: 44×22 and 44×14
• Walton: 47×19 and 47×17
• Josh: 44×21, 44×17, and 44×15
• Rainier: 46×21 and 46×17

Sierra Road is so steep that Cervélo TestTeam (including last year’s Tour de France winner Carlos Sastre) told me they were going down to a 38t chainring. So all of us would have been more comfortable on a smaller gear, but we managed. I can only speak for myself but if that climb had been at the end of the stage, I would have really struggled.

For the rest of the stage, the 44×17 was perfect on Patterson Pass and the 44×15 was good for the flats. I was maybe a little overgeared for some of the block headwind sections.

Wednesday’s stage has probably more total elevation gain than today but the climbs are more gradual. Sierra Road is roughly a 2,000 foot ascent in three miles, and the first climb tomorrow is about the same elevation gain but over maybe ten miles. I’m thinking that the 44×17 should be okay as my climbing gear, and I might run a 44×14 on the flop-side since there will be some long, wide-open descents. But it’s all a crapshoot, really.

-Josh

* We had to skip about 20 miles in the middle in order to get ahead of the race’s rolling road closures. So it was more like an 80 mile day for us.

Meanwhile, six of the MASH crew battled wind, rain, climbs and descents. Here are two of them, the oldest and the youngest. Meet Blake and Walton.

Photo by Mike Martin

Blake Von Knopka
Age: 40
Hometown: Berkeley, California
Stats: 6′2″, 190 lbs
Occupation: General contractor and property manager
Status: Married with 7 bikes
“I was surprised that I made it to Santa Rosa before the field. I rode so hard the last 30 minutes. I just didn’t want to get caught and have to wait on the side of the road.”

Photo by Mike Martin

Walton Brush
Age: 18
Hometown: Portland, Oregon
Stats: “slouchy” 5′10.5″, 155 lbs
Occupation: Industrial design student
Status: you’ll have to ask
“Would I want to race seriously? I think it’s more of a fad for me. It’s way funner riding at times like these than racing.”

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.