Joining Bob for his 25th (officially organized) double century. Congrats Bob!!! 🎉 Up until last week, I wasn't sure if I was going to do it, mostly because Sonny had been struggling a bit on recent rides. After getting destroyed by my allergies on last weekend's ride, I felt like it would be a bad idea to suffer for 200 miles like that. But then that evening Sonny said he signed up. Well, I guess that meant I had to too if he was willing to suffer. I didn't realize it but Bob informed me that 10 years ago, I did my first Davis Double. It was my second ever double on my way to getting my California Triple Crown that year. The weather was looking promising. It was going to cooler than the surrounding days with pleasant temperatures and only single-digit winds compared to how windy it's been this year. The evening before, when we went for dinner and to register, it was already feeling too hot so again, very glad it was going to be cooler. I managed to get more sleep than I typically do before a double - almost 5 hours. I was feeling the most optimistic about the ride for the whole time leading up to it. When we went outside though, it was quite breezy. Definitely more than the single-digit windspeeds promised and starting earlier too. Because it was supposed to be nice, I dressed for that instead of the wind. So with the windchill it ended up being slightly chilly until around the second rest stop 60-ish miles in. Heading out of Davis, we passed a group of guys that later passed us back. Initially, I was glad we went by them because they were pretty twitchy riders and not a group I wanted to be riding with but when they caught us, Bob decided to jump onto the back of their train. Not long after that, one of the guys I had identified as twitchy almost took Bob out but we still stayed. I was at the back and don't know if it was them or Sonny but the pace kept yo-yoing. Sonny does have the tendency to let a gap open up in front of him and then surge forward to close it. Not sure why he does that but it makes it hard to stay in paceline and negates the benefit of it as you're using up a lot of energy constantly braking and accelerating to maintain position. When we were passing groups, those guys were definitely accelerating for no reason. All they had to do was maintain speed and go by. Eventually Bob let them go. I kind of wish I had said something earlier. Sadly, the headwind got even worse after that. Not sure what the best thing to have done would've been. We had periods of terrible crosswind coming from our left. Bob would ride slightly to his left and I would sneak in to his right but there really wasn't any room for Sonny. When Sonny was leading he was doing basically the same thing. When I was pulling, I'd be right on the left side of the lane, since there was no traffic that early in the morning, giving both Bob and Sonny room to form and echelon. I mentioned it to them but on their pulls, the echelon we needed never really formed on their turns. At one point when they rotated, Sonny and Bob just rode side-by-side so I went in between them snarkly saying something about how they broke the echelon so I was just going to ride here. At the first rest stop, the wind was gusting so badly. I felt bad for the volunteers because it was quite chilly. Bikes were hanging precariously on the racks as they were almost being blown off. We continued just as the sun started to rise. We got a brief bit of sun before it was covered by the clouds again so it remained chilly, especially because of the wind. It was particularly fun battling the headwind and we just trudged on. At the second rest stop, it finally felt warm enough to strip our layers off. I had been finishing one bottle between each rest stop which I thought I was doing well considering how cold it was. The next section, the roads were quite bad. Lots of potholes and bumps. Around mile 70, Sonny's rear tire just flatted instantly for no apparent reason. I rode back and forth along the road and found nothing obvious that could have caused it. We found a pull out where Sonny started to repair it. He's normally always composed but he was really frustrated and unhappy about the flat. He's running tubeless (as we all are), and had just retaped and put in new sealant. He couldn't find any obvious holes or cuts. He was going to try and pump it back up but the tire had unseated. He wanted to use a CO2 but I thought that would be a waste of time given that he couldn't find the source of the leak. I told him he must as well just chuck it into the field. He had a tube and he should just install it and save the CO2 in case we needed it later. He insisted on using it anyway. It wasn't a complete waste I guess because it did show sealant/air coming out of one of the spoke nipples. His new rim tape had somehow failed. So he did have to throw in a tube anyway. One of the crazier things was he pulled out all the old sealant and it came out all as one piece like a molted snake skin. Bob and I have never seen anything like that. This section of the route was also the start of some longer climbs. I was wondering why Bob was going so hard on them and a few times, I just let the two of them go, pacing myself. I didn't realize until the third rest stop that I hadn't been eating enough. Normally, I have a PB&J at each stop along with other things but I hadn't the first two stops. I started off in a bad mood thanks to the wind, cold, and pacelining issues and maybe part of it was just being hangry even though that's not how I was feeling. At the third rest stop, around mile 90, I was feeling pretty tired and that was when I made the realization about my fueling. I ate a bunch of food including a PB&J. I was worried I'd dug myself into a hole I wasn't going to be able to recover from. As we got going again, feeling the way that I felt this first 100 mi., I wasn't sure I was going to be able to do another 100. One of the things happening while I was feeling tired that just added to my frustration was I was never positioned were I wanted to be. We all have our strengths and weaknesses and by now know where to be when. Only now I was out of place. Instead of being the first to descend, I'd end up following the guys who brake unexpectedly in places where I wouldn't normally. Or navigating around potholes, there was only one line but we weren't in line and it would be a bottleneck using up more energy both physically and mentally. The gravel section of the route before lunch was surprisingly empty. We had it almost all to ourselves. We had seen a bunch of roadkilled snakes during the day. On the climb out, I saw one on the side of the road and immediately just thought it too was dead but it was in fact alive with it's head facing out towards me. My chances of finishing seemed grim before, but on the climb I started to feel better, having more power. At lunch, a former Fatcaker, James, found me and we chatted for a bit. After lunch, my legs came back to me thankfully. I learned a lesson today that I thought I would've already learned by now. Those times towards the end of rides when I'm unable to generate more normal amounts of power on climbs probably wasn't because I was tired but because I wasn't fueled. In general, I'm not a snacker and because of that, I'm terrible about eating throughout the ride. My inability to eat while riding because of my asthma and breathing also don't help. After lunch is probably the worst part of the route where we have to be on CA-53 for quite a while. Lots of fast moving traffic which is not pleasant at all. Around this time we we kept running into a group of three guys, with one of them seeming to be struggling and also seemingly not a descender and was getting dropped hard on the long descents. As we rolled into the canyon next to Cache Creek, one of the nicer sections of the route, they caught us again and we decided to paceline with them. The road is nicely paved and trends downward. The views are nice too. On one of the descents, Bob, not wanting to apply the brakes, had pulled out of the line and was just slowly coasting faster than the guys from the other group. Sonny pulled out too, which just gave Bob license to continue, even though we had promised to take it easy and chill out. Sonny, being tired and not wanting to chase, was just out in limbo coasting and not catching up to Bob. That meant I was in limbo behind Sonny not being able to got around him and to catch Bob like I normally would. I said to one of the guys, "I don't know what he (Bob) is doing." Then a gap opened up and I sprinted after Bob to tell him to chill out. One problem, we were having too much fun descending to chill out. Oh well, I hope Sonny made some new friends. :) Eventually, the terrain leveled out and got rolly. They caught back to us when Bob and I were stopped by SAG looking for a tube for someone who flatted. The other guys rolled off the front and we chilled out. Most of the rest of the way was either downhill or tailwind and sometimes both. This is the mark of a good route and route builder IMO. :) We got to the last rest stop just before sunset. Unfortunately there was still 20-ish miles left to go so we weren't going to get back before dark. It was hard to imagine we were still 2 hours of riding from getting back. Luckily because of the terrain and wind, we'd been going much faster, after about mile 130, and we got back in about an hour and a half. Sonny sounded pretty destroyed at the end but he never really slowed. I'm really glad I had a better back half than the front. Bob seemed to have the best day out of all of us. Probably making for a better 25th? :)