LOTOJA 2008

As a family if we were to take a vote about which bike race is our favorite every year. I think the vote would go to LOTOJA. The race starts in Logan, Utah, and finished at Teton Village, Wyoming. It is about 207 miles, all raced in one day.

We arrived in Logan early Friday evening to find long lines of people waiting to pick up their number and race packet. We found Mac of Milliseconds hard at work making sure that everyone's timing chip was associated with the correct race number.
We found Brent chambers in the Motorhome, moving people into the correct categories.


Rachael seems to find her way into the packet pickup tent and helps get the packets ready every year. ( One woman even remembered her from helping years ago when Rachaell was small enough to fit into the boxes from the shirts and just played while Dad and I did the helping). We all have a great night visiting with volunteers, and cyclists who come every year. We always hope to get to bed early, but it never happens, and the alarm going off at 4:00 a.m. is way to early. The hotel was gracious enough to have their Continential breakfast start at 4:30 and we were the first ones in line. By 5:00 we were headed over to the start line in front of Sunrise Cyclery. The first group left at 6:00 a.m. - the TOUR group. Our friend Kevin Leake went in that group. He took a bunch of friends with him, I think Kevin's job is to push the pace and keep them going along the way so that they get to Teton Village before dark. The actual RACERS started at 6:25, we had a group leaving every 3 minutes for the next hour and a half. We watched Mark Shaeffer head off again, I think he has done this race 12 or more times. Mark is a great friend and onw we enjoying seeing at all of the races. We also got to watch Jamie Leake start the race, it was her first time in the Women 1/2/3 field. She ended up in 4th place.








Rachael and I take off after the last group of cyclists have started. We have a ham radio operator with us in the car. He keeps us informed of things having along the race route as informed by all of the Ham radio operators. They truly help to keep this event safe as we have 1500 cyclists out on course. After 9 hours and 23 minutes we arrive at Teton Village and watch Cameron Hoffman sprint to the finish to win the Cat 1/2/3 race. We keep the finish line open until 8:15 and call it a SUCCESSFUL day. Lots of cyclists finished the race and no one went away in an ambulance. As we say at our house "Another one in the bag"