Jim’s Tech Talk
By Jim Langley
Arriving via email this week was a very short note from a cycling friend, Kenneth Herrington who is with the Fresno, California Cycling Club.
It said, “Just want to let you know. Mark Perkins has published the complete history of the Climb to Kaiser. 700+ pages.”
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-fresno-uphill-climb-to-kaiser-mark-a-perkins/1143068336
The Climb to Kaiser
Another bike friend, Mark Perkins wrote the book. He’s been working on it for years and years. I had seen a rough draft about two years ago. At that time he was having difficulty finding a publisher.
I’m so pleased that he managed to publish it that I wanted to share it with you even though I think Mark’s aiming the book at fellow Fresno clubmates and the many riders who’ve done the C2K. I don’t know how many of you have ridden the ride or are interested in it enough to buy Mark’s book. It’s well researched and full of fun facts, photos, charts and ride stories.
The event has been going on since 1977. It’s unique because it’s roughly an out and back course, 77.5 miles out and 77.5 back for 155 miles total. It climbs to the top of Kaiser Pass, which is on the backside of Yosemite National Park, elevation 9,163 feet. That’s the turnaround. The paved road ends at the top actually.
While the highest point is a little over 9K, the total elevation gain is a whopping 16,000 feet. 16K over 155 miles would be bad enough but the great majority of that climbing happens over about 65 miles at the beginning of the ride! And, while you might think it’s a free ride back, you’re so thrashed from all that huffing and grinding on the out leg that you curse every climb all the way back and there are quite a few.
In 1996 when I was at Bicycling Magazine Ken invited me to come down and do the ride. I went with another editor and afterward we were so awed by the ride that we included it on our 10 Toughest Rides in America list. If you’re interested in giving it a go, it’s coming up Saturday June 17, 2023. Here’s all the information: https://fresnocycling.com/event-4831435.
It’s a tough ride for sure but it’s also scenic. It passes by Shaver and Huntington Lakes and covers some lovely roads.
My C2K Story
Mark Perkins asked me to write up my 1996 Climb to Kaiser ride for the book because even though I finished it, it was a miracle that I did. I’m going to retell the tale here. It’s one of my most embarrassing cycling stories.
The whole problem was that I didn’t realize how incredibly hard the ride was. So I just brought my race geared road bike. I am pretty sure I had a 39/53 in front and 11-21 in the back because for a long time that was what I rode and raced on. It’s hilly here in Santa Cruz where I ride so I figured I could make it up the climbs in the C2K.
Well, the Climb to Kaiser leaves the flatness of Fresno and pretty soon goes straight up. As I mentioned, in about 65 miles you climb something like 14,000 feet.
Despite having to zig-zag to make it up the steepest sections like the Tollhouse and Big Creek climbs, I actually made good time to the top of Kaiser and was probably one of the first 10 riders. The air’s thin and it’s freezing up there. They put one of those foil blankets over me so I would stay warm. I felt fine for about a minute and then was overcome by nausea.
I thought it was the elevation. It got worse and worse. I tried to eat. They had a table with little cups with sliced peaches in them. I took a cup and the peaches tasted like poison. I tried the other food. It all tasted sour, awful, spoiled. The guy preparing the food sampled what I was complaining about and said it was all fine. I could see that he was worried about me. So of course I took off before he could force me to stop. How hard can it be I told myself, it’s all downhill. Not!
All the way back I got sicker. While it was about 40 degrees at the top of Kaiser, as I closed in on Fresno the temperature soared toward 100. I was dizzy and could barely balance. Riders passed, saw me wobbling down the road and asked to help but I couldn’t hold a wheel. Still I kept pedaling. As we got back to Fresno, the red lights at the huge intersections stopped me and I was so ill I was vomiting, grossing out all the people in cars. My bike, handlebar tape and clothing were covered in the red energy drink I couldn’t keep down.
The last miles to the finish were dismal. I was crawling along. My vision was so blurred I could hardly see. I flatted and it was all I could do to inflate the tire because my arms were so weak. But I kept going and got there, crossed the line for an official finish (23rd) and fell over onto the lawn where I tried to take a nap.
That’s part 1 of the story. What made it so embarrassing was that the ride organizers had asked me to come do the ride to write about it for Bicycling Magazine. So naturally, I was wearing our Bicycling kit and I had arrived in our Bicycling van so everyone knew the magazine was there. And everybody knew that the ride had about killed one of the editors. 😉
Ken asked me for years to come do it again. They saw my ride as a failure I think. The failure though was that I was stupid and brought the wrong gearing. The effort of that much climbing on those huge gears put me in the calorie deficit that then put me in a situation where I could never eat or drink enough. Combined with the huge temperature swing, it just did me in.
Part 2 is that the nurse at the finish insisted I go to the hospital. I insisted NO, no hospital! I told her I would be fine if I just rested in the grass at the finish. But she had a couple big guys pick me up and put me in their truck to take me to the hospital.
There’s no way I needed to go to the hospital and no way I was going to go. So on the way I convinced the two guys to drop me off at a hotel instead – my room from the night before was still available. I bought some sugary food from the hotel and went in, turned on the AC and commenced eating and resting and watching TV.
Well, back at the event, Nurse Ratched called the hospital and they said I wasn’t there. She then decided to call my wife!
Well at the time my wife worked weekends as an event manager at a resort here. The only way to reach her was through security so a cop received the call and went to track her down. By the time she got the message it had become “your husband is in an emergency room in Fresno and needs help.”
In reality I was eating ice cream watching TV in the hotel feeling better and better by the minute. When suddenly the phone in the room rang. I’m sure you can guess how the conversation went. She was happy to hear I wasn’t dying in some emergency room but she was definitely not happy about getting such a scare. She still gets upset every time I say I want to do a big ride because of it. And she knows about big rides having ridden cross country with me.
Your Turn
If the Climb to Kaiser sounds like your cup of tea, I hope my story doesn’t keep you from giving it a try. You now know to bring the right gearing and who knows, you might even end up in Mark’s book at some point.
If you’ve got an embarrassing or epic ride story to share please do so in a comment below so that I’m not the only one here with energy drink on his face.
Jim Langley is RBR’s Technical Editor. A pro mechanic & cycling writer for more than 40 years, he’s the author of Your Home Bicycle Workshop in the RBR eBookstore. Tune in to Jim’s popular YouTube channel for wheel building & bike repair how-to’s. Jim’s also known for his cycling streak that ended in February 2022 with a total of 10,269 consecutive daily rides (28 years, 1 month and 11 days of never missing a ride). Click to read Jim’s full bio.
I’ve done C2K probably around 2 dozen times – best support of any ride I’ve done. A couple of corrections to your report. The route is more of a figure 8 than an out and back – see https://ridewithgps.com/routes/40131035.
The paved road does not end at the top, but continues on to Florence Lake or Edison Lake (it splits about 10 miles after the summit) and the pass is quite a bit south of Yosemite so it really isn’t on the backside of the park.
In the early days of the ride, the name was the Fresno Uphill Climb to Kaiser. Along with the directional arrows, they also used the initials of most of the words in the ride name painted on the road. I’ll leave it to the reader to figure out what those letters were…
Thanks very much for the corrections jPeterO, appreciate it. Congrats on completing the ride so many times, bravo!
Jim
Hi, Jim – Epic! As being the inspiration of dubious distinction of Santa Cruz CC’s erstwhile annual Flaming Phoenix award once upon a time, of course that implied some pretty serious cycling mishaps. Your episode I think pretty much eclipses anything I managed to survive, I believe! Thanks for sharing; a good laugh is a gift, especially for this ol’ singed bird…🤣
Sorry for the long post:
This is the background story (letter written by my husband Bob) of my C2K experience:
Dear Fresno Cycling Club,
I am writing this letter on behalf of my wife, daughter, and myself. We thought you may be encouraged by what the Climb to Kaiser has meant to us.
My Father-in-law, Virgil Classen, passed away May 1, 2022, after a 5 1/2 year battle with cancer. Starting in the early/mid 1980’s until 2015 when he was 74 years old, he rode Climb to Kaiser every year except for three years where he had other commitments. Virgil also rode the Death Ride and Davis Double nearly every year during this same period. One of the years he missed C2K, was to do a 26 day PAC Tour across the US with myself.
When cleaning out my in-law’s house upon his death, Virgil’s daughter, Joey Yraceburu, my wife, asked if I could get Virgil’s old Kestrel back up and running for her. It was this bike that he last rode C2K. Upon rebuilding the Kestrel 9 months ago, Joey physically struggled to complete a 2-mile ride on a small hill near our home. However, about a month later after struggling to finish a 14-mile ride with a significant hill, she asked me if I thought she could finish C2K in honor and memory of her father. While I was deeply touched and welled with tears, I was shocked and very uncertain if she could do it but promised I would do everything I could to help prepare her for the ride. While she is a great athlete, she is not an endurance athlete and lives with a pacemaker that limits her heart rate to ~130 beats per minute. I am still not certain, but I am gaining some confidence that she can finish C2K while making the cutoff times. There have been numerous tears shed after many training rides over the past months, but she has worked herself up to completing a hilly century yesterday in 8:20 and made a 490’ climb in 0.8 miles (shorter but similar steepness to Big Creek). She is exhausted after every training ride and struggles during recovery before the next ride but she constantly reminds herself with every pedal stroke why she is doing this.
Also, Kayla Lankford, our daughter (Virgil’s granddaughter) told Joey she would train and do the ride as well if the decision was made to attempt C2K. We all registered shortly thereafter. This has drawn Kayla and us closer together after having some distance for several years.
Joey and I met on C2K back in 1988 at the Huntington Lake rest stop where she was volunteering and would give Virgil a leg message during lunch each time hid did C2K. I did not train much that year as I had chicken pox prior to the ride and was in such dire looking condition at the lunch stop, that Joey offered me a leg message and was then stuck giving one to everyone who asked as she had lost the excuse that she only gave her father a leg message. Several months later, Joey and I got engaged at the lunch stop.
Upon receiving the C2K cancelation email on Friday, Joey cried for hours. There is no substitute for what this ride meant to us one year after Virgil passing away. While Joey would like to commit to C2K next year, she and Kayla don’t know that they have it in them to go through the training/suffering and time commitment again that they went through these past months. I have not seen anyone fight and suffer so much on a bike. While training/riding with Joey has been slow for me, this might be the most rewarding and satisfying C2K experience for me, seeing her reach milestones of getting up certain hills, and thinking about what it would be like when she summits Kaiser Pass and Tamarack Ridge, starts the Auberry decent (where I have always shed tears in the past), and reaches the finish line.
While I am not fully convinced that Joey can make the cutoff times, I am convinced that she will have closure on this chapter in her life attempting C2K whether she finishes or not as I know she will push herself to utter exhaustion as her father always did. Either way, there will be tears of relief, joy, and remembrance. Therefore, Joey, Kayla, and I are contemplating our own C2K ride Friday June 16 with some sag support from family. We do realize the last 1.5 miles of Kaiser Pass may not be open.
We understand that Fresno Cycling Club did not have much of an option in cancelling the ride this year and appreciate being able to roll over the registration to next year. We thought about the Tollhouse century, but it does not carry the meaning that C2K carries for us. Therefore, we prefer to roll our registration over to 2024 just in case the training misery is forgotten.
And this is how our attempt went:
This is Kayla (Bob & Joeys daughter)
The ride was exhausting, but I had a lot of fun. It’s such a beautiful area! And it was incredible to share with my family
Mom was amazing. She was already fighting nausea by tollhouse and fought that on and off for most of the ride. She fell on Tollhouse. Her back starting hurting on Big Creek and she felt that pain the rest of the ride. Dad gave her back massages every break & sometimes rode next to her to rub her back while she was riding. She fell another time on Big Creek. She was shaking/shivering uncontrollably at the snow gate just prior to summiting. As the ride went on she took longer & longer just to catch her breath at a rest stop. We had to pull her off to rest once when she started looking unstable on a decent in the dark.
There were soo many times that quitting for her seemed very reasonable. She just kept getting back on the bike and riding anyway. Her perseverance was incredible to watch.
Special thanks to my grandparents, brother, and sister-in-law for providing excellent SAG during the ride. We couldn’t have done it without you all.
We successfully completed the entire ride at 12:05am with a time of 19hrs and 17mins.
-Kayla
So that’s my C2K experience: From day one of training to finishing the ride…19+ hours later, it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, physically, mentally and emotionally. I’m thankful for the experience, the reminiscing we enjoyed along the way, an incredibly supportive family and that I don’t have to go on a training ride tomorrow…or the next day!!
-Joey