Triple Bypass touts itself as an "epic bucket-list bicycle ride." Taking off just outside of Denver and ending up later that day in Avon/Vail, it is epic indeed. • 118 Miles • 10,800' vertical climbing • 3 Mountain Passes: Juniper, Loveland, and Vail When I first moved here over a decade before, I would see the people with Triple Bypass hats or kits and, once I looked it up, it seemed a little crazy, but it was also intriguing. Eventually, it became a goal. I was psyched when my daughter's longtime boyfriend, Henry, agreed that we'd ride together. At that point Henry, who was otherwise super fit from pretty much every other sport, wasn't really road cycling that much. I told him, "you know, to do this, you're gonna have to train to be ready for it." As I've come to find out is usual for Henry, he was completely down to do it. Training for Triple When you do a ride like this, you don't want it to turn you inside out. You don't want to show up that morning and go, "oh wow, can we do this?" Once we committed to it, we were gonna make sure we'd be ready. It was fun to walk through a training program with Henry that would take us through a progression‚ workout by workout, ride by ride, from the day we decided to do it, to the day we would show up in Evergreen. We started doing longer and longer rides and, whenever you ride with someone in that way, you learn a lot more about them. You're just spending so much time in the saddle. And that was a really cool part of that experience leading up to the ride itself.
Day of the Ride—Saturday, August 21, 2021
We took off from Evergreen pretty early. Our goal was to go hard the whole time. We were really confident in our ability between the two of us to keep a pace.
Riding Triple, and riding it well, is a combination of having the endurance to cycle over a hundred miles, coupled with having your climbing legs in place. The third, which is really hard to do, is to train for the altitude. Even for us living at 5,430 feet elevation in Boulder, we knew we would be twice that three different times during the ride. We had trained on Peak to Peak highway, paralleling the Continental Divide, and taking us up to around 9,000 feet elevation and that made a big difference.
We rode hard the whole time, had people following us from time-to-time, we were really confident in our ability to keep the pace we did, especially on the second climb to Loveland Pass.
The only weird part was the weather when we were going up the final big push at Vail pass. We stopped right before that climb and it opened up raining. It was a schlog but all part of the fun and unpredictability of a ride through the Rocky Mountains. Henry wanted to really go for it during a timed piece at the end. I waved him on and just held my pace. We crossed the finish line within seconds of each other.
Now I'm one of those people wearing a Triple Bypass hat around town. I'm happy for the experience. Proud of how we performed. In the end, training for the ride with Henry was my favorite part.
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