Donna and I, with our friends Darrell, Mary Ann, and Mary Ann’s granddaughter Jade, volunteered to set up and man the main SAG stop on today’s GABA Tumacacori Century bicycle race.
Since my last entry, by dint of tireless research (Google), I have learned that SAG is an acronym after all, standing for Support and Gear. For a long bicycle race, gear consists of water, Gatorade, PB&J sandwiches, granola bars, breakfast pastries, cheese puffs, pretzels, M&Ms, mini-candy bars, oranges, watermelon, and bananas. Support was a GABA bicycle mechanic with tools and a portable maintenance stand.
We got up at 4:00 AM, left the house at 5:00, picked up our friends at 5:15, and arrived at Amado at 6:00, well before sunrise. Last year the guy hauling the trailer full of SAG support stuff arrived at 6:00 and we had an hour and a half to set up the tables and arrange water coolers and food. This year he didn’t show up until well after 7:00, so we huddled in the car for an hour, keeping warm until the sun came up over Madera Peak to the east. Once he arrived we had all of 15 minutes to set up before bicyclists began arriving, but we made it, and from then on we were busy busy busy. After setup, my main job was slicing fruit; Donna and Mary Ann slapped PB&Js together; Darrell restocked ice and water; Jade was our resupply runner.
As with last year, we met a lot of people and saw several friends from Tucson’s bicycling community. I wore my Pedalfiles Bike Hash House Harriers shirt and several riders asked me about it … out of them I think I have one solid recruit, if by “solid” we mean he gave me his email address and asked me to put him on our ride announcement list.
What a fun morning. There’s a lot of satisfaction to be had helping out with races like this, and gosh knows they’d be grueling affairs without food and water stops along the way. I brought my camera along, so here are a few photos (click on the thumbnails to see the originals on Flickr):
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