2012 Tour of Utah Stage 4

 If you happened to stumble onto this page looking for a great recap and summary of Stage 4 you may just want to follow this link instead (Tour of Utah Stage 4). However if you are here to follow the promising career and silly antics of one Rodzilla, then by all means please read on.

Red Rider and I were invited as VIP guests to watch the finish of Stage 4 by our host Mercer and United Health Care (which by the way claimed two stage victories and put two riders in jerseys on the final day.) The expected finish time was around 3:30 - 4:00. We of course were there a little earlier taking in all the sites of a professional level multi-stage race right here in Utah.

My favorite booth was the Larry H. Miller Pro-Form Le Tour De France demo trainer. At this tent they had a leader board of those who generated the most wattage for 10 seconds. They had two demo bikes where they were encouraging people to see what they could do. I really wanted to give it a go and would have had no hesitation if it were just Red and I. Lucky for me our host was also interested to see what Rodzilla could do.

After making what felt like 10 minutes of adjustments to the seat height, reach distance, seat position, and the handle bar height I was dialed in. Keep in mind, at this point I could tell that the Jazz Dancers were starting to get rather annoyed and the line for people wanting to try was growing.

They gave you about 20 seconds to get warmed up in before the actual trial. During the warm up, I generated about five to six hundred watts. I glanced one more time at the leader board and saw that the top score was 935. I saw a few more scores in the 900s a couple of 800s and the rest of the scores seem to clump into the 500-600 range. So I thought to myself I gotta beat average, oh and make Red proud.



Without spandex or clip in shoes in front of a ton of people (no spandex was probably a good thing) I peddled my heart out. My favorite part of the video was the expression on the Jazz Dancer's face. I think she was genuinely surprised at the results. Watch the video again and see her face.

Not sure if you can hear the audio, but Red is laughing at me knowing I was embarrassed, and already predicting that this clip is going on the blog-site. The Dancers tell me not to stop to keep going, and finally announce 1211 watts as the new top score.

Anyone know of any 10 second races around the valley? I might be interested.

I just realized that I didn't share with you my motivation to ride this thing in street cloths in front of a crowd. More than just inflating your ego, the top wattage producer also won free movie tickets to any Megaplex for a year with all the popcorn you can eat. That would have been a huge prize to take home. Unfortunately "would" is the operative word here. I managed to stay on top for the next 3 hours, I went back to the tent after the finish of the race to check the standings (wait there was another race going on that day?) only to see that someone put up a 1325 score. I managed to get a quick glance of the guy who robbed me of my year supply of buttered popcorn and I gotta tell you there ain't no way he is going to enjoy that popcorn as much as I would have.

Oh yeah, The Tour of Utah.... It was really hard to tell what was going on with the race, the coverage isn't as good as the Tour of France with Paul Sherwen and Phil Leggitt. All we heard was they are crossing I-15 and then about 30 seconds later Keough hits the line. It wasn't until later that I watch the following clip.



2012 TOU Stage4 Highlights from Tour of Utah on Vimeo.

Too bad Tyler Farrar didn't hold on, he seems to be having a rough year.

Next up....Stage 5