Lance Is Back

I realized that my seat belt wasn’t on as Santa Rosa Press Democrat photographer Kent Porter merged onto highway 101 in Santa Rosa, burying the tachometer on his late 90’s Honda Civic. I’m riding shotgun and Arleen Ng is crammed in the backseat sharing her space with a big storage box. We’re trying to get ahead of Lance Armstrong and his bicycle racing team as they train on the roads of western Sonoma County.
Lance is making his big bicycle racing comeback and has joined Team Astana. The team, which includes top riders from around the globe, is conducting a training camp ahead of the Amgen Tour of California which starts on Sunday the 15th of February. Today, they are going on a leisurely 105 mile ride.

I know very little about bicycle racing other than Lance has won the Tour de France many times and that Floyd Landis dude losing his title to alleged drug use. Other than that, I have no idea who most of these guys are. Thankfully, Lance is wearing a different color outfit than the rest of the team. It would be impossible to pick him out of the pack otherwise. The whole team has the same bikes, the same outfits and the same general physique. Are these guys really human?

Arleen (who was shooting for EPA) and I were lucky to team up with Kent since he knows all the back roads of Sonoma County. We would have been totally lost. We also learned a lot about Kent’s career as we drove down windy roads towards the coast. We were treated to a mini history of stories that Kent had covered over the years. He pointed out the spot where he had to cover the kids who were murdered in their car and the little dirt road he took to cover a wildfire a few years back. He said “I did a portrait of a woman right up there a few weeks ago” as we passed a house.

The trivia wasn’t limited to things he had covered either. We learned all sorts of things about the area and the news stories that the small towns produce. The most gruesome was the one about the two kids who broke into a house near Jenner and shot an elderly couple 60 times for no apparent reason.

After driving for over an hour, we finally found a spot to shoot the riders coming up a hill. We found a hill to stand on and waited for the riders to come. We waited about 20 minutes or so before they arrived. At this point they were probably 50 miles into the ride. None of them were winded and they carried on casual conversation as they pedaled up the hill. Within seconds, they were gone. We hopped back in Kent’s company car and raced back down the hill in hopes of catching the pack one more time. After a few minutes of Arleen being quiet in the back seat I asked if she was susceptible to car sickness as Kent was whipping around the turns on the narrow winding road. She said she was fine but would let us know if that changed.

We made it to the coast and were able to find another vantage point to catch the riders one more time before heading back to Santa Rosa. They again passed us by on an uphill, none of them breaking a sweat. I don’t know how those guys do it. I was just riding in the car all day and I was tired.
Back at the hotel, a small group of bicycle racing fans waited for Lance and the team to return from their journey. The riders tried to cut through the crowd and some took detours on paths leading to the hotel entrance. I was walking to the area where they park their bikes and almost got run over by Lance. Kent had to give me a heads up. He came out of nowhere. That would have been a bummer if we crashed into each other.