Texas Hell Week XVIII: New Twists and Turns

It is only a couple of months until Texas Hell Week XVIII returns to Fredericksburg, and cyclists take to the rolling pavement of Texas Hill Country. We’ve got some nice changes in store for this year, including:

• Several new routes, including roads we’ve never used before south of Comfort, as well as near Harper.
• New takes on old routes, including doing some in the opposite direction.
• New brevet routes (see separate posting on this)
• A tiered entry program, allowing riders to select their amenity package. This translates into potential savings for our riders who already have more t-shirts and sweatshirts than they can ever wear.
• Hell Week will serve simultaneously as a RAAM (Race Across AMerica) weekend and UMCA (Ultra Marathon Cycling Association) camp, attracting many long-distance cyclists from around the country. This reunion of Hell Week with RAAM and UMCA hearkens back to the beginnings of Hell Week, when several of us were training for RAAM. Of course, all cyclists are welcome at Hell Week!

On top of all this, I am building a routes database for TXHW. It will allow me to create new routes and/or combinations of routes (think: A, B, and C routes used each day) by letting me match destinations, ingress, and egress characteristics. There could be almost limitless possibilities for future routes, allowing us to offer up something unique each and every year.

As we did last year, the A-B-C rides will all leave at 9:00am CDT, and will be “nested” in that they all head out of town (egress) in the same direction before parting ways. We’ll have completely new maps this year, courtesy of Google Maps, along with the same precise and exacting cue cheets we have always featured.

Be sure to sign up soon before the late fee goes into effect. We are expecting a large turnout this year; our registrations are running well ahead of average.