We arrived at the first support point and jumped out of the follow vehicle ready for action. Riders were blowing by at high warp. Eventually, we were a bit worried that we missed our rider, but then we saw Jure Robic. "There's no way our rider could be in front of Jure, he promised us he would take it easy at the start." Then we saw the Bachetta recumbent, and again I said, "There's no way our rider is in front of the recumbent." Gradually, all the other riders came in and their crews followed them out, until we were left wondering where was our rider. We got the word from the officials that CHP had cleared the road for traffic.

We hopped in the van and booked up the road until we found him. He had gone out with Perpetuem and was in desperate need of water. We pulled over at the first safe spot, handed off a bottle of water, and then got a stern warning from the officials for violating the approved support points. We didn't care, he needed the water and the next approved support point was 7 miles away.

For some reason, he had been avoiding water, but he had been taking 3 endurolytes per hour. We pulled him off the road a couple of times before Lake Henshaw to get water in him. We did a long stop at Lake Henshaw, to massage him and push fluids. After leaving there, we kept him slow and in recovery mode, emphasizing water. I wanted him in good shape for the descent into Anza Borrego, we had already seen him fall once and knew that he had fallen before that. The descent into Anza Borrego has steep drop offs on the side, if he had fallen, we would have been picking up the pieces on the bottom. His descent was tentative and slow, he rode the brakes all the way done, didn't rotate the pedals at all...If I had to sum up the first 2 time stations it was rookie mistakes.

We found out the crew in the auxilliary vehicle had their own problems, they got locked out of the van in Oceanside. The key started working again, so we just have our fingers crossed that the problem doesn't re-occur.