How was it?

It was a great ride. Here'sa post from the General Discussion forum

http://forums.roadbikereview.com/showthread.php?t=71349

It was full of beginners and unexperienced riders. I was speaking to a medic team and they said between rest stops 5 and 6 there were more crashes than they could keep up with.
I personally saw a handful myself...mostly at the rest stops when people would just stop in the middle of the road or start to pull out with out looking.
They could have been better organized...I will not ride in it next year.
Other than the lack of decent riders...it was okay...Hotter than hell is a perfect name for it!

I don't think it was too poorly organized. I just don't think they were expecting that many riders. When I talked to them last month they were only expecting about 7-8 thousand to show up because of the heat and dry/windy condition we've had this year. Imagine my surpise on the ride when I saw rider # 12075 in the pack. I didn't expect to see numbers that high, we showed up on friday night and two in our group did late registration and their rider number was around 9000, and they were some of the last people to register. That means over 3000 people showed up to register the morning of the ride. Probably hard to plan for a sudden arrival of 3000 more people from a logistics standpoint.

Only thing I didn't like was that some rest stops were on the wrong side of the road. That's when I saw the idiots stopping in the middle and just casually walking across in front of riders passing through.

I rode the 100 mile ride. It was an awesome spectacle, looking back at 12,000 riders at the start. I was lucky enough to start near the front and make Hell's Gate easily (that part is due more to the strong group with which I rode than anything else) before it closed. I don't know how chaotic things were further back, but all seemed O.K. where I was. I did see the guy at the 80 mile point who was misdirecting folks. I followed the painted arrows on the pavement instead and spared myself an extra thirteen miles (apparently somewhere around 1000 riders were not so fortunate. The last twelve miles seemed to go on forever and there were few things that I've seen in life that were more welcomed than the finish. I got there in 4:47 (very much a personal best and, once again, due to the group with which I rode).

It was definitely an enjoyable event. I was surprised at how much it had grown since I last rode the HnH (1989) but found that, all-in-all, it was a very positive experience.