The Flèche is Strong...

Easter is only two weeks away and as all good Christians know, that means it’s time for the most befuddling and beguiling of randonneuring events, the Flèche. For those of you who followed that link and read the rules of the Flèche, please explain it to me sometime because I still haven’t quite gotten my head completely around how this thing works.

Well, I suppose I understand the important parts well enough... Basically it’s all about riding around for 24 hours straight with a team of 3 – 5 riders. The team needs to cover at least 360 kilometers and needs to arrive at the same place where all the other teams are due to arrive (Olympia in this case). All of the Flèche teams that managed to survive the ordeal have Sunday brunch together and then they all go on about thier business. There are a lot of other rules that seem aimed at trying to keep everyone from getting too comfortable anywhere during the 24 hours of the Flèche.

This is my fourth year of hanging out in the Randonneuring “tent,” yet somehow I have managed to avoid this curious event. It’s not completely intentional. In my first year of randonneuring (2009), I was still too intimidated by even a 200k brevet to consider joining a Flèche team, but by 2010 I was eager to give it a go so I got on a team but had to drop out at the last minute due to a work conflict. Then in 2011, my FOOSH in early March mucked up any hopes I had of joining a team.

Finally my Flèche stars seem to have aligned. Captained by Gary Prince, the team includes Dave Harper, Joe Llona and myself. Our mission so far has been to come up with a route that has as few kilometers over the 360km minimum as possible while still taking us through Port Townsend (I’m not sure what we’ll be doing in Port Townsend but Gary really wanted to go there and he’s the captain of the team so there you have it). I think we’ve achieved our goal as we have an interesting looking route a hair under 370 kilometers. We’ll start at the ferry dock in Winslow at noon on April 6th and head north through Port Townsend, then over to Sequim for dinner, and then south on highway 101 for miles and miles all the way to Elma where hopefully we’ll be able to find a good breakfast. From Elma we’ll take a victory lap around the Capital State Forest before continuing on to the finish in Olympia.




I'm looking forward to this event as it's really the only randonneuring event that I haven't tried yet, and many randonneurs count it as their favorite event. In the meantime I have a 300k brevet to ride down in Tacoma that will keep me busy for at least part of next weekend. So, please carry an umbrella with you wherever you go over the next two weekends to ensure we have sunny skies for our complicated rando shenanigans.