Flèche 2012

I rode in my first flèche this past weekend. It was a lot of fun and definitely not like any other Randonneuring event I've ever done before.

The object of a flèche seems to be as much about finding places to hang out and kill time as it is about riding. Don't get me wrong. We rode 370 kilometers. That's a long ways to ride no matter what. But it's definitely not enough riding to use up all 24 hours. So, that out of balance time-to-kilometers ratio leads to a fair amount of stupid stuff like hanging out in restaurants with fish and chickens all over the walls, sleeping in post offices and riding interesting looking trails that you think might go where you want to go even though you really have no idea where they go.


The obligatory "riding to the flèche panda"



My trusty steed at the Seattle ferry dock

I started this adventure by riding downtown to meet my teammates Gary, Dave and Joe. After a cup of coffee at cafe D'arte we headed down to the ferry dock to get our picture taken while the Gilligan's Island theme song played in the background ("a three hour tour/ a three hour tour...").

The Olympic Discovery team waiting for the ferry

Off the ferry, we made a quick stop at Classic Cycle (a very cool bike shop, worth a visit next time you're on the island) to get our cards signed for the official start, and then we headed off up Hwy 305 to begin 24 hours of cycling and time-killing.

Dave taking the lead on Bainbridge Island

From Winslow to Port Townsend, the roads were dry and the weather was perfect.

Nice quiet and notably dry roads

Gary with enough clothes in that pannier to last a month

Approaching Port Townsend we made our first unplanned detour by jumping on the Pacific Northwest trail. The trail is unpaved, but definitely the more fun than riding on the busy highway.

The team on the trail

Approaching Port Townsend

In Port Townsend we met up with Jon Muellner, a fellow Seattle Randonneur who lives there. While sitting there chatting with Jon in Port Townsend I was beginning to realize that I needed to adjust my thinking for the flèche. Normally on brevets I'm trying to get through controls as quickly and efficiently as possible. I rarely just sit and relax. With my brain in brevet mode the sitting was making me feel like a New Yorker who just got off the plane in the Bahamas and hadn't adjusted to island time yet. I was anxious to get moving. Luckily the adjustment didn't take long. By the time we rolled out of PT, I was already shifting gears (figuratively... no real gear shifting on a single speed bike).

From Port Townsend to Sequim we managed to stay off of the highway for most of the trip. First we found the Larry Scott Memorial trail, another unpaved multi-use trail that weaves and rolls its way out of Port Townsend and eventually turned to single track. Then we jumped on every road we found that paralleled highway 101 until we got on the Olympic Discovery trail which parallels 101 some more and goes on for miles and miles. I'm sure it wasn't the most direct route, but it made for some lovely riding.

Trestle on the Olympic Discovery trail

Between Port Townsend and Sequim we saw our only real rain of the trip and a bit of hail (always fun on a bike), but the sun found us too and the weather was definitely nothing to complain about. Yet.

Sunshine has us totally confused

Gary dropping us as usual

Near Sequim on the trail

In Sequim we had an excellent Mexican dinner with a frosty hoppy beverage to wash it down. We were all still feeling strong and fresh. Meanwhile, outside the sun was setting and the temperature was dropping ("a three hour tour/ a three hour tour...").

When I was working out our route, I remember looking at the town of Quilcene on Google Maps and thinking, "a town like that has got to have a bar that stays open until two, right?" "I mean, what else would people in Quilcene do on a Friday night?" Quilcene would have been a great place to stop and warm up a bit on our long 110 mile stretch from Sequim to Elma. Unfortunately the poor souls of Quilcene have to go someplace else to shoot pool, quaff a beverage and share some craic with their mates. There was nothing open in Quilcene when we rolled through at about 11 pm. So, that left us with a full night of riding and 110 miles of road with no services of any kind.

Actually, it's not accurate to say "no services of any kind." Randonneurs are nothing if not resourceful. While most people might look at a post office and see only a place to pick up and drop off mail, a randonneur might see a five star hotel.

Lilliwaup PO: Your tax dollars at work

The thermometer on the bank in Hoodsport read 28 degrees when we went by. The temperature dropped quite noticeably after that as we climbed through the hills near Matlock. I'd guess it was somewhere in the low 20s.

We arrived in Elma as the eastern sky was beginning to glow purple, and promptly found the Rusty Tractor Family Restaurant, which at the time seemed like a kitschy Shangri la.

The Rusty Tractor in Elma

You had to be there...

Spirits and heads were drooping a bit in the Rusty Tractor.

Gary providing inspiration to the team

I don't think Dave said anything intelligible after this. And we were still a five hours away from Olympia.

But with a fifty year old cheerleader for a waitress backing us 110% we were able to hold it together and get back on the bikes for the trip to the 22 hour control two hours away in Rochester.

The wind blew in our faces pretty much all the way to Rochester, and then again from Rochester to Olympia. But by then we knew it was in the bag. There was nothing left to do but keep pedalling until we were greeted at the Governor Hotel in Olympia by a smiling Don and Mimi Boothby. It was 12:10 pm Saturday.

As much fun as it was riding through the freezing night (cough, cough), I have to say that my favorite part of the fléche was the banquet the next morning. It was fascinating and entertaining to hear the tales of adventure and misadventure from the other teams.

Thanks to Josh Morse and Seattle Randonneurs for putting on a great event.

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.

300k with the Cyclos Montagnards

This is a late, late post. Sorry. Life has been getting in the way of blogging lately...

Last Saturday I rode the SiR spring 300k. The ride started and ended at University Village, about a mile from our house so I definitely had no excuse for not riding to the ride. Before I get into the actual ride I have to fill you in on some of the back story. A couple weeks before this ride I had agreed to ride this year's SiR Fléche with the Cyclos Montagnards team. Yes, I realize that last sentence was full of words that mean nothing to you if you aren't a card-carrying randonerd.

So what's a fléche you ask? Well, its a randonneuring event that even seasoned Randos find confusing. Basically, a fléche is like a brevet that you ride as a team of 3 - 5 riders. Teams have to cover at least 360 km in 24 hours. Each team chooses their own starting point and route, but all of the teams end in the same place at roughly the same time. The idea is for everyone to converge on some nice place where they can all get together for Sunday brunch after the big ride. The fléche rules are designed to keep teams moving for most of the 24 hours. For example, a team can't stay at any one stop for more than 2 hours.

How about Cyclos Montagnards? Cyclos Montagnards is an organization that exists under the randonneuring "tent" and is all about riding farther and faster than you ordinarily need to or want to as a "normal" randonneur. So given their mission, the Cyclos Montagnards fléche team was definitely out to win the overachiever's award by planning to ride over 600 km in the 24 hour fléche when 360 km would do just fine, thank you very much. So, I was a little surprised they asked me to ride with them because having never ridden 600 km in just 24 hours, I'm not sure I'm even capable of it. But I was flattered that they thought I could do it so I agreed to join the team.

Ok, now back to last weekend's 300 km brevet... All of the members of the CM Fléche team (Ryan Hamilton, Brian Ohlemeier, Jan Heine, Hahn Rossman and I) were supposed to be riding the 300 km, so we decided to ride it as a team just for practice. Jan, the CM team captain, decided we were shooting for an 11 hour finish and he even put together a detailed schedule of when we needed to be at each contrôle along the way and how long we could stay (He gave us a whopping 4 minutes at the "lunch" stop, and a minute or two at the others). We gathered in the dark for the 6:00am start and the team chatted a bit amidst the 80 or so other riders who had turned out for the brevet. Just before 6:00 am the ride organizer, Gary Prinz, said and few words of warning and encouragement and sent off the horde into the cool calm morning.

Immediately the CM team took off like a shot trying to get ahead of all the other riders. I figured we would start fast to get ahead of everyone else, and then eventually settle into a more relaxed pace once we had put some distance between ourselves and the other riders. I figured wrong. the pace never really slowed much for the entire ride. I remember thinking for the first 150 km that there was no way I could maintain such a fast pace for the entire ride. But somehow I kept hanging on and staying with the team despite the voice in my head that kept screaming at me to just sit down beside the road and give my legs a rest.


Route Map

The route headed up around the north end of lake Washington and then turned south toward Redmond and Sammamish. After climbing up and over the Sammamish plateau we then had a long flat stretch up through the Snoqualmie Valley heading toward Monroe, Sultan and eventually through Granite Falls to Conway before turning south and working our way back to University village.

Even though we were still riding faster than my legs thought prudent, the flat ride up through the Snoqualmie Valley was insane fun. With a group of six (Hahn never showed up, but Mike McHale and Eric Anderson hopped on the train with us) we ran a rotating pace line. This was the first time I had ever ridden in a rotating pace line. It's a bit intimidating at first, and a little like being a part in a big, fast machine. It requires some serious concentration, and you never really get to rest like you do in a standard single-file pace line. It's also pretty hard to find enough time for eating and drinking. Other than a few minutes to stop and fix Jan's broken fender, the rotating pace line helped us maintain well over 20 mph average all the way to Sultan.

We made a quick stop in Sultan to get our cards signed and refill water bottles and then started the biggest climbing section of the ride. From Sultan up to Lake Roesiger, the route has some ups and downs (mostly ups), adding up to over 1,000 feet of climbing over a dozen miles or so. One short section on Reiner Road has a pitch of about 18% which definitely gets your attention. During this section I started noticing that my legs were on the verge of cramping every time I stood up and pushed hard. Fortunately for me (not so fortunate for Ryan), Ryan was also fighting cramps about that time, so the group slowed down a bit to let Ryan recover. Nope, not for me, it was all for Ryan (wink, wink). Of course, "slow" for this group was still faster than just about any group I've ridden with before.


Ride Elevation Profile

While we were slowed down a bit I gobbled a couple of Endurolytes (amazing things, those Endurolytes) and caught up a bit on "food" and fluids. Amazingly, I was feeling pretty strong again by the time we rolled into Granite Falls.

The next section rolls along Hwy 9 with ups and downs but nothing steep or long. We were back into our rotating pace line and moving along at a good rate again. We kept this up most of the way to Conway where the course turned South into the teeth of a head wind.

The headwind from Conway wasn't too strong, but it definitely slowed us down. It was tough to work together here because the wind was at an angle forcing us to spread out across the road in order to stay in each other's draft. Needless to say, cagers aren't crazy about a group of cyclists taking up the entire lane on a busy highway.

By the time we got to Arlington, and on to the Centennial Trail, we were mostly out of the wind. Unfortunately I was also mostly "out of wind." Jan, Brian and Mike were still riding strong, so I just sort of hung on to the back and let them do most of the pulling as we flew down the trail. Thanks for the hard work, guys. This isn't the first time I've received a free ride behind Mike. The man is pretty amazing on the flats and into the wind. He always modestly claims it's entirely due to his fancy-schmancy carbon fiber deep section wheels. But it certainly doesn't hurt that his legs can generate about as many watts as a Toyota Prius.

Somewhere between Snohomish and Woodinville, I got a flat tire. I came to a stop and threw my leg over the bike to get off and my leg immediately cramped to the point that I could hardly stand up. While I stood there beside the road screaming in pain and massaging the back of my thigh, Ryan, Brian, Mike and Eric were fixing my flat. Note to self: When riding with nice guys, fake a bad cramp whenever you get a flat. Moan and groan and massage your leg for a few minutes while your buddies fix the flat. When they're done, you just hop back on the bike and say your cramp is much better, thanks, and ride off into the sunset with your hands still clean. By the way, those guys fixed the flat in about half the time it usually takes me.

The last fifteen miles of the ride were on the Burke-Gilman trail. We were all starting to smell the barn at this point, and as a result, were probably riding a bit faster than we should have been given all the Saturday afternoon traffic on the trail. So, I'd like to send an open apology out to all those folks on the trail that we blew by. But, I hope you can all appreciate that a randonneur's judgement can get a bit cloudy when they get within a few miles of the end of a brevet.

We rolled into the finish in U Village at 4:10, 11 hrs 10 min after the start. We didn't make our 11 hour goal, but I'm going to blame my flat tire and Jan's broken fender for that.

This was the third brevet (counting the 100k populaire) of the season, and the third one in which I ended up riding with a fast group of riders. One thing I'm starting to realize about riding with some of the faster riders is that fast rides tend to make for boring ride reports. I spend the entire ride clinging desperately to the back wheel of the rider in front of me so I have no time for taking pictures or watching for interesting sights along the way. Working as a team is a lot of fun, but it's definitely a different kind of fun than when I take a brevet at a more leisurely pace. Both approaches have their pluses, and I probably won't know how I'll approach my next brevet until I get out there.

By the way, a couple of days ago I learned about a work commitment that's going to make it impossible for me to ride the fléche. I'm disappointed, but I have to say, the thought of riding the pace we rode on the 300k for 24 hours straight was a little intimidating. I was doing some serious suffering for about 10 of those 11 hours. No doubt I would have set a new personal best (or worst) for suffering on the fléche.