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.

Chili Hilly

Somewhere up there are the fast riders

Last year's SiR Chili Feed 200k was my first ever Randonneuring event so this weekend's 2010 version of the Chili Feed 200k (and absolutely last one, he means it) marks the first anniversary of the event that ignited my obsession with riding bikes over long distances in horrible conditions while doing paper work.

I remembered starting last year's ride wondering if I'd make it, worrying about following the rules, whether I had the right kind of mud flap, was I wearing enough wool... I'm hardly a wise old veteran with a single year of randonneuring under my reflective belt, but at least I was able to relax, enjoy the ride, say hey to some friends from past rides, and make a few new friends.

A very quick stop at the Black Diamond bakery. Next time I'm staying for a donut.

Actually there's not much of a story to tell about the ride, so I won't say too much. The weather was pretty good for mid-March. A few minutes of hail, a few more minutes of rain, some chilly head winds here and there, but otherwise a pretty decent day.

I rode the first third of the ride mostly alone, caught in that no man's land that I often get caught in ahead of the main pack, but behind the fast riders. When a group caught up with me after the Flaming Geyser climb I decided to stick with them to get some rest in their draft. It was a strong group and Mike McHale in particular was like a diesel locomotive on the flats so there was no reason to do anything but stay with them for the rest of the ride. We finished the ride in 7:47 which is almost an hour faster than my time last year.

Muddy freckles, but worth it for the draft

Next up is the 300k in two weeks. This will be my first ride of over 200k since last September.

Running with the Big Dogs

Today SiR held their 100k Spring Populaire. A Populaire is a brevet that is free and open to the general public. Populaires are basically the Randonneuring open house to get new members.

Populaires usually draw quite a few people, especially when held on a day with great weather. At the start I noticed that there were a few of the fast riders there, guys like Jan Heine who is almost always the first to finish a brevet, and Chris Ragsdale who won one of the top endurance events in the country last year, the Furnace Creek 508. These guys are endurance cycling monsters who could keep up with just about anyone.

I decided that since it was a relatively short ride, it might be a good time to try staying with the lead group, to see what life is like at the front of the peloton. I generally tend to finish brevets in the second or third group which is often quite a ways behind the lead group, so I figured I could stay with them for at least a short while. And if I completely blew up 20 miles into the ride, it wouldn't be such a big deal to limp along for 40 miles to finish the ride.

Out of the gate the lead group was cruising along at 25+ mph on the flats. It was fun to be part of that, but I knew right away I wouldn't be able to keep up that pace for 100km. Sure enough, about 12.5 miles in we came to Montreux hill which climbs several hundred feet in a couple miles and during that climb I got completely chewed up and spit out the back of the lead group. So, my time with the elite riders was brief, but it was fun. At the top of the Montreux climb, I could still see the lead group a couple hundred feet ahead of me but I knew that catching them would mean burning every match in my book with 50 miles still left in the ride. Not a smart strategy, so I let them go.

There were a couple of other riders that also fell off the lead group at Montreux and the three of us ended up working together for most of the the rest of the ride. In the last five miles or so that small group dropped me too, so I rolled into the finish alone. Still, it was a fantastic ride. It's great to finish a ride like that with absolutely nothing left in the tank; it lets you know you really gave it your all.

I finished the ride in about 3hrs 40-something minutes. This was a pretty hilly ride, with over 4,000ft of climbing, so I felt pretty darn good about finishing in under 4 hrs.

In which I don't get lost or crash and the sun shines the entire ride

On Sunday I rode my February 200km permanent. With sunshine and temps in the 50s by the time I finished, I had to keep reminding myself that it is indeed still February, and whether or not that big city groundhog back east saw his shadow, we still have months of crap weather ahead of us. But the start of the ride was pretty February like. The thermometer near Marymoor on the way out of town said 30 degrees.

I rode the Redmond - Carbon Glacier permanent. I chose the route because I wanted something with easy navigation and not too much steep climbing. I decided to ride this one on my single speed bike just for "fun."

The route is a straight out-and-back that heads almost directly toward Mt. Rainier from Redmond. Then when you're almost there, you turn around and head back along the same route.

View Larger Map

I dressed with the assumption that it would be warming up as the day progressed. That turned out to be true, except that it didn't really get warm until over halfway through the ride, so I had frozen fingers and toes for the first five hours. The Carbon Glacier Ranger station is up at 1,700 ft. and deep down in a valley, so it was still below freezing when a got there with plenty of frost on the road and ice on the puddles.

This was really a nice route without a lot of traffic and some interesting scenery along the way. Like the Mowich Mall. (I guess "mall" has a slightly different meaning if you live in Mowich. Do you think the Mowich teenagers hang out here?)

And the Wilkeson cemetary was beautiful with frost still on the grass. It was also a sobering reminder to keep my eyes open for frosty patches on the road lest I end up road kill.

The climb up Highway 165 to the Carbon Glacier Ranger station is gradual enough that it's not a problem at all on a single speed.

I hadn't seen this guy in a while.

A glimpse of Mt. Rainier from Enumclaw.

(In my very best Eeyore voice) Nice barn. A bit drafty.

Overall the ride was uneventful in the best possible way. I never got lost. No flat tires or other mechanical issues. I felt good the whole way. Didn't waste too much time hanging out in convenience stores.

The ride took 8 hours 20 minutes, which is the fastest I've ever done a permanent. That probably has less to do with fast riding than not getting lost and not hanging out too much in convenience stores.

Next weekend is the SIR Spring Fever Populaire which officially kicks off the 2010 Randonneuring season here in Seattle. That means this was probably my last permanent for a while since we have a pretty full schedule of brevets for the next few months.

Cougars and Rabbits

One of my riding goals for this year is to spend less time riding. That's going to be a challenge since I'm planning to ride in the PBP in 2011 and the more official ACP sanctioned miles (kilometers actually) I ride, the better my chances are of getting into the PBP. So I'm trying to maximize the official Rando rides I do while minimizing the unofficial training rides. But it's tough to do those long brevets without any training so my strategy is to make the training rides short but intense.

Yesterday I did one of those short but intense training rides. It was about 50 miles with 3,450' of climbing. That works out to about 69' per mile. Anything over about 55' per mile is what I would call "hilly" and makes for a good workout. Here's what the elevation profile looks like:

I rode from home out toward Issaquah to the base of Cougar Mtn, rode up and over Cougar Mtn, and then did a quick loop around Mercer Island on my way home.

On my way around the Mercer Island loop, I came up behind a guy in full team kit. I saw him look over his shoulder and see me when I was about 100 ft back. There's nothing better to keep you hammering on the pedals than having a rabbit to chase down. Even better when they know you're chasing them and they want to make a race of it. As soon as he saw me, he picked up the pace some so I was no longer gaining on him. So I picked up the pace a notch. It took me about 5 minutes, but finally I closed that 100 ft between the two of us and immediately passed him. If it were really a race, I would have sat on his rear wheel for a while to rest a bit before attacking, but I was out more for exercise than the race so I just kept hammering past him. So of course he grabbed my rear wheel and hung there for a couple minutes and then passed me. I let him get ahead a bit and then chased him down again. We traded places a couple more times before finishing the loop. Each time one passed the other, we gave a friendly nod and a smile. I'm not sure about him, but by the time I finished the Mercer Island loop I was pretty gassed, but it was a lot of fun.