A faster shade of zoom
I’m no longer certain if I’m going to bother with doing a series this year, but I’m not so uncertain that I was going to stop riding lots. This weekend my plan was to ride my new One Big Hill permanent, but, sadly, it has not yet been approved and I’m greedy about accumulating RUSA miles this year. So what else to ride? Volcanoes vs Farmland was an option, but it involves climbing (and descending) the Tualatin Mountains and the last time I did that on a brevet it didn’t work out very well, so I shied away from that. Sellwood-Birkenfeld-Sellwood also climbs that range, so it was out as well.
Hills to the Yeah! and Sellwood to Hood & Back don’t have the Tualatin Mountains feature, but they’ve got a bucketload of climbing, so my shattered right shoulder vetoed my thoughts about doing them, and that meant I was left with one solitary permanent that I could ride at the last minute. And, as a bonus, if I rode PRP, I could also use that as a first preride for the upcoming summer 200k.
But first I had to get out of the house in the morning. On friday, I stuffed a bunch of science diet into the big rando bag (I’ve been out of sorts since the middle of November, so the idea of baking up a fruitcake seems like too much effort these days,) pumped up the threadbare tires (Clement Strada tires are very nice, but they wear really quickly; I’ve gotten three flats on them in the last nine days,) cleaned and oiled the chain, and otherwise got everything ready to go. But then things came up on Friday evening and I didn’t get to sleep until a little after midnight, so when the alarm went off at 7am I sprung into action at the speed of an enraged sloth and didn’t get out the door until after 9am.
This was inconvenient, because I said I’d be back by 7pm, and that meant I had to do a <10hr loop to return when I said I would (and my usual loop average is in the 10h30 area.) But fortunately it was a ride from my front door (the official starting point is at Einstein’s Bagels in NE Portland, but permanent owners are allowed to adjust the location of controls up to 5 miles without forcing a reapproval, so I have a Sellwood start alternative that folds around a control up by OMSI) so I didn’t have to ride 4 miles and then do a <(10hr-transit time×2) loop.
The weather forecast called for chances of showers before 11am, and then partially sunny in the afternoon, but there were little bits of mysterious blue poking through the cloud cover as I sailed down 17th (a nice fast road now, but I’m not sure what it’s going to be like when a streetcar line is built down there this fall), turned west, and dodged through backroads over to the OMSI control, where I looped around (Water Street is closed south of OMSI so that ORHF can build their new museum to replace the soon-to-be-demolished Brooklyn Roundhouse, but it was possible to walk or ride your bicycle along half the road on Saturday morning. Alas, the entire road was blocked off by Saturday night) and headed south towards Portland Traction’s Springwater line (which is now the Springwater Trail, and only sees traffic as far south as the northern edge of Milwaukie.)
And then westward ho! I was pushing myself a little bit, but not too much, and wasn’t maintaining nearly the breakneck speed I’d done for the first 50 miles of the 300k, but still kept myself moving at a ~16mph brevet average until I was a mile this side of Boring, where a couple of short steepish ramps brought me down into the 15s. A brief stop to officially record the time, and then I bounced off to the south, taking Amisegger Road across a lobe of the Boring lava, then down into the valley that the Clackamas River (and Deep Creek) carved out of the foothills.
And after dropping down into the Clackamas River Valley, I had to pay it all back by climbing slowly up to the ridgeline that separated the Clackamas River from Deep and/or Tickle Creek.
And that was half of the steep climbing finished, and I was only about 25 miles out. Judd Road, after the initial steep ramp, is a pleasant country road that works its way gradually upgrade for a while until it runs into OR213, and then, very quickly thereafter, deadends into Howlett Road, which can either take you further uphill (followed by a screaming descent down to Eagle Creek) or take you slightly downhill to Van Curren Road, which goes off a cliff pretty much immediately and deposits you – at speeds of around 50mph if you can do an aero tuck or weigh 190 pounds – much closer to the mouth of Eagle Creek. The Portland Century goes upgrade here, but PRP goes downhill, and after plunging down the cliffside and riding a couple of miles on county roads, plunks you onto Eagle Creek Road, which climbs all the way back up again, but so gradually you won’t even notice it.
Normally I would take pictures here, but my brevet average had gone down to under 14mph by the time I’d climbed Judd Road, so my interests were more on the order of moving along fast enough to get my brevet average up to >14mph again. I didn’t bother to take any pictures until I saw a #30 interurban bus stopped at a store outside of Estacada, but instead just kept plugging along as fast as I could sustainably go.
And once on the other side of Estacada, I hopped back onto the highway to finish the loop up to Ripplebrook (with one small detour onto Faraday Road to avoid a nasty climb where OR224 goes all the way up to the top of the Clackamas River gorge, then plunges back down to the river level.)
When I’d started randonneuring, Faraday Road was open (I rode up it on my attempt to do the Barlow Road 300k) but it closed before I could start making up permanent routes that went up to and past Ripplebrook Ranger Station, so I’d spent a couple of year winding my way up and over the point of land that OR224 climbs. But this year it reopened, and I’ve been riding it ever since. But on Saturday I made a pleasant discovery; one of the things that PG&E had done to Faraday Road when it was closed was to put a pipeline under the road, so there was this huge long scar down the road with periodic manhole covers jutting 3-6 inches above the surface of the road. This made return trips a little less enjoyable, particularly on days when the trip out to Ripplebrook were against headwinds and I was out of puff on the return, but I’d gotten used to it. But on Saturday, I turned onto Faraday Road, went past the barrier that blocked automobile traffic, and almost immediately discovered that PG&E had repaved the road with a nice thick smooth layer of wonderful wonderful asphalt. And they’d just repaved it, because not only was the surface still oily (it had been raining not long before I reached Faraday Road, and there were countless little oily puddles on the surface of the road) but there was a half mile or so stretch where the paving wasn’t finished and only half of the road was completely paved.
Alas, OR224 had not also been paved, and when I reached the south end of Faraday Road and went back onto the mainline it was back to the usual slowly disintegrating under the forces of nature and logging trucks pavement.
There were more signs of rain up here, and I was very happy that I do not ever take the fenders off my bicycle as I ploughed through various rainpuddles. But the sun was making a good effort to burn through the clouds now and the puddled wet pavement was punctuated by bits of dry sunny pavement and wet sunny pavement that was steaming like mad as the water evaporated away under the pressure of the sun.
One bridge, two bridges, three bridges, and four, and then came the second big climb, which slaughtered my moving average as I crept slowly up it. I was down to about 13.7mph when I crested the top of this ramp, and not any higher two miles down the road when I turned in at the Ripplebrook Ranger Station 4h45 after I’d set out in the morning.
And then I went in, got myself an ice cream bar, and spent about 20 minutes slowly eating it and relaxing in the not-sun before tossing my helmet back on, climbing back onto the bicycle, and heading back to Portland.
There was a bit of a headwind, but not much, and the downgrade made up for the wind. My brevet average was down to 13.3mph by the time I left Ripplebrook, but I shot downhill in the mid to upper 20mph range, and by the time I’d cleared Estacada I was averaging around 14.5mph. But then, alas, the indifferent state of cleanliness of OR224 struck; I’d been dodging glass ever since I’d passed Estacada, but as I was climbing away from Eagle Creek (the highway drops a little bit as it crosses over Eagle Creek) I nailed a patch of glass dead-on and the rear tire gave up the ghost with a resigned “Whufff!” as most of the air escaped through the huge gouge that the glass had left me with.
And since I was in a hurry it took me 20 minutes to change the tube, which dropped me down to 14mph again. When I got back onto the mlcm and was moving again, I managed to get back up to about 14.3mph by the time I’d reached Oregon City, but at this point I was running out of water, food, and energy and the last 12 miles of the loop became much slower than the previous 114 miles had been. I wasn’t exactly creeping, but I was running slowly, and it took me about a hour to make it from Oregon City up to the return fold control at OMSI (not helped by being stuck behind a collection of stoplights on Milwaukie Ave in Portland) which left me with 2 miles to go with 8h54 on the clock.
So I scrounged around internally for a bit of extra energy, found it, and cranked my way back south as fast as I could go, reaching a Sellwood control point just as the clock ticked over to 8h59.
When I got home, I apologized smugly to the best that I was not home at 7pm like I said that I would be :-)
Things that worked/didn’t work?
Well, the tires didn’t work. They worked well enough, but I would have been happier if that 20 minutes I was stopped by the side of OR 224 had been spent on the bike. And my shattered shoulder complained bitterly every time I stood to climb anything more than a tiny bump, so I spent more time than usual sitting down and just cranking my way up ramps. And I forgot to bring the padded gloves I wanted to try to deal with finger numbness, so I had to periodically ride on the brake hoods to relieve the pressure on those fingers.
What did work? Well, since I was riding by myself I didn’t have to worry about vanity, so I went out in what for me is full bikey mode (tights, honest-to-god bike jersey with back pockets that I’d loaded up with keys, wallet, and cellphone.) And this whole arrangement, regrettably, worked, so that’s another thing that’s going to force me to be doing a lot more riding by myself.
Everything else is about as well fit as I can get it without buying a torch and building my own frame. I’d like to stretch the mlcm out an inch (or 3 inches so I can use Cowbell bars) but, finger numbness aside, it’s about as comfortable as I can get these days.
Would it work for a 600? I don’t know. But I don’t know is enough so I’m not going to write the idea off just yet.