A tale of two brevets (part 2)
After the Friday loop I wanted to do another loop on Saturday, partially to do back-to-back brevets, but mainly because it’s now summer and I actually have unscheduled time these days. My original Friday plan was be to do the second checkride of Portland-Ripplebrook-Portland, but One Big Hill had just been approved so I had to ride that instead. So that meant that I knew what I had to do on Saturday.
I didn’t want to do it as the official checkride for the June 30th brevet, so I instead decided that I would ride my conveniently almost identical permanent and put in the trolley trail rerouting along the return leg, then ride the half dozen variants of the in town routing between Velo Cult and the edge of town/the Springwater Trail on Sunday.
Once again I planned on leaving early. Once again I did not leave early. And when I rolled out the door to head on down to my fold control at OMSI (the P-R-P permanent normally starts in NE Portland, but an organizer can move controls up to 5 miles without forcing a reapproval, so I have a route variant that starts/ends in Sellwood, but hairpins at OMSI to get the proper milage. It’s a horrible solution for the end of the ride, because I have to ride right past my house and go another 5 miles before I’m finished, but I’ve gotten used to it) I realized that today would not be one of my particularly fast loops, because my legs felt absolutely dead.
I’ve ridden this loop a lot now; I think I’ve ridden it almost as much as I’ve ridden Michael Wolfe’s UGB 200 (and my variants UGB200.bis and codename:UGB210 – the latter is what became my Volcanoes vs. Farmland loop) and it’s become a pretty uneventful loop that is made more interesting by my promising to myself that one of these days I’m going to detour up to Three Lynx and the village of Ripplebrook.
Today was not one of those days; being sluggish meant that the climb up to Ripplebrook was interrupted by quite a few stops to refill water bottles, scrounge for snacks, and otherwise just come to a screeching stop because I was exhausted. It did not help that the cleats on my brand new clipless pedals have completely worn out, and my feet were starting to cramp up with a vengance every time I put any sort of effort into pedalling, but even without that I was still suffering the price of not really doing much riding over the last few weeks (plus, apparently, still having a bit of the cold that felled me last week.) I spent a lot of climbing in my absolutely lowest geat, plus, on the last ramp up to Ripplebrook I found myself actually stopping to catch my breath several times on the way up – and this is something I’ve not done for at least a year and a half.
But out I went nevertheless, checking out some of the cues on the cuesheet and marking them for later correction (the traditional cue for going into Boring is to take Wally Road east from Telford, except that these days that road isn’t even signed and *every* *single* *prerider* has commented on it. When I rode out there and tried to take an unbiased look, I realized that it was a doomed cue and I’d need to either route people along an unpaved part of the Springwater Trail or take them all the way down to OR212, and then across into Boring. OR212 has the advantage of being paved, so I’m choosing that.)
It is springtime, and the snowcover is still melting down off the tops of the mountains, so the Clackamas River is running pretty enthusiastically and provided a more-spectacular than usual side-view during the long climb up the hill.
When I reached the ex-Ripplebrook Ranger Station (it’s now the Ripplebrook Guard Station, because the US government has privatized the Mount Hood Wilderness as part of the ongoing process of asset-stripping this country for the benefit of the 1%) I stopped for a considerable period of time for snacking and catching my breath. During the time I was here the wind decided that it was time to start blowing south, which meant that my return would be against a headwind. Normally this would be a problem, but the first 40 miles of the return is basically all downgrade, so the wind has to be moving pretty enthusiastically to really slow you down.
Then, finally, 6 hours and change after I left home, I rolled out of Ripplebrook for the normally-store-but-it-seemed-pretty-long trip back to Portland. And, as expected, most of the trip back down was pretty quick.
Most of the trip was pretty quick. Part of it wasn’t, though; my feet were starting to cramp up pretty badly when I pushed hard (I think it was an artifact of the Crank Brothers cleats being completely worn away after only 1800 miles of riding) and it struck me that it would be a lovely break to stop by the river, take my shoes off, and dabble my feet in the water. So when I reached the first bridge, I pulled off to the side of the road, tucked the mlcm under the south footings of the bridge, took my shoes off, and walked down to the water to dabble my feet and take a couple of pictures.
I got one picture, then tried to wade into the water, but had my foot slip, which dumped me and the camera into the drink, and then after I grabbed the camera I realized to my intense disgust that I must have struck my hand in just the right way on a rock when I grabbed for a hold when I was slipping, because the index fingernail on my right hand was gone and the ring fingernail was crunched into my finger and was bleeding copiously all the way around the nail.
Well, goddamn. This is definitely not a good year for my right side, is it?
So I scooped up my camera (it was sitting at the bottom of the Clackamas River bubbling in a fairly unhappy manner), my shoes, and then climbed gingerly back to where the mlcm and my first aid kit were sitting. And then I sat down on a rock and spent about 15 minutes cleaning off the nailbed on my index finger (the one wonderful thing about shock is that if your nerve endings are shocked enough they won’t care about having someone clean them off with a nice stingy antiseptic solution) and bandaging up the bloody messes.
And then I jumped back on the bicycle and rode home, completing the permanent in just over 11 hours while doing the scheduled reroutes I wanted to try out in the process. I needed to stop a couple of times to rebandage (I stopped at the Thriftway in Estacada to buy a box of bandages to replace the now blood-sodden ones I’d put on up at the first bridge, and then I stopped at the Barton bridge to replace them again because I wound the previous set too tightly and my index finger was starting to hurt even after taking a couple of ibuprofen to take the edge off) and I was not at all shy about stopping to rewater myself, but by g-d I was not dead and I was not going to let another injury DNF a mere 200km loop.
Normally I’d be sad that it took me 11 hours to finish this loop, but I think that destroying a pair of fingernails is a good excuse for taking a hour longer than I should have. I’ll try to complete the loop faster when I do my last-minute checkride on the 29th.
And my camera? I had to disassemble it to dry, and it now (after two days) is powering up for me. It’s complaining about a lens error, which I suspect is point-and-shoot-ese for “the lens is packed with sand”, so I need to get a canister of compressed air and nail it with that to get the sand out, but there’s actually a fighting chance that I might have a camera-shaped object that takes some sort of picture of another when I’m all done with this.
I did get a few pictures, though I didn’t manage to get out for a ride on Sunday (I instead went to the doctor’s office to get a tetanus shot and have a red-hot needle rammed through the nail that didn’t fall off – that finger had swollen to the size (and color) of a large purple grape because of bleeding under the nail) nor today (some of the bandages had stuck to my finger when I changed my dressings today. That hurt badly enough that I had to use the Good Drugs™ and those put me right to sleep for most of the afternoon.) Maybe I’ll get out tomorrow. Maybe I’ll ride another 200 on Thursday. Maybe I’ll just stay on the bicycle on paved roads for a while :-)