Oh. My. God.
I was taking another look at the trip logs for my trip down to Slab Creek Road just to see what my average moving speed was (13.2mph, in case you’re wondering) and glanced briefly at the Max Speed line directly below it.
57.6mph.
So I crosschecked it with the nice graph that shows speed vs. time, just in case it was another one of those bizarre anomalies that my Garmin 205 sometimes spits out (it’s taken to saying that my max speed is on the order of 4000 mph, with, of course, no corresponding spike in the speed vs. time graph) and, to my shock and horror, I saw a nice spike going up to the 50s, then dropping fairly abruptly down into the 30s.
Now, when I went over the top of Cascade Head the second time today I was pulling a tourist with tire problems, and at the summit I gave him directions to the next town, then sprinted off downhill to make up some time. And soon thereafter the front end of the bicycle started shimmying in a rather alarming fashion, even after I tried to dampen the shimmy by pressing my knee against the frame, so I scrubbed off a lot of speed on one of the short straight sections. So that matches that speed profile.
That’s about 7mph faster than I’ve ever been on a bicycle, and I didn’t do it on a quiet country road but on a busy major highway.
*shudder*
If anything is a sign, I guess this would be a sign.
I’ll be curled in a catatonic ball for the rest of the evening.
Update: I double-checked the data by feeding it to ridewithgps, which does a good job at massaging the data to take out unsupported spikes, and as expected it found a different maximum speed: 100.7kph
If I’d crashed at that speed they’d still be picking pieces of shattered Orc out of the side of Cascade Head. double-*shudder*
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28 metres per second, near as dammit.
That’s fast.
(I have a GPS track that thinks I was doing 98 kph uphill on Bay Street, which I cheerfully discount. One of the 74 kph tracks is lamentably plausible, though.)