Portrait of the artist as a drowned rat
As promised, I went out on a populaire (Kevin Brightbill’s Cuthbert Binns super-fast Sauvie Island loop.) The weather forecast called for occasional rain, but the “occasional” part turned out to be 3.5 hours of fairly enthusiastic downpour and 45 minutes of drizzle, which acted to slow me down to 4h12 loop time.
Nuts.
I did manage to discover that my Resist Nomad tires have way better handling in gravel than I do; the gravel section up to the nude beach has had new gravel dumped onto it, and this gravel is heaped up in drifts where the pavement turns to gravel. I hit one of the drifts at about 20mph and that sent the mlcm into a spectacular fishtail (there were a couple of points where I was leaned over about 20° as I turned into a skid, but the Nomads held tight and kept me from dumping) which I got out of just before I reached the side of the road …. at which point the tires slid out sideways into empty air and dumped me onto my left side, but fortunately only at about 4mph.
(And, also, when I was returning from the nude beach I encountered a couple of pheasants, who went galloping down Reeder Road ahead of me for about 150 feet before they decided that flying was a better bet. The male pheasant was running ahead of the female pheasant, and by the time they took off I was riding alongside her. I would have gotten a picture, except that (a) the L6 starts up very slowly and (b) I was too busy pushing into the rain and wind to think about it.)
And, after grinding out 70 miles, I’m much less wound up than I was yesterday. I’ve still got the same issues as before, but punching out a fast wet 100k makes a big difference in my attitude. Perhaps the Estacada 100 again tomorrow. It’s supposed to dump down rain again, but it’s not likely I’ll get much wetter than I got today.
10,450 miles & 10148 RUSA km for the year.