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If it’s not one thing it’s another

When I last rode the Cuthbert Binns populaire it pissed down rain for almost the entire loop and I finished in 4h12. Today I rode it again and it not only didn’t rain but the sun actually came out for a while.

It still took me 5h47 to finish the loop :-(

There are probably three reasons for this;

1. There was an increasingly strong south wind that manifested itself when I was looping around the southern tip of Sauvie Island; I ended up crawling that 5 miles at maybe 13mph, dropping a couple of times down to under 10mph when the wind was particularly strong.
2. The rear tire ate a michelin wire outbound on highway 30, and most of the air leaked out in the next 25 miles, finally forcing a tire changing stop about 3 miles south of the nude beach gravel section (the drifts of gravel are still treacherous, but this time around I slowed down to about 15mph and followed a line on the wrong side of the road, which only had one or two fishtailing drifts.
3. When I was about 4h10 into the ride, and 4 miles out from the closing control, my front tube failed and forced me to, after an attempt to cement the two tube sections together, to cyclocross-carry the mlcm a mile and a half to the downtown REI, where I bought a tube and was able to limp home from there (my minipump appears to be failing; I couldn’t get more than about 30psi into the front Nomad, and unlike a fat tire a 29mm Nomad does not deal well with such low pressures.)

The headwinds coming back were particularly bad on Sauvie Island, but highway 30 is tucked in against the bluffs for most of the way back into Portland, so the headwinds were knocked down to a dull roar and I was able to make about 19mph for most of the transit from Sauvie Island to where St Helens splits off from Highway 30 (St Helens is more exposed here, so the headwinds could build up a head of steam and reduce my forward speed to ~15mph.) I did not take more than one picture of the scenery, because when I had a tailwind I was trying to keep my speed above 22mph to compensate for the headwinds to come, and when I had a headwind I was too busy cursing my way along to take pictures unless I saw a particularly interesting railroad view (and then, after a while, I was too busy staggering slowly along to notice much.)

The Sauvie Island Road section up along the west side of Sauvie Island always seems longer than it actually is, and, even with a headwind, the return to Reeder Road always seems much shorter than it actually is. And the run up to the nude beach on Reeder Road twists and turns enough so that I never really notice how far it is, because there are very few long vistas where you can see the road several miles ahead of you.

And one thing that really annoys me about headwinds is the nonstop howling of the wind in my ears. I think that this slows me more than the actual pressure of the wind, and I should probably build a couple of airfoil earflaps to push the wind out away from my ears a bit. As is my modern tradition, I avoid thinking by having my earphones in and pumping music (P!nk’s Try is my goto song of the week and I’ve been playing it on continual loop whenever I’m riding a permanent) but even with the volume turned up to eardrum-shattering levels I can’t get away from the howling of the wind, which makes me want to just stop and wait for the wind to die down before continuing on.

I think that if I had not had the two flats, and, even if the second flat had not been the sort of catastrophic failure that it was, I could have finished in a hair under 4 hours. Better luck next time, after I’ve done another loop of the Estacada 100.

Pictures are on flickr, and I am now up to ~10,550 miles (1877 shy of 20Mm) and 10258 RUSA km for the year.

—orc Thu Nov 1 18:59:08 2012

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