The year in brevets
It’s not likely that I’m going to go out for a night-start 200 tonight (even if it was just another run up to Ripplebrook; first, it’s Too Damn Cold™ up in the mountains at night, secondly, even though there isn’t much traffic I’d worry about it being drunk traffic, and thirdly, the best would no doubt object vigourously to my going out to add another 204km to my total for the year :-) so my RUSA totals for 2012 are 12232 km (out of a total distance of ~20100km – I have to ride out to far east Portland this afternoon for a therapist’s appointment, and I don’t know exactly how many miles I will ride to get there and back,) which includes
- 35 populaires,
- 21 brevets in the 200-299 km range,
- 5 in the 300-399 km range,
- 3 of 400-599 km,
- and 2 600+km.
As you can expect from my habit of riding loops until I’ve worn the paint off the highway, there are certain loops I’ve done over and over again:
| loop | how many times? |
|---|---|
| Cuthbert Binns / 1650 | 11 |
| Portland-Ripplebrook-Portland / 1302 | 9 |
| Estacada 100 / 1697 | 8 |
| Nicolas Flamel Populaire / 1612 | 6 |
| One Big Hill & Silver Falls / 1566 | 5 |
| High Rock 300 / 1615 | 3 |
| Volcanoes vs Farmland / 1301 | 2 |
| Sellwood-Birkenfeld-Sellwood / 1278 | 2 |
| Cedric Diggory Populaire / 1550 | 2 |
| Zigzag 160 / 1565 | 1 |
| Portland/Pacific City 160 / 1601 | 1 |
| Pomona Sprout / 1595 | 1 |
| Luna Lovegood Populaire / 1549 | 1 |
| Hot Springs - Covered Bridges 400 / 1616 | 1 |
| Hills to the Yeah / 1134 | 1 |
| Grawp / 1691 | 1 |
| Dixie Mountain 100 / 1303 | 1 |
(plus 10 bike camping prerides/loops, but they aren’t important)
If you count checkrides, jra’s, and DNFs (which don’t count for RUSA credit,) my totals are 40 populaires and 30 rides in the 200-300km range.
If I was going to have a goal for 2013 (which I don’t) I’d try for 20k’s worth of RUSA miles. That’s a moderately ambitious goal, though, since I’d have to maintain a weekly average of 384 km, which means it would be more likely to be a weekly average of 500 km when I added in shopping trips, bear deliveries/retrievals, and therapist appointments. It’s doable but for the detail that I want to have surgery to kludge together my shoulder and that’s going to keep me off my bicycles for 3-6 months (I am trying to borrow a Tadpole trike for the duration, but so far none of my leads has put a trike into my garage and the alternative is to spend $2k to buy one, which runs headon into the detail that we don’t really have $2k lying around unless I get a doctor’s prescription for the thing.)
I am, however, planning on doing at least two Permanent SRs next year. I need to finish and submit another 400, but when I get that done I’ll have/have access to two complete nonoverlapping Portland-based permanent series (one finishing with Kevin Brightbill’s Grawp!, which I’d love to do in the summer when there’s less hail and freezing rain, and the other finishing with Portland-Portland-Portland!) and then I’ll be able to consider carving out a week to ride one of the 1000+k permanents (It would be nice to ride something like the Cascade 1200, but Permanents Don’t Count™ for rides like that and I’ll just have to save my money instead) that’s out there (or finish and submit the Olympic Peninsula Death March for a Portland-based 1000+k loop.)
If I want to do an organized series there’s always the SF Rando series(s), and if there’s any way I can do it it would be lovely to get out east and ride D2R2 (180k with 3.5k’s climbing, most at 10+% grades) so I could reset my opinion of my climbing skills, but there are a lot of Portland-based permanents now and it would be a shame not to ride all of mine at least oncetwice.
But even if none of this actually happens (I could end up not riding at all for six months, which would probably give me another nervous breakdown) this was still a pretty good year for riding the fuck out of my bicycle (actually bicycles, because the midelifecrisismobile spent the last two months of the year laid up waiting for a new rack while I rode the project bike instead.)