This Space for Rent

Well, I certainly overpacked for this brevet

Yesterday was Orrando’s spring 300k, which, freed from the need to be near Portland by the existance of a Portland-based summer series (organized by yours truely, Theo, Ed, Lynnef, Susan O, and Joshua Bryant), took a route – Newberg to the vicinity of Breitenbush Hot Springs – that had laid dormant since 1997 and brought it back to life. I’d signed up to ride this loop, but hadn’t really planned how I would get there (aside from vague thought of “well, I guess I can ride down there the morning of the loop; it’s only 31 miles and other Portland randonneurs have done it in the past”) until this last week, when my friend Theo arranged crashspace with one of his friends who lives down there and I converted my “well, maybe I’ll go” into “I neeeeeed to ride this loop.”

We made plans to ride down there on Friday afternoon, which became Friday evening as we fitted it into our other plans for the week. Ed bowed out because of a commitment at the Community Cycling Center friday afternoon, so only three of us departed Theo’s house at 7pm(ish) to ride down via Macadam, Boones Ferry, and Wilsonville Road, arriving (after an extraordinarily pleasant ride; leaving at 7pm meant that we avoided the bulk of rush hour and got us onto Wilsonville Road at twilight, which is a very nice time to do sailing along close to the river) at somewhere in the ballpark of 9:30, and then after a little bit of last minute prep went to sleep for a 4:45am wakeup so we could stagger the two blocks to the start in time for the 6am ride.

Well, everyone else did their last-minute prep; I’d done mine the night before, loading up the big rando bag with everything I’d thought I might need (two pairs of socks in various obnoxiously colourful stripes, two baselayers, two pairs of gloves, additional underwear, armwarmers, and a reflective sash for when the sun went down on the way back. Plus my camera, an auxilary battery for the GPS, and a pile of food, ranging from science diet to cookies to a bakers dozen baked potatoes.

I’d figured this would be enough for the late evening hours when I was riding slowly and the night chill was creeping into the air. I’d been chatting with Michael Johnson about this ride, and he said he wanted to take it easy and do more of a social loop, so I figured it would be a reasonable 16-17 hours to run up into the mountains and back.

Reeling off the miles stupidly fastly

At the start, we met up with Michael and several of our other friends, including new rando Stasia, who has two speeds – ridiculously fast and insanely fast – and chatted very briefly for the few minutes before we were released for our 6am departure.

But when the flag went down, we were off to the races; the fast boys bolted down the road as if chased by a herd of rabid wolves, and since my now-traditional solo brevet start involves running full-out until I start to burn up, I simply modified it to gluing myself into the group, then bolting down the road with them while hoping they would start to burn up before I did.

Over the Willamette at an average speed of 17.6mph; plowing through the fog along Champoeg Road, then south towards Gervais at the same rate, then bending east on Howell Prairie Road and rocketing towards Slayton at a steadily increasing speed until we were averaging 17.8(or .9) as we shot southwards. Somewhere along here Michael asked if anyone had a cuesheet for a suggested detour on scenic roads between Slayton and Lyons, but I was the only one who answered yes. Comments were made about having to either wait for me or to beat me up for the cuesheet, but this conversation had barely started before we hit a toe of the Cascades (south of Pratum) and I was, as I expected, dropped when the climb lasted more than about 100 feet. The fog started to clear as I reached the southern end of Howell Prairie Road, and it was clear (but cloudy; the fog was hovering about 200 feet above our heads) when I transited Shaw Highway and approached the junction with OR22.

Michael & Kevin wait for me by the side of the roadStasia & Ed wait for me by the side of the road

And there the fast guys, as expected, were cooling their heels (and taking advantage of shrubbery along the road to attend to the call of nature) waiting for the cuesheet (and also me); I stopped briefly to take a few pictures, then we all roared off up into the valley, dodging on sideroads into Stayton, then crossing OR22 to take another sideroad up closer to Lyons.

There’s a pinchpoint in the valley here, so all of the roads need to climb up a bit to get over it. I had been riding along with Stasia and Kevin, but when we started climbing my stomach started to make “ahem, excuse me, but I believe a little something would be just the thing” noises and when I slackened my speed to unwrap and consume a piece of science diet I was, again, dropped by everyone, and ended up riding along towards Lyons by myself (at a much more moderate pace than before; my brevet average speed dropped to 16.8mph by the time I reached the control at Lyons) as the clouds evaporated under the pressure from the warming sun.

I reached the Lyons control to find everyone in the throes of finishing up. The control was crowded, so I barely had time to get my card signed (and buy a couple of ballpoint pens, because that was one thing I had forgotten to pack) before I had to hustle to catch my friends, who had made short work of the control and were heading out.

Past Lyons, we took a side-road (along the old Oregon Pacific line up towards Santiam Pass, now truncated to Mill City because of Detroit Lake) to Mill City, where an unexpected (the weather forecast called for “light” winds; this was not light) headwind sprung up to bedevil us. And then at Mill City, after breaking up briefly so some of us could use the bathroom, we jumped onto OR22 for the long stretch against headwinds up to NFD 46 and beyond.

At this point, I was starting to run a bit out of puff, so I was religiously latching myself into someone’s slipstream, but that came to an abrupt end when we reached Big Cliff dam, where the road tilted steeply upwards for 150 feet and I was left behind in a puff of bicycle-shaped implosions (I was not more than about 1500 feet back when I crested that ramp, but I couldn’t make up the distance and completely lost them when we reached the second, and far more impressive, ramp up past the main Detroit Lake dam.)

Detroit Lake (and bonus thumb)

And then I staggered along – into the increasingly annoying headwind – by myself for the next 25 miles or so. I saw one rider at the convenience store at the intersection of OR22 and NFD 46, but they passed me when I jumped into a scenic lookout a mile up NFD 46 in search of water (no, there was none, but it cost me about 3 minutes to discover this) and I was overrun by Dieter Loibner, who is another of the riv-fit riders who goes my speed without bothering to have aero fit on his bicycle, but it was mainly just me, the steady uphill grade, and that stupid headwind.

The lower reaches of NFD 46

The really fast guys passed me about 4 miles up NFD 46 (on their way to ~10-11h finishes) but I didn’t see anyone else until I was about 3 miles from the turnaround, when Stasia came whipping by downhill, followed at a respectable interval by Ian Shopland, then dribs and drabs of smaller groups consisting mainly of my friends.

What this warning sign does not mention is that the road winds UP fairly abruptly

Soon after the last group passed me, I came over a rise and dropped down into a small depression where the wind died down and allowed me to coast up to the turnaround (at the BASE of the steep climb up to the top of the saddle that NFD 46 uses to get over to Ripplebrook.) I found the info control, took a picture (in case I forgot it), then turned around to head back west to see if I could overrun any of my friends.

And then I climbed to the top of that rise and into the face of a headwind. Imagine my delight. So I squoze myself into the most aero position I could get and bolted off down the hill towards Newberg.

Well, actually “bolted” may be an exaggeration. I was starting to run quite low on water, and I was pretty exhausted by trying to maintain a good moving average, but I still managed to make it down to Detroit in good time. Michael Johnson, Ed, Kevin, John, and Dieter were there, but were moving pretty slowly, and I zoomed in, grabbed some nasty sports drink (sugar and salts for $3.50. Ugh), loaded my water bottles, and headed out almost before they registered I was there.

And then it was back along the shoreline of the Detroit reservoir, against that stupid headwind. I’d seen Ian heading across the OR22 bridge across the Breitenbush River just as I arrived at the store, so I was thinking that I might catch him, but it was a nasty slow-feeling crawl along the road, punctuated nicely by the much-nicer descent down the ramps next to the Detroit dam and Big Cliff dam. Dieter caught up with me along here, and I drafted him for about 6 miles before he outpaced me in Mill City, and I was back to crawling along, muttering obscenities every pedal stroke, against the stupid headwind for the next 8 miles down into the next control in Lyons.

At the Lyons control, I overran a couple of my faster friends, but was tired enough so that I didn’t have the energy to snap through the control and keep rolling. So aside from getting my control card signed I also got an ice cream sandwich and peeled off my knee-high stripy socks in favor of some shorter ones before falling in behind them and religiously sticking to their slipstream for the next 15 miles or so.

From Lyons, we shot west towards the control in Stayton (the route is slightly longer on the way back than it is on the way out, so it needs to be controlled to keep people from skipping on by on OR22; I suspect it’s more like a YOU NEED FOOD NOW type of control so people won’t completely forget to eat and die in the last 45 miles. At this point we were all going through water at a pretty good clip, so got nasty sports drink to top off our water bottles until the next convenience store) and after a short stop there back onto Shaw Highway, then Howell Prairie Road (which seemed a lot longer coming back than going out, thanks to not maintaining 18mph average across it.)

A pile of rando bikes in Gervais

As we approached Gervais, my left foot started cramping like mad (so I had to resort to dropping to a low gear and spinning like it was going out of style to go up ramps without having my foot go into agony) so I said I needed to stop for 5 minutes to stretch my foot and get an ice cream sandwich. It turned out to actually be about 12 minutes, but it was enough to reduce the cramp to a dull ache before we hopped onto our bicycles to do the last 19 miles into Newberg.

Daylight outside of the ultimate control

We did that last 19 miles in a hour and six minutes, and got into the ultimate control in Newberg 45 minutes before the sun went down, officially finishing the loop in 13h19 (we’d gotten there a couple of minutes earlier, but took some time stacking up the bicycles and getting into the hotel where the control was located.)

And all of my nighttime/cold clothing? It was still in my big rando bag, doing nothing except packing the poor thing to overfill.

The things that worked on this loop?

  1. my vanity, for trying to keep up with much younger and faster friends, which was helped by
  2. the ~25,000 miles I’ve ridden my bicycle in the last 3 years, and
  3. having finally arranged the bicycle to fit my style of riding.

My vanity is a huge part of this, because it took forever to catch up to my faster friends after being dropped on the ramp at Big Cliff Dam, and during that long stretch I had to deal with periodic “oh, why am I doing this? I should just DNF and go home on NFD 46!” mutters from the paranoiac depths of my subconscious. At almost no point did I seriously think I would actually catch up to them, but I figured that I was not going to actually die if I tried (I might feel like I was going to die, but when I was sprinting along in an attempt to get up to brevet minimums on the fléche it was an exceedingly painful couple of hours, but by G-d we were making up the time and that was worth it) so there was nothing to lose if I gritted my teeth and made a run at it.

Things that didn’t work out quite so well.

  1. I am afraid that I’m outrunning my clothing choices. The last couple of loops I’ve done (the sub-10 hour Portland-Ripplebrook-Portland, and this loop) I ended up with the balls of my feet cramping fairly severely. I am afraid that when I push myself along at a fast-boy pace I end up flexing my feet too much for them to be happy.
  2. And in the outrunning clothing choices department, I found today that my regular pants scheme of ¾ths length wool underwear with +4s over the top became very sweaty once it got up into the 70s. If my vanity keeps trumping my common sense, this will make any summer brevets/permanents that I do a festival of perspiration, which is not exactly how I want to spend the summer.
  3. When I get tired, I lean on my handlebars, which crunches my carpal tunnels and makes my hands go numb. It’s worse when I’m at speed, because my normal remedy of resting my hands on the brake levers isn’t nearly as comfortable as plunking myself into the drops.

The handlebar problem might be solvable by lowering my bars and/or increasing my saddle setback a little more to balance my position, but the other two seem like they might be basically insoluble without making the supreme sacrifice and switching to bike-specific clothing. My shoes are starting to get somewhat worn, so I’m thinking of putting a pair of clipless pedals onto the project bike and replacing the shoes with ones that have clips on them, but the pants problem looks like I may need to try out a set of tights (bicycle-specific if it’s possible to get them without chamois pads, I’m not sure what type if it’s not) and learn to live without the pockets I so dearly love.

PS: Oh! Before I forget: pictures!