recipes and ride reports

oh ew these gloves smell exactly like one might expect if one rode in them for nineteen and a half hours, much of it in the rain, and then accidentally left them in a handlebar bag for a couple of days before setting them out to dry. time to do last-minute laundry because I am not inflicting that on anyone, myself included. next post: a recap of several rainy rides. a raincap. a shower of posts. a...something.

Argh, I had an entire ride report here, and Safari crashed and ate it while I was trying to add the image. Let's summarize with the photo while I go take out my frustrations by starting to put the gravel bike back together, and eventually I'll rewrite it (and take out this comment).
( With apologies to Smashmouth, but it seemed apropos )

A long story short: it was a stunningly beautiful course, with much better pavement than I expect on backroads, and also it was damn hard.

This is the information page for my 118-km (~74mi) Permanent Populaire (RUSA Route #3389) from West Medford to Ipswich and back.

Route map and GPS file on RideWithGPS, (also available to ride in the reverse direction).

( More details, including some pictures and control information... )

If you're interested in riding this route, please email me from the link on the RUSA page for the permanent; I do not always check comments here as quickly as I do my email. I will be happy to help you with any questions and information on parking if driving to the start.

Actual ride report coming when I have pictures sorted out etc. But it's Tuesday and I already feel pretty good post-400k, which is just awesome. No hand numbness (had a fair bit the one other 400 I did), no muscle aches that aren't the usual sort of DOMS from pushing a bit hard, tiny bit of chafing that has already healed.

So yeah, I'm back, I hit my big goal for this season, and I'm going to be putting together a training plan for the full series for next year.

Last weekend was the NER 200k -- first in the series, a hilly jaunt up into some really pretty parts of southern New Hampshire and I really wasn't sure how this was going to go.

One of the reasons I love these rides is the exhilaration of, 115 miles into a ride, asking your tired body if it has some speed left in it, and having it answer YES. There's nothing quite like it.

That's it, that's the ride report. Well, and 12:24, which means I finished with more than an hour left, which isn't my 11:13 finish of two years ago, but isn't bad at all.

Next up: my first team event, a 200k ride to Portland with friends old and new.

I've had a lot of pre-ride jitters manifest as anxiety dreams, but I'm not sure I've ever had them before a 100k. I've had two this week. (I don't remember exactly what they entailed now, and dream descriptions are generally only interesting to the dreamer, but I woke up and distinctly realized they were anxiety dreams about the 100k.)

I'm still vastly out of shape, although I my brain is fairly confident that, barring really awful weather (I'm not doing 90 miles in driving sleet this year), or the flu that's going around the office, that I can gut out 68 familiar miles. I just...haven't ridden that far in a long time. My shoulder is OK, my hand is OK, I have been riding some, but it seems daunting in a way it hasn't since before my first populaire.

It's longer if I add the to/from to the total; I might drive to the start, I might not. It seems wrong, somehow, not to ride out there. (dphilli1 alas has had to bail out even before the day-of; his ankle has gone from keeping him from running (hence biking!) to no biking either. He wasn't up for 90, so the plan was to drive. We'll see. I need to decide, like, yesterday. Probably I'll ride out there, and if I have to, call for a ride home afterward.

I also need to hook up a new cyclocomputer -- the old one's mount cracked in the crash, and it's been in my handlebar bag since -- still registering miles but no longer on the bars. We'll see if that happens before the ride either; it's not like I'll be trying to set any personal speed records.

I'm tentatively looking at the rest of the season, too; I'll know more once I've knocked out 68/90 miles where my body stands. Even without the cancer and the crash it was not shaping up as a terribly good off-season; new responsibilities at work have been keeping me busy and I've lost the hang of making time to hit the gym again. I am definitely looking forward to doing my first team event -- a flat 200k dart should be a great way to do that. The big question is what if the 200k goes well. If it goes poorly, the answer is clear; do more 200ks. If it goes close to as well as in 2014, though, do I dare more? Somewhere in the midst of fear and uncertainty and mortality rates, I put PBP 2019 on my calendar; there's no time like the present to get back into the habit of being in brevet shape. But I need some confidence-boosting successes right now, more than I need challenges. Hopefully Saturday will be the former.

Here comes the dirt bike
Beware of the dirt bike
Because I hear they're coming to our town

When I bought my Seven, there was one thing I said I didn't want and was never planning to do with the bike. And that was get into dirt riding/gravel grinders. I had an old rigid MTB (my Nishiki) with racks and fenders that loved gentle offroading and I was happy to keep any dirt rides in the touring/slow toodles camp. Not for fast riding, or even the closest approximation of "fast" I can manage.

The paint was barely dry on my new darling when I took it on the Middlesex Canal Tour, for which it was overkill, speed/efficiency-wise (this was more a city bikes tooling along at 10mph between informative stops sort of ride), but it was new and I wanted to ride it. And then we turned off the pavement onto trails, and the bike...rode just ducky. On little 23mm tires pumped up to rock-hard. Sure, I wasn't going very fast, which helped, but the handling was fine. Hrm, I said. I'm still not doing gravel grinders, I added.

At my first brevet, up in Burlington Vermont, one of the experienced riders, Frank kept trying to convince me to come back up for the Fall Classic. I still couldn't imagine doing that much dirt on the road bike, and I couldn't quite imagine doing brevet speed and distances on my Nishiki. He did make it sound like fun, though. And he was the first (of many) randonneurs to be very welcoming of my newcomer self -- to just assume I would succeed at anything I tried. I didn't, however, try the Fall Classic that year.

All hail the dirt bike
Philosopher dirt bike
Silence as we gathered round
We saw the word and we're on our way

The next year, though, when it rolled around, I was itching for a little vacation, Burlington was beautiful when I last went, and a weekend trip for good food and a little bike ride (for me) and dirt road run (for dphilli1) sounded ideal. The 114k edition, not the 200k, since I wasn't really sure I could hold brevet speed on dirt and hills.

Once I started riding, though, I didn't much care if I DNFed, although I was trying hard not to. It was just simply wonderful to be out there.



You can get scenery and stay on pavement, but willing to go off it yields some of the most marvelously quiet places to ride. Well, quiet except for the skittering of dirt under tires. I talked to myself about trust a lot on this ride. Trust your tires, I said. Trust your brakes, I said. Trust your legs, I said, and go. I bombed down descents one razor's edge of reflex ahead of the dirt sliding under me; I hauled the bike around trying to scrape myself up hills without spinning out. I walked, some, of course. It's me. And I made time and stopped for photos. (I've linked the album before, but now you have context.)

Soul-crushing dirt bike
Self-propelled dirt bike
You see I never thought I'd understand
Till that bike took me by the hand
Now I ride

Now I find myself pulling up Bing Maps (which, not always accurately, shows dirt roads, unlike Google maps), and poking at routes. I throw a little dirt in here and there when designing routes, although I refrained from adding any to the nightride. (Though a permanent version of that course with dirt might be in the works, or a free-route perm with paved/unpaved alternates.)

After tweaking my knee futzed up my brevet schedule, I went looking for consolation-prize rides, and one popped out. We bought a rack for the car and I dragged David up to New Hampshire to try and ride Raid Rockingham, which is pretty much an ideal beginners gravel-grind -- it's not especially hilly, it's not a far schlep from Boston, and it has an easy short-cut down from ~60mi to ~40 if necessary.

That, alas, did not go quite as planned.



I almost threw on my big saddlebag with a spare tire, because I wasn't sure how rough the roads were, and because after the 300k tire debacle I was feeling touchy about tires. I didn't, though, because I hadn't had any dirt-related tire shenanigans, ever, and was pretty confident I'd be OK. That turned out to be true. David's tires, though, were another story. They were beefy 'cross-ish/city-ish tires, but they weren't new any more, and a few miles after he'd dropped me on a hill, I came across him looking dismally at his bike. He'd shredded a sidewall, and was dubious about his ability to fix it. I think we could have, if we'd kept at it, but after blowing the first spare tube before we'd found the real problem (and setting his ears ringing) and then having the patched original tire not hold air when we put it in to a makeshift-booted tire, he wasn't ready to try a third time. So I rode on to the aid station, alerted the sag wagon, and then rode back to the start to meet him (after some no-cell-reception shenanigans and miscommunications). Hopefully he'll still be willing to go the next time I drag him on one of these.

Thwarted again, I started thinking about other rides. We'd be going up to the White Mountains, and I wasn't really sure I wanted to do a big epic hillstravaganza -- but given that our hotel was basically at the top of Crawford Notch, my options were: East: drop down and then climb back up the notch, which definitely qualified as big hills, West: go quite a ways on busy 302 and then come back on it, with nice roads in the middle and a variety of hilliness options, or to go North, which meant dirt. And meant one major named climb -- Jefferson Notch, but didn't mean a really LONG hill. The questionable part was the other hilly dirt road -- Old Cherry Mountain, which had no google-maps photos and the only ride reports came from mountain bikers heading all the way up to the summit; I'd just be taking the road and not the spur trail/ex-road to the summit.

I learned two lessons on this ride: one, how low I can push below the recommended tire pressures and not pinch flat. Two: bring bug spray. Riding, you're going fast enough, generally, that bugs aren't an issue. When you're changing a tire by a picturesque but mosquito-filled mountain swamp, this is not true. I was a little worried -- I was only three miles in, Old Cherry Mountain Road was generally nice, but I'd used up one of my two spares and I hadn't been able to find the cause of the puncture -- I was assuming pinchflat based on the fact I'd dropped my pressures from the usual in expectation of much dirt, but I wasn't able to get the tube to hold enough air temporarily to find the hole. I put the new one in, ratcheted it back to recommended ranges with my tiny pump (<3 my Lezyne micro floor drive pump), and it was fine the rest of the way. I was up and over the rest of the outbound leg quickly, and onto the one flat bit. That was actually the least-pleasant part:



While the scenery was bucolic, the gravel was rough, and the fact that my Seven is not, in fact, a gravel grinder or a 'cross bike was making itself known. It's a great bike, and handles this crap as nicely as an endurance road bike can, but it's not its home turf. And a deerfly facebombed me and stung me on the neck, which hurt way more than it should. So I was really quite happy to turn onto the notch road, which was about as perfect as dirt roads could be, except for the up-half-a-mountain bit. I gave directions to some lost tourists looking for the trailhead parking lot at the top of the notch, and tried not to think about how much more quickly they'd get up there.

But the climb was, as of then, pleasant. It followed a little brook upwards, occasionally acquiring pavement as it bridged the water, and if there's one constant I like in rides, it's water. It slowly got steeper and steeper, stairstepping a bit. I told myself that maybe this was the steepest bit and the notch was just past that bend, and pushed; no, the notch was at least a mile and a half in my future. I tried to stay on the bike, past the point I'd do so on a brevet; I didn't have far to go once up and over, after all. The faster I went, too, the fewer bugs could land; somewhere around 4-5mph the mosquitos start to be able to catch up to me. But eventually I ground to a halt, and started walking the steep bits and hopping back on as soon as it flattened out enough to do so; the road continued to be some of the nicest dirt imaginable, which helped. At last I came around the bend where the steep kicker really starts, and from there it wasn't far to a point where I was looking around for the fancy National Forest notch sign. I even went back and forth a bit in the notch looking for it, but alas, no photo op presented itself. Might have been behind one of the parked cars; the trailhead parking had spilled out onto the road-sides for a quarter-mile in either direction.

I wasn't very disappointed by the lack of sign, though. Well, I thought, I'll just have to go back and climb it again some time. Maybe next year. Some day I'll get all the way to the top without walking.

So the last time I posted, I was cranky after DNFing the 300k. I dithered for a few days over trying to head out to Westfield to ride their Bash Bish 300k, and the bike was in the shop with ETA unknown, trying to troubleshoot the ongoing chainsuck issues.

And then I landed wrong playing DDR and twisted my bad knee. Welp, decision made. I don't play DDR much right before events I care about; while it's fun and a really good workout it's a lot more injury-risking than most things. And my knees were probably a bit on the overstressed side anyway from ramping mileage up too much. It also wasn't healing quickly enough for me to get enough miles in before the 400k. So, alas, this is not going to be my year for my first full series.

Having decided that, though, opened up more opportunities for fun rides -- am thinking of doing Raid Rockingham, the same weekend as the NJ 600k, which looks like fun and I might be able to convince dphilli1 to come along. And to focus my energies on maybe getting a little faster, rather than purely on building endurance.

The bike arrived home last weekend, with a happier drivetrain and new fenders. The latter were not actually exactly planned; I asked about what my various fender options were, especially if there were any that would make 28mm tires less of a tight fit, and somehow that translated into the shop going ahead and installing a set, which were not quite right and I had to turn around halfway home and have them tweaked. Once tweaked, though, they're nicely larger than my old ones.

So without goals, just for fun, I did two shorter rides this weekend.

( A hill montage and hanging onto a fast group... )

The ride started out great. A big huge crowd of people, many of which I know by now (even if I am terrible with names and don't remember them all). We all set out as a giant strung out pack, but the light across 2 quickly split a chunk of us out the back. Me, T, S&G, plus a bunch of people I hadn't met. We were still a wide variety of speeds; I rode with S&G and a guy A I hadn't talked to before for a good while before the first control, where I didn't want to really stop, so I left them behind and cruised on alone.

The sheltering of a pack would have been nice in the wind, but I was feeling good, and happy riding by myself. Around mile 50 or so I started seeing the speed demons heading back north; this was one of the few really out-and-back courses we do. They were flying by in tight little pelotons. Then I started seeing the looser middle packs, and then I was at the turnaround myself, being teased by one of the gentlemen who'd helped with my flat-o'doom on last years 300k. I sheepishly admitted that I'd just gone back to the type of tire that had been such a cause of dismay, but that I was sure I'd be OK next time. They didn't have any food at the turnaround, and I was starting to get hungry, but I figured I'd eat later. (Never wait until you're hungry to eat. Bad move, though I never really bonked. Just got overly tired.)

At mile 90 or so of the brevet, I started writing this blog post in my head. A title, a nervous start, some suspense, and then the news: Reader, I crushed it (p.s. that's a good thing). Well, the first 90 miles or so, I did. After that...

( Well, it could have been a lot worse )

Ugh, the amount to which I do not feel ready for tomorrow's 200k: large.

It's flat, it should be fast, I'd originally sort of hoped to sub-10hr it, but I do not have nearly enough miles in my legs, and I feel old. Maybe it's just the winter and the cold I had and the amount that derailed my training, maybe I need to recheck my thyroid prescription, maybe it's just the end of a long stressful work week with poor sleep, maybe it'll be fine.

Blah. I expect I'll feel better on the road, once I wake up, and this post will feel silly.

It's a good reminder to me next winter, at least: do more speedwork. Time tooling around on the Brompton with studded tires helped keep my endurance OK but my speed is abysmal. I felt AWESOME last Thursday/Friday doing back-to-back speedwork on the spin bike, but it evaporated again.

And having to change a slow-leak flat tire tonight after taking the studs off the Brompton earlier this week didn't help. Ow, my poor hands. I'm bonky and in pain and tired and I haven't STARTED the ride yet. (Dinner should kick in and fix one of those, shortly.)

My rims are the only thing about my Seven I'm not thrilled with; I want to be able to pick my tires based on liking them, not being able to get them on. I only changed one, not both, because there's only so much stress I can deal with, and my hands already hurt; the rear can keep its noisy Grand Bois for now. I wanted to like the GB wundertires, but they are SO NOISY and don't grip well in snow and wet. Hopefully putting on at least one Conti means that the roads will be bone-dry. :)