OH LOOK I'M POSTING. Hurrah!

I'm writing this from the Mercure hotel in Saint Quentin en Yvelines, where I'm chilling and waiting nervously for PBP to start. We got in on Tuesday morning, after a fairly uneventful flight -- the bike had a TSA note, but unlike many friends' bike cases, they seem to have left everything alone in there after taking a peek. My main suitcase was a little more shaken up; they didn't like the mochi and kẹo mè xửng huế (Vietnamese soft sesame candy) lurking in the bottom.

Amusingly, the Carrefour near the hotel had both mochi (although green tea flavor, not red bean) and the candy in their international aisle, but I didn't want to count on it. (We'd gone over to the international section mostly to see what the "tex-mex" section contained for giggles.) But that's later in this travellogue...

Saw my first fellow randos at the car rental -- one guy in a Randonneurs Brazil jersey, and a group of four guys with bike boxes, but I was exhausted and didn't go say hi. We got a small five-door car just big enough for the bike box, and went to the hotel for quick naps. My bike was the first into the bike area in the garage! After napping I reassembled the bike, while chatting with a tandem team from Florida who'd arrived an hour or so after we had. (We ended up eating dinner with them as well, when we all had headed out to find what was open before 7pm in SQY and had discovered the same two options.)

Then we did two days sightseeing in Paris; on the second one I spotted at least two, maybe three fellow riders -- a pair of guys, one in a SF Randonneurs jersey, locking up at a cafe, and a guy on a very West Coast Rando Bike (boxy front bag, looong fenders and flaps, etc) in a jersey the color of Seattle Randonneurs (but I couldn't read it) aptly navigating the traffic-circle-of-hell around the Arc de Triomphe. Now we're hanging out in the hotel with a day to kill; we'd sort of planned to go into Paris today too, but neither of us want to walk around a lot, and Versailles tickets were sold out.

We bought snacks and beer at the Carrefour; right now our Paris souvenirs are a sweatshirt (D was cold in Paris yesterday) and two reusable shopping bags. :) Bike check tomorrow; am probably going for a short shakedown ride this afternoon. Possibly we may drive down to the start and check it out even though we'll be there tomorrow, too.

I am vacillating between nervous and excited to get rolling.

I owe this blog three years' worth of posting about the Portland Daytrip 400k, really, but for now, an anecdote from this year, because it still weighs on me and was the only slightly sour note in the whole ride. (Aside from the usual moment or two of "why the hell am I doing this to myself", of course.)

I was riding along in the early evening, feeling good, when I start catching up on a man on a (modern, fairly nice) hybrid, and pass him. A few seconds later, I hear whirring, and he blasts past me, frantically spinning his pedals, and pulls in front of me. A few seconds after that, he sits up and slows down.

Oh, good grief, here we go. I instantly start catching up. How long am I on this road for? Am I about to spend the next five miles doing this? But I'm gaining way too quickly to just settle in behind this dude, so I pull out and around.

"Nice job," he says, and I breath a sigh of relief. He's unlikely to be an asshole about this. I decide that merits a little friendliness, and ask him if he's having a nice ride, which he takes to be a query on its length, and proudly proclaims he's gone 20 miles and is almost done, and to prove it, slows and begins to prepare to turn off. He doesn't see my smirk as I tell him to have a nice day. I'm just shy of 200 miles into my ride, after all.

Why do people men insist on doing this? Catching up to say hey and be friendly, sure. But really? I'm slow. I'm even slower with 200 miles in my legs, although at the time I was feeling pretty great and it was flat; I was probably tooling along at ~15mph on the flats, averaging ~13mph overall around then.

Sigh.

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.

Welp, there's no getting around it, so I might as well rip off the band-aid and post a ride report about yesterday. I DNF'ed the 2015 NER 300k at 137.7 miles in, at Petersham. In many ways, I DNFed about ten-fifteen miles before that, when I was suddenly sleepy and dizzy and decided that if I still felt that bad when I got to Petersham, I'd quit then, in a nice somewhat-lit town center where the volunteers might be able to help me get home, and if they couldn't, I could wait somewhere safe for a ride. (Spoiler: Emily and Tsun are awesome volunteers, and played tetris with the contents of Tsun's car to fit me & my bike in, along with another DNFer. Also thanks to the two friends who would have come gotten me if I'd needed them to, since D was out of town.)

( Read on for the long version... )
( Cut for large images, jump here if you only want the pretty and none of the tl;dr )

Anxiety was for nought; my performance wasn't as good as I vaguely hoped it might be with insufficient training, but it wasn't bad; a few minor/annoying mechanical issues were also surmounted.

More later, once I have repaired both engine (i.e. foooooood and sleeeeeeep) and the machine (front derailleur issues).

Yoga again. This time felt less transformative, but I was also arriving after a week of vacation from hunching over computers (and substantially less hunching over a cutting board than usual at Thanksgiving).

Last year I was cagey about goals, because I didn't want to post lofty ones and fail. This year, I'm comfortable posting them. Not to keep myself honest so much as to get excited about them.
And no, PBP isn't on here. I don't think the crowds sound appealing, if I'm going to shlep over to ride in France it's going to be wine-country touring style, and dphilli1 deserves a better 5th wedding anniversary than either being home alone or crewing for exhausted cranky randonneuring Sarah in France. :) If the series goes well, in 2015, a domestic or Canadian 1200K in 2016 seems like a good goal.

( 2015 ride calendar, tentatively ) After that -- Westfield doesn't have all their info up -- they have a September 200K and a 200K option for the Great River Ride, which could be fun. I'm pretty sure I'll won't want to do anything longer than a 200K after the Big Goal Rides. And I'm not sure if I'll go up for the Fall Classic again -- it was a lot of fun, though. Maybe I can convince dphilli1 to do the populaire with me, since he'll be training for touring by that point. And hopefully there will be some more 100k-ish rides with NER.

And then touring in October, woo.

Somewhere in there it'd be nice to get the canoe out for a multi-day trip. Or even just get the damn thing down for day trips, period. Alas, time.