All posts by Mike

Should have believe original forecast

Tues/Thurs 7:45am ride

Monday night the forecast wasn’t looking good; rain from 8am-11am. I mean, seriously, the point is to target our ride? I made sure the rain bikes were ready to go, and figured it would be wet, for the first time in quite a while. But by the time we got up, a miracle! The new weather forecast said rain between 11am-1pm! Yeah! So we set out on our nice bikes on what should have been a nice ride.

Never mind that we could see the clouds up on Skyline… just heavy fog, right? Right. About 3/4 of the way up Kings, it began to drizzle, and as we headed towards Skeggs, it turned to real live rain. And cold. Well, not epic type cold, but when you weren’t thinking it was going to rain and you’re facing rain and maybe 43 degrees, well, definitely not what you signed up for. Not a whole lot of fun descending, but you just kept thinking how much you wanted to get down to the bottom, warm up a bit once you could apply some power to the pedals.

And no, we didn’t do the West Old LaHonda loop, rationalizing that it wouldn’t be a good idea riding across a recently-graveled road while its raining, since water has a way of causing gravel to really cut through tires.

Shortened Thursday’s ride so punished myself today

Ride reports (not Tu/Th)

Thursday’s ride didn’t go so well; I’d gotten maybe three hours sleep and was having a really tough time. Normally I can still ride pretty well without much sleep, but that just wasn’t happening Thursday so Kevin and I skipped the West Old LaHonda section. Something that rarely ever happens.

So today, no choice, had to do something to punish myself. Of course, Kevin wants to know why *he* has to suffer too. He was making up all sorts of alternative rides as we got going, but eventually gave in, realizing that it was going to be Redwood Gulch or bust. Part of it is just me, wondering how much longer I can still do that nasty climb, with the not-low-enough-anymore gears on my bike. It’s strange how I can easily maintain 240 watts on a climb like Kings or Old LaHonda, but if it gets really steep, instead of just going slower at the same watts, I struggle to keep it above 220.

Truthfully, I started out the ride feeling really awful, wondering how it was even going to be possible doing a long climb. I hoped that I’d start feeling better as I went, but while the perception of feeling better never happened, I did finally see more-normal power figures once we got to Skyline. I was more than a bit worried that I’d blow apart as Kevin kicked hard up the short climbs, but happy to see that I could do 350 watts and stay on Kevin’s wheel.

It’s certainly not summer; most of the ride the temps were in the low-50s to low-60s. We wore leg warmers the entire ride, and light jackets at the start. Kevin was able to use regular gloves but I was finding my long-fingered winter gloves to be a bit inadequate, a scary thing to think about in such mild temps. My electrically-heated gloves are going to be put to very good use this winter!