Twenty-Six Minutes, Thirteen Seconds

That was my time today over the ten-mile Hubbard Time Trial.  10 miles in 26:13 works out to 22.9 miles per hour.  That far surpassed both my time in the Broome TT and my expectations for the evening (though it was about in line with my hopes for the evening).

Thanks to my friend Bruce and his wife Nancy for the pictures.  Also note in them, like the Broome TT, I'm smiling at the start but not at the finish.  And look at those skinny freakin' legs!  Dang, I'm eating as much as I can shove down my throat.  And they don't look that skinny from the first-person perspective.  :)

The Arbon Valley Ride

It's been a month.  I suppose I should post something.  Here's what I did last weekend.

A couple months ago Kate let me know that she was gonna be heading to Pocatello to stay with our friend Shannon and go to a DOCNA trial.  I decided that I needed to get some climbing done and a change of scenery wouldn't hurt either. Also I didn't want to be left alone with the cats for a weekend. So I decided to tag along with Kate for the weekend, bring my bike, and ride up Mink Creek & down Arbon Valley on Saturday.

So off I went with chamois butter in my shorts.  Rode six miles and stopped at the agility trial along Quinn Rd.  A perfect place to stretch & refill my water bottles before starting in earnest.  Continuing on, I headed south into town, turned down Garfield Ave, and rode past the hovel that Kate & I had the great misfortune of calling home for three years.  The last time I'd ridden these roads, I considered the eight-mile ride from there up to the NWS office near the airport to be long.

After passing an old man riding a bike & talking to himself on Garfield, I hopped back on the main drag at Benton St and continued south out of town.  Watched a kid barrelling down a hill out of a side street and onto the main drag, almost getting himself run over.  My first little rest stop was at the mouth of Gibson Jack Creek - about 14 miles into the ride.  The road was about to turn up Mink Creek Road.  From there I'd gain about 1000 feet through some small rollers for a few miles and then hit the steep 780-foot climb.  So I pulled into Gibson Jack Road, drank some gatorade, and ate a Clif Bar before continuing on.

Two thirds of my way through the rolling section, I entered the Caribou National Forest.  There was a little turn-out there so I pulled over again to stretch & empty my bladder.  I learned a couple things here that I should have learned a long time ago:  1) all else being equal, the inside of a curve in the road is better for hiding from traffic than the outside of a curve; and 2) when hiding from traffic to pee on the outside of a curve, it is more prudent to ensure that trees are obscuring the view of you from both legs of the turn than from the apex of the turn.  But I had a nice view of Scout Mountain from there, about 5 miles away over some lower hills in the middleground (the first picture).

And so I continued on up the hill.  The steep part wasn't really all that steep, and it was less of a challenge than I thought it would be though I was still very happy to round the last curve and see Crystal Summit.  Not a single car passed me on the way up - I thought that was odd.  The second picture is a view looking from Crystal Summit into Arbon Valley.  The snow-covered mountain on the far horizon is called Deep Creek Peak.  It's a little over 18 miles away from Crystal Summit (straight-line distance), and my ride was to take me within about eight miles of it.

The ride down the back side of Crystal Summit was really fun.  Steeper and twistier than I remembered it being from the one or two drives I took that way back when I lived in Poky.  An excellent time.  A somewhat close encounter with a bull got the old heart racing a bit, and a longer ride south than I was expecting got me to pull off the road and check my map.  But all was well.  And the road kept going down and down and down.  I thought I was gonna have to make another climb that I missed while studying the route.  But that climb never came.  I finally came to the end of S Mink Creek Road and turned north on Arbon Valley Road - mile 37 of the journey and the start of the homeward leg.  

Still heading down a gentle rolling grade with a small tailwind, I was sustaining 25 MPH and grinning ear to ear right about that time.  But somewhere around mile 45 or 50, I started realizing that I hadn't brought enough food.  I brought enough for the ride itself, but I failed to realize that I'd be riding right through lunch time.  I was confident that I wouldn't be so grossly undernourished that I wouldn't get home, but I knew I was in for a struggle for the last few miles.   The third picture is looking south along Arbon Valley Road to Deep Creek Peak (very roughly ten miles away) from a point near where I came to this realization.

So the last fifteen miles or so was less enjoyable, but only partially because of the lack of nutrition.  Around the start of the final fifteen, Arbon Valley opened up onto the Snake Plain.  As a result, the wind went from being at my back to kicking me right in mouth.  Less enjoyable.  And the terrain became flat so the road became straight.  Less enjoyable.  But hey, it was still more enjoyable than . . . well than a heck of a lot of things.   All told, I figured I got about 2200 feet of climbing over 70 miles of beautiful, lightly traveled roads through montane aspen stands and sage covered valleys.

The Longest Ride

There was a race yesterday near Middleton that allowed day-of registration.  I seriously considered showing up & entering it, but decided against it since I hadn't done any speed training since the Broome Time Trial.  I also hadn't done any long rides in a while so I figured that I should do that.  Plus I had other business to take care of in Boise - a tire wore out a bit sooner than I'd have liked (~800 miles) so I wanted to take it back & see if I could get a bit of a discount on a replacement.  

So I rode from home to the site of the race - one of the many subdivisions in the area that had begun construction right as the housing market tanked and now grow weeds but have beautifully smooth pavement.  On the way I stopped at a little park to pee and ended up spending twenty minutes or so reading about the Ward Massacre.  Until this point I was ignorant of the fact that the road I rode was originally part of the Oregon Trail; and pretty much right at the spot where I was standing, a small party of emigrants were killed by Shoshone Indians after a trade went south.  Having not grown up in the West, I never learned much Oregon Trail stuff in school; so it was a highlight of the ride, and it was brought about solely by my small bladder.

Got to the race, hung out there for a while, got a small amount of razzing from Tyler for not entering, saw Krisitin Armstrong, ate lunch, and took off for Boise.  I'd never traveled this particular leg of the journey before, so I ended up missing a couple turns and adding a few miles onto the ride.  But I got to Boise and was satisfactorily compensated for my underperforming tire and continued on my way in relatively short order.  By the time I returned home, the ride I'd projected to be 67 miles had turned into a little over 73 miles.  Whew!  And those last six - mostly into the wind - were the least enjoyable of the whole ride.  :)  But that ended up edging out a last year's LeBow ride as the longest ride ever for me. 

Jason Broome Time Trial

Great times.  That was fun.  In fact the more I think about it, the more I realize how enjoyable it was.

Kate & I got to the venue in plenty of time for me to check in & warm up & all that.  A little too early, maybe, actually.  It was windy so I decided to hang out in the van for a while before starting to warm up.  Then I realized that it was getting late so 

I rushed to fit my warm-ups & stretching in.  Didn't get nearly as much time in on the trainer as I wanted, so while I stretched I wasn't as limber as I should have been.   And actually my knees are starting to feel that now.

But I got to the start line on time.  Tyler was the starter and he gave me a nod of encouragement while another dude held my seat while I clipped into my pedals.  Then the fun began.  Had a tailwind and a slight downhill grade on the way out, so I took it a bit easy to save some juice for the trip back up & into the wind.  Still, I gained on the person in front of me and was a hundred or so meters behind him at the turn ("B" on the map linked above) - where he fell.  Ended up being a ~12-year-old BYRDS rider.  The official helped him up & held his bike while he remounted & got going, but he had to rebuild that 10-15MPH of momentum (that he otherwise woulda kept sans crash) going into the wind so he burned a lot of gas there and I overtook him easily shortly after the turn.  I thought about saying something encouraging but couldn't think of anything good and couldn't spare the breath anyway.  I figured he might overtake me again shortly (BYRDS is one of the top youth cycling programs in the country and I've heard there are a couple BYRDS riders going for cycling scholarships to college), but I never saw him again. 

Shortly after that I rounded a bend in the road that put me on that long straightaway heading due north - square into the teeth of the wind and culminating with the largest climb of the ride. Couldn't have been more than 50 feet of elevation gain but from my perspective it looked huge (now that I look, Google Maps says it's more like 90 feet, but still...).  But in my adrenaline-charged state I thought, "Bring it!"  And I kept thinking that for what seemed like an eternity.  Every time I looked up at the hill, it never seemed to be getting any closer.  One rider passed me.   Then he hit the hill and passed the next rider (whom I was gaining on).  Then I finally got to the base of the hill, got my cadence & form in order, attacked it with my glutes (not something you hear everyday), and motored straight up it.

Once atop the hill, I saw a sign for 1km to go, gaged how much gas was left in my tank (simultaneously making two mental notes: one about how glad I was to have learned the conversion between miles & kilometers, and the other about how funny it is that these racers want so badly to be in Europe), chilled at my steady pace for a little while longer, then shifted up a couple gears and hammered for the last 500 - 700 meters.  My final time over the ten miles was 29' 54.??" so I did indeed barely get over the finish averaging above 20MPH.

My average was 20.067MPH as a matter of fact.  And even better was that I was only overtaken by one rider.  And even better than that was that I gained on the two people ahead of me!  I did actually overtake the one guy, but who's gonna count a kid who falls as an overtaken rider.  And even better than all that, it was FUN!  And Kate came to watch me too.  :)

And I'm sure that in subsequent time trials I'll get my logistics & timing down better so I'll be ready when I need to be.

Getting Jazzed for the Race!

Yesterday I took the Trek out for another test time trial on the same seven-mile course as last time.  I managed 19.3 MPH last time and was hoping to top 20 this time.  I didn't bother doing the math ahead of time, but in order to accomplish that I had to shave more than a minute off my previous time.  And I did!  My previous time was 21:45 and yesterday I clocked 20:22 for 20.62 MPH.

So there.  And I think I can sustain that same pace for an additional three level miles, so I should be able to keep it above 20 MPH for Saturday's race!  Wish me luck!

Yikes it's windy out there now.

My First Race

I entered my first race.  The Jason Broome Memorial Time Trial.  It's the first race in the Lyle Pearson Spring Series - also a road race or two and maybe a crit.  But forget that noise.  First rider leaves the start (near Exit 71 of I-84 east of Boise) at 10:30 AM on April 4, 2009.  Wish me luck!

The Dog Days of Late Winter

Kate's doing dog stuff in Caldwell this weekend, so my plan was to ride out there today, watch the dogness, and ride home, maybe taking a detour around the lake for some extra miles.  While I was planning this, a friend of mine emailed me and asked if I'd be able to ride.  Heck yeah!  So we did something like this except in reverse order and stayed to watch the dogs for an hour or so.  Plus I rode a few miles to warm up, plus we zigzagged around a while in Caldwell, so I got 45 miles today.  It was great to have a riding partner again.  Makes me look forward to STP's startup even more.