We did it. Oh… yeah, I guess I can tell more. From Portland: Joe, Freed, and Greg (Freed’s Dad) came up the night before. The same night, me and LB were frantically doing last minute adjustments to our bikes. It was a late night and an early morning – less than 4 hours sleep. Yeah… pretty dumb thing to do before a 205 mile bike adventure.
We planned on doing this event in 2 days, some however do make it in one. Jim was crazy enough to make the journey in one day. Our day started out plagued with flats. Between me and LB, we had 5 or 6. It was pretty frustrating as well as a huge time killer. It was a strange anomaly, we had been training for almost a full year with zero flats with all our rides – to now have to fix so many and so early in the ride. Not surprisingly, when we exited King County, no more flats! phew. I did have one more issue though, I lost a screw in my shoe cleat, which required a stop at one of the bike repair trailers along the route.
It was surprising to me to see how many people (almost 9000) participating in this event. I would say that about half of them were not your typical biker. The bikes ranged from the top of the line slim road bikes to big knobby mountain bikes. The riders varied from fit athletes to, hum… almost large people; which is amazing that people not in shape were able to take on this large task with success. It was also pretty cool to see such a wide range of bikes on the route. Road bikes do not take a beating like other bikes, so some nice vintage rides were running good as ever!
Okay, on to the photo part of the story. I realized that I hadn’t taken too many pictures of the ride itself, but not real easy to pull out a camera and keep pace pedaling.
Early morning loading of the vehicles:
First use of Annajo’s new bike rack system.
Okay, it looks dumb, but putting these things on our helmets really worked out AWESOME to help us find each other in pack. Especially through the dorky mirrors we were also sporting on our helmets.
Pre-ride group shot. See, we don’t look that silly…. do we?
We were released in waves. It was more than a little crazy being in such a large pack.
First of many flats… grrr.
Joe and Freed had found a nice cool spot in the shade of a trailer while waiting for us to catch up at the food stop. Good find!
Just another mini stop to fill up the water bottles.
LB making up for some lost sleep at another stop.
First time hitting the Century Mark!
Spaghetti all you can eat at end of first day. I had three plates. Best darn spaghetti ever!
Leave it to the Portlanders to go on a beer run from the campsite.
Oops, the sun is up. We over slept our alarms. I really didn’t mind though.
Joe and Freed leading the pack – good wind pushers.
Big food stop. Really impressed on how smoothly the event was, especially for the number of participants.
So… on HWY 30, then bunched us up again. By the time they let us go, there was about 1000 of us crossing the bridge. I thought it was a crazy idea, seemed to work out fine though. That was a site… CHARGE.
End of ride group photo. We all made it!
Bikes corralled in the field.
Celebration in the beer garden. Rode 205 miles for that beer!
Comments (1)
My mind keeps asking “should I do it again?” The ride was actually a lot of fun. I never got to the point where I desperately needed to get off the bike, and riding with you guys was a lot of fun. Gotta love a sport where you can be getting exercise, going somewhere, and still be able to talk to each other at the same time.