The first ride is always the hardest, but yesterday we got on the road bikes for the first time in’08. The Inter Urban Trail is just a few blocks from the pad, so figured that a nice pedal while get’n some errands out of the way would be a good use of a half-ways decent (weather-wise) Sunday.  Hit both the malls in the area – which both are on the trail; hmm… that is interesting. There are also several housing developments popping up along the trail as well.

My bike computer was on the glitch. I used my GPS to track speed; but had to Gmap the path to see how far we went. Looks like 18 miles or so, not too shabby for the first ride I’d say. Explains why my butt is so soar today!

We registered for a 75 mile event ride in the Portland area, which is coming up shortly. Had to get back on the saddle and log some miles in. First ride was a short 12 mile loop around West Seattle after work last week. Nice and scenic following the water. Although short, big hills coming back up from the water.

Saturday we left straight out the front door here in Lynnhood and headed down to Fremont to check out the Red Bull Soapbox Race. Started with hopping on the Interurban Trail down to Mountlake Terrace. From there we went a few miles on the road, following HWY 104 to Lake Forest Park. Then it was the Burke-Gilman Trail again all the way to Fremont. About 23 miles total to get there. Husky Stadium was live with action in preparation for the big game.

After watching a fair amount of contraptions wobble down Fremont Ave, we grabbed some grub and headed back. About 45 miles total, 4 hours of ride time, so an average of about 10 mph. Not a ‘monkey pace’ – so I was feeling fine in the end. Somebody was a little more tired though, next weekend might be a little grueling.

Wednesdays still have been ‘riding days.’ But now that STP has come and gone, the pace isn’t so furious. Annajo and her friend don’t push as hard as the Beeza. Just getting out and enjoying the ride is kinda nice.

I’m wanting to find new trails for the road bikes now. Between the Burke Gilman / Sammish Trail and Centenial Trail… kind of been there, down that. Now that I’m not in ‘training mode’ I think spending some time exploring shall be in order.

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.

Pre-Ride Commentary

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!