Soggy, Foggy and cold hill repeats

I found the following statement on Cyclingnews.com's write-up of Paris-Roubaix kind of amusing. It is in reference to Thor Hushovd crashing while he and Tom Boonen had a small lead on the remaining 4-5 people in the "winning" break-away:


"Hushovd's mistake cost him an excellent chance at victory, as he is undoubtedly the stronger sprinter of the two."


Really? I kept re-reading it to check if they were talking about Hushovd and Pozzato, but I don't think they were. Not a big deal, but in my humble opinion, Hushovd is not "undoubtedly" the stronger sprinter between him and Boonen. I don't even think he's the STRONGER sprinter of the two, but they're both pretty darn good. It just depends on the conditions and luck and either one of them could win a sprint. And they're both no Mark Cavendish...


That was a long lead-in to my new socks! Cezanne loves the argyle, I like them because they're a little different. They'd probably (definitely) look better with white or black shoes, but these are what I got!


Earlier in the week my teammate Brian emailed a couple of us asking if we wanted to go out to Skyline Drive this Saturday and do hill repeats along the first 4-5 miles of Skyline Drive. I was game. I kept checking the forecast as the week progressed. Side note: Cezanne likes to make fun of me because I check the weather so much on the iPhone. She likes to say something like: "did the weather forecast change in the last 10 minutes?" I deserve it and she does it in good fun. I just usually/always like to get a last minute update of the temp before I go riding.



So, all week the forecast was rain and high 40s. Towards the end of the week the forecast was rain Friday night and Saturday morning, then clearing. More promising... So, what kind of weather did we get? 47 degrees and raining.



The above pic is on the drive out to Skyline Drive (in Front Royal, VA), about 75 miles from home. It was absolutely pouring. The "this is going to be fun" thoughts ran through my mind, but didn't really prepare me for all the day's adventures.

Fog.

We got out to Skyline about 30-40 minutes behind schedule, so by the time we started riding it was probably 10am, not 9am...



The further we went up Skyline the worse the fog got. I wish the picture did it justice, but I should have taken another when we reached the visitor's center. You can barely make the car out in front of the one you can see clearly above and it got worse.



In packing up all my stuff last night, for some reason I decided to throw my rear light in the bag. I don't think I've ever put it on during the day. I usually throw it on if I'm riding in the evening and know I'll be wrapping up around sunset. I don't have any issues with the nerd factor of having a light, I'd rather be alive.


It actually came in handy...sort of. We parked about 4.5 miles into the park at the visitors center and got bundled up. For some reason (probably the rain and fog), it felt colder than 47 degrees. I'm glad I brought extra stuff I thought I wouldn't need (extra jacket, beanie, shoe covers). The ride down the hill was miserable, cold and wet and couldn't see very far in front of us. I was on the brakes a ton on the way down.



We got to the bottom and turned around for the ascent. Ahhh, that's better. We warmed up pretty quickly on the ascent and that made everything bearable. The fog was sitting above mile 2, so mile 0-2 had good visibility, just still cold and wet.



We made it to the top and were feeling good. Basically, the ascent gets you nice and warm which makes the cold descent bearable. Just as we pulled right into the visitors center to turn around, the park ranger blasted his sirens for a second. He was right behind us. He asked us if we had front lights on the bikes and we said no. He made a smart comment like, "do you think that's a smart idea?" Listen buddy, yes, having a front light would be the absolute safest given the fog conditions, but at the same time, I'm more likely to get hit from behind, not from a car that decides they not only want to cross the yellow line, they want to go two-thirds of the way into the other lane where I'm riding.



We didn't give an attitude and basically the law is if you're riding in fog, you have to have both, so that's why I said the rear light I brough and was using "sort of" came in handy. It got us 80% of the way to being the safest, but not all the way.



So, after mulling it over a bit, we had to decide what to do. It boiled down to 2 options: (1) go find another hill not in a state/national park to ride on or (2) go to Kmart and get cheap front headlights. What really complicated things was that Cezanne and I had this plan for her to drive out and meet us for lunch after the ride... Uh-oh. Brian was talking up this BBQ place (The Apple House) and it sounded good to us, although I think the last time I had BBQ was in San Diego about 2 years ago when my brother Jason visited and we went to Kansas City BBQ (famous for a part of Top Gun being filmed there).



Bike rides typically don't end right on time. There are a lot of different factors like weather, flats, speed, expected speed, who else is riding, cops telling you to go get a front light if you wanted to ride... So, I got an update on Cezanne and she was about 20 miles from the restaurant, and we were at Kmart. We decided to get the lights and ride. I told Cezanne it would be another 1.5 hours of riding (about 30 minutes per trip up and down the hill). Of course, I was only taking into account the ascent time. Cezanne defaulted to thinking it would probably be about 2 hours then and I agreed. That would put us ready to eat at 2pm. We were ready closer to 3pm... Sorry Cezanne! I felt awful and Cezanne was a good sport. She gave it to me a little bit when we got home and I totally agree with her.



She knew it wasn't going to be a solid meet-up time, but she wasn't expecting to drive an hour and 15 minutes just to wait around for 3 hours. I should have cut the 2nd ride short, only doing 2 ascents, but that's difficult when it's not just you that's out riding.



So, both rides combined for 33 miles and just over 5,000 ft of climbing. That's a lot of climbing for just 33 miles. The climb is actually really nice, not too steep, not too shallow and pretty constant gradient. Each climb wound up being about 4 miles and 1,200 ft of climbing with a gradient of 5.7%.



The first ride: http://connect.garmin.com/activity/3457799



The second ride: http://connect.garmin.com/activity/3457789


All in all it wound up being a good ride despite the weather and the stopping and going and buying a light and making poor Cezanne find a way to pass 3 hours in a small town where she had never been before. I'll make sure that doesn't happen again!