| Quick Stats Ride Distance: 100 miles Elevation Gain: 6,799 feet Average Moving Speed: 14.00 mph |
With the Tour of the Unknown Coast (TUC) coming up fairly soon we decided to tailor this ride to mimic it. We put the climb of Seven Mile Hill, from The Dalles side, after the 80-mile mark. The TUC has this little climb they call "The Wall" at about mile 80. They say "1 mile climb, 18%-22% grade." I'm not sure I believe their numbers, but better to be at least semi-prepared than completely-sorry.
Hence, all the brutal training rides.
However, there is climbing-brutal, there is wind-brutal, and then there is headwind-climbing-brutal. Guess which occurred on this ride? Yep, from about mile 70 onward we were, again, finishing the ride with a nasty headwind. What else would one expect in The Windsurfing Capitol of the World?
But I am getting ahead of myself. We started the ride riding from Hood River to The Dalles along the Columbia River Highway, the route we usually end on, so it was nice to go in the opposite direction and see things from a different perspective. Funny how that works on a bicycle. Your speed is so vastly different on opposite gradients (e.g. 7 mph going up but 35 mph going down) that it really is a completely different observational experience when switching directions.
Once we rolled into The Dalles we took a right and headed up past Chenoweth to get back on the normal Cherry of a Ride route. I like this portion because we get to descend down into The Dalles on Cherry Heights Road, and as descents go it is a pretty good one. In fact my SportsTrackLive phone app claims I got a couple personal bests on this descent.
Then it got confusing. We were going to get water at Quiznos, but that whole complex had been demolished. So we opted for Taco Time. But worse than that, we came upon a parade, and the parade route was our intended route. We didn't know it, but we had come upon the Cherry Festival. So we looked at the map on Amy's phone and decided on a detour, since there were no detour signs posted anywhere that we could see. We backtracked 3 blocks to 10th Street and rode 11 blocks parallel to the parade and then went back to our hopefully non-parade route. Parade. Still. Ironically the road parallel and adjacent to the parade, i.e. the best alternate route, was also closed. Either a Farmer's Market or some other Cherry Festival road closure, we didn't know what to do. Until we saw a car go into an alley between the two closed roads. We went for it. We went 4 blocks in the alley way and then the alley ended. Thankfully the Farmer's Market road was no longer closed, but it only took us 1 more block. The parade was the only reasonable choice at this point. Thankfully it was the last block of the parade route, so we entered ourselves and our bicycles into the parade.
There were lots of parade obstacles, mostly horses. The dancing horses were not simply going forward. They were moving over toward the crowd on the right side. Right in front of us. So we moved to the center of the parade route and went around them. Lots of strange looks. I had a big grin on my face as I felt quite silly, but what were we to do? We had places to go, hills to climb, headwinds to fight. It was like we were actually forced to join the parade. I almost forgot to use my parade wave but did get in a few waves before the parade was completely behind us. We realized too late that we could have tossed some of our "candy", but the meat sticks and granola bars may have been thrown back at us.
We rode east out of town and did the normal Emerson Loop part of the ride with a bit of climbing. After last weekend's tough ending I decided to make sure I had gas in the tank for the final leg of this ride as I knew it would be tough. So I did not push it too hard up any of these hills. We noticed a minor tailwind heading out, so we knew we'd have to fight it coming back. Boy were we right.
The wind was slightly against us as soon as we did the U-turn at mile 60, but it wasn't too bad at that point because we were headed slightly downhill (an average of 1 to 2%) to compensate. At mile 70 the wind laughed at our pathetic downhill compensation and held us to an average speed of 12 mph for the next 10 miles. This stretch included our final rest and water stop in The Dalles at Burgerville. The scheduled location was Taco Del Mar, but that was no more as it had morphed into some kind of bar.
The final climb seemed both harder and easier than expected. Harder in that I was exhausted because it started at mile 82.5, regardless of my attempts to preserve myself. And the climb started with that blasted wind. But it was also easier in that I just kept pushing the pedals and going up, little by little, and it never really seemed as steep as I thought it would. Part of it could have been another couple we met on the climb. We chatted with them a bit and perhaps it took my mind off the climb.
Steep or not, it was definitely taking a toll. I had to take 2 or 3 breaks and still started having an upset stomach before getting to the top. And once that process starts it is hard for me to recover. Even with the climb behind me and a nice descent my tummy was not happy. But this was no nice descent. Not this day. This was a headwind/crosswind hold-on-to-the-handlebars-with-all-you've-got kind of descent. I usually catch up with Aim on descents. Even though I'm sure she took it dramatically slower/safer than I did, she still had to wait quite a while for me this time.
Once I got to Mosier, where she was waiting, I got off my bike and laid down on some grass. After a few minutes I felt slightly better. I must have looked horrible because she offered more than once to go get the van for me. I almost took her up on it, but decided I'd better man up and get going. It was only 5 miles to go, after all.
It was a bit strange. I was able to ride that final leg no problem, just had no extra oomph. At all. There were definitely no speed records set on the last 5 miles, but I did eventually make it back, and that had been in serious doubt earlier.
Hood River doesn't have a Burger King for my normal post-century Whopper, so we found a Taco Del Mar and each had a Mondo burrito. I gotta say, that's a pretty good alternative.
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