Time Flies

I had expected my next post to be accompanied by fancy photos from the Blue Lake race, but no photos have been posted, which leads me to believe that mooning that guy with the camera may have been a miscalculation on my part. If anyone happens to see my ass posted somewhere, please forward that along. In the meantime, I will delay a post-mortem on the race until after I get pictures, since I already gave a pretty good sketch.

Sunday I had a pretty nice 37 mile bike ride. There's a hill over by the 99th street max transit center that rises out of nowhere that I've been wanting to ride up ever since I went into exile on the East Side. Probably even a little longer than the climb up Marquam Hill, but at least its equal. There was another nice climb from Marine Drive up NE 122nd (roughly, it's not a straight shot), but since my next race will be flat as a pancake, I'm not single-mindedly looking for hills to climb. One thing I learned from my last race was that a bike commute is far different than riding non-stop as fast as you can for over an hour, so I'll be spending a bit more time over on Marine Drive on my weekend long rides.

On the way down, there were pretty horrifying turns and I hit 30mph without pedaling or even thinking about it, so I was using a lot of breaks. At some point I need to figure out how to adjust my front derailer since the chain slipped off every time I tried to shift into the big ring. This certainly slowed me down, but for those who are playing at home, I travelled almost exactly 37 miles in 2 hours and 30 minutes. I would have actually been faster, but I was stopped by a guy parked in the bike lane who wanted my opinion about riding his bike from the Portland Airport to Hillsboro. I could probably figure out a way to do it, but it is serious pain in the ass getting over the west hills into Beaverton unless you really know what you're doing.  He was flying in at 1pm and I also think that ride is in the 40-50 mile range after you finish riding back and forth across Portland just to get over the Beaverton. 

I'm sure there is a super-slick way to pull this off that I'm not aware of, but I still wouldn't recommend it to a newcomer flying into PDX.  The person I spoke to is flying into Portland and then riding his bike from Hillsboro to Sacramento, with many stops in between. He seemed to do these trips pretty much full time, an upper-middle-aged guy with a beer gut. Good work if you can get it. Ultimately, I recommended he just got on the Max train at the airport, which will take him straight out there. It's kind of like cheating, but sounds like he'll make up for it on his way to California.

Work has really been cutting into my blogging time lately. I was able to whip something off during lunch, but lunch has been catch as catch can the last few weeks.