Carbon River

200k From Redmond to the Carbon River ranger station with the Seattle Randonneurs. A very pretty day. 200 kilometers (about 125 miles) may not sound like much, but it's a bit uphill getting there, and of course the downhill is nice, but you never make back coming down what it cost you going up. In this case, total ascent was just over a mile. My stats below show the profile.

The bit past Wilkeson tips up rather steeply. On the graph, that's the cliff around miles 50 and 75. That got my attention on the way up, but it was mostly steady work riding with strong riders with nothing to prove but no reason to dilly-dally.

Incidentally, the store in Wilkeson has an informal museum on the town's history as a sandstone mine. The store is collecting donations for a skate park.

The picture at the top of the post is the new ranger station. It's closed of course, along with most of the government, so there was nobody to sign our cards. We can work around that of course, but there were no other services either. Not so bad in late fall, but in Summer it would be both a figurative and literal mess.

Thanks to John Pearch for organizing a very nice ride!

Tahuya Hills 600

30 hours 57 minutes. Three minutes faster than my goal, as it happens.

This ride goes nigh well all over northwestern Washington. From Seattle pretty far into Mt. Rainier park, west through Centralia onto the Olympic Peninsula, around Hood Canal to Port Gamble, and finally into Winslow on Bainbridge Island. Whew!

Would I do it again? Yes, I'd do it all again just to ride through the twilight along Hood Canal, as if I and the small group I was riding with were the only people on earth.

As with any ride like this, so many cool things happened. I loaned out tools to people who needed them and got them back. People loaned me things I needed and they got them back. We saw the fans waiting for the U2 concert at 6am. The guy in Seabeck who called us "Marine Tough" without asking us where we were going, because he'd seen our tribe before. Hammering the last 7km to finish in just under 31 hours because we were pretty sure we could so we should try, but only if all seven of us could do it together. And most of all, truly wonderful volunteers, who cared for us as if we were the most important people on earth to them.

Yeah, it was pretty long, but this ride is half as long as PBP. Half. Every time I double the distance, I go about 1.5 kph slower, which suggests a PBP time of about 67 hours. Sweet!

Except, that would mean not sleeping for 67 hours. I don't think I'm going to do that. I think I'm going to get some sleep along the way, probably twice. And I'm not sure the 1.5 kph math holds up anyway. But this 600 was a big confidence booster for PBP. I finished about as fast or faster than a lot of people who are planning to finish PBP and have good reason to believe they can do it.

SIR 200K

SIR 200K in 8h 54min. That's about 1h 45min behind Jan Heine, the fastest finisher, and in the top 20%. I like to finish in the top 10% of ultra-endurance events, but I woke up at 1:00AM feeling kind of nasty, so I'm not dissatisfied.