Category: Bicycling

Prairie Ride Summary – Cycling Adventure Across Colorado and Kansas

Mountains in the distance as we head east on US-160

In July, Dave and I found adventure on our bicycles riding across Colorado and Kansas. We started in Trinidad, Colorado and rode east along US-160 to Winfield, Kansas, then north through the Flint Hills, and back west again to Hoisington, Kansas, where our vacation time ran out. We enjoyed 7 days of wonderful riding, wrapped around a truly enjoyable rest day in the heart of the Flint Hills. The individual posts for each day of our ride can be found at these links:

Day 1 – Trinidad to Springfield (Colorado) – Runnin’ With The Big Dog and Pritchett, Colorado

Day 2 – Springfield, CO to Plains, KS – Pace-line Harmony and a Pool of Bonk in Plains, Kansas

Day 3 – Plains, KS to Coldwater, KS – Comanche Rollers and 109 Degrees

Day 4 – Coldwater, KS to Wellington, KS – The Medicine Hills

Day 5 – Wellington, KS to Cottonwood Falls, KS – Through the Fog and Into The Flint Hills

Day 6 – Pie and Cottonwood Falls

Day 7 – Cottonwood Falls, KS to Lindsborg, KS

Day 8 – Lindsborg, KS to Hoisington, KS

Windmill and sunrise in the Medicine Hills

Our approach to the ride was one of ultra-minimalism, each of us carrying only about 20# total, plus water.  While we surpassed our “threshold” mileage goal, the winds didn’t allow us to threaten our more aggressive mileage goals. We discovered quite a few unexpected things along the way, some perhaps a bit more pleasant than others. For example:

  • Handlebar bags are more wind drag than you think they will be, and make the bike a lot less stable. But they’re easy to send home once you discover this.
  • Saddle sores can happen for lots of reasons, and chamois cream becomes a wonderful thing when they do happen.
  • Wind is a big deal. Big wind is a really really big deal.
  • Head winds or quartering head winds make really bad words form in your mind, and most of them just spill right out of your mouth since nobody could possibly hear them anyway.
  • The wind doesn’t really seem to pay any attention to what spills out of your mouth – it just keeps blowin’.
  • Tailwinds turn all of life into a wonderful experience. It’s simply impossible to have an unkind or unhappy thought while pedaling with a stiff breeze at your back.
  • People are way more nice than you ever imagine them to be – even when you imagine them to be nice, they sometimes surprise you with even more kindness.
  • Few things bring as much joy to your heart as watching a pair of Scissortail Flycatchers dancing between the wires and the grass.
  • You can almost always find chicken fried steak and eggs for breakfast at diners in Kansas.
  • If you “hit the wall” in runner’s lingo, or “bonk” in cycling lingo, your day is over – wherever you are at that point, and you discover yet a new version of feeling really rotten.
  • You can discern a lot about local habitat by watching the smashed stuff roll by under your tires.
  • Tailwinds and nice people are a wonderful layer to leave over the top of anything unpleasant that you might find along the road.
Sunrise in the Flint Hills

In terms of overall results, our “threshold goal” of 600 miles assumed no help from the wind, and we got very little such help in the end. With neutral winds, reasonable weather, and no physical ailments, we hoped we might hit 800 miles. With excellent tailwinds, we thought we might even be able to push toward 1000 miles. In the end, we rode 718 miles of a 770 mile route. (There was one day that we got a ride in a truck past what we feared would be heavily trafficked roads – we had enjoyed the route so much that we didn’t want to create a bad taste with nasty urban highway traffic.)

We saw deer, antelope, fox, a few bajillion head of cattle, some really nice dogs and cats, Scissortail Flycatchers (along with eastern and western Kingbirds), Grasshopper Sparrows, Red Headed Woodpeckers, and lots of other birds too common to mention. We saw Red-tailed and Broad Winged Hawks – including a nice rodeo act with a Red-Winged Blackbird riding a Broad-Winged like a bronc. We saw lots of Marsh Hawks and more Peregrine Falcons than I would have expected.

Sure we endured some heat and cussed at some wind. I felt open saddle sores on the parts of me that were most intimate with my saddle for a couple weeks after the ride ended. But those were the tiny little inconveniences of a ride that was – overall and all-in-all – one of the most pleasant rides I’ve ever done.

I’ve been chronicaling the ride in a number of epic blog posts. While they’re not complete yet, they’re getting close. Below are the links to the blog posts as I get them done. My objective is to consolidate and edit these posts into a book that I’ll publish, so what you have in these posts is the raw material from which a book will eventually emerge.

Thanks for reading!

Day 1 – Trinidad to Springfield (Colorado) – Runnin’ With The Big Dog and Pritchett, Colorado

Day 2 – Springfield, CO to Plains, KS – Pace-line Harmony and a Pool of Bonk in Plains, Kansas

Day 3 – Plains, KS to Coldwater, KS – Comanche Rollers and 109 Degrees

Day 4 – Coldwater, KS to Wellington, KS – The Medicine Hills

Day 5 – Wellington, KS to Cottonwood Falls, KS – Through the Fog and Into The Flint Hills

Day 6 – Pie and Cottonwood Falls

Day 7 – Cottonwood Falls, KS to Lindsborg, KS

Day 8 – Lindsborg, KS to Hoisington, KS

Clark County Rollers - Day 3

 

East Wind

My enduring hopes for a 200 mile day on day one of the DANROPES ride are fading fast. Though the wind blows from some version of the west 80%+ of the time in eastern Colorado and western Kansas, the forecast for the next several days is for some version of an east wind.

I’d been having wonderful dreams of clipping along with a nice tailwind at 20+ mph for the first few hundred miles, and I’m watching those dreams blow away I think. Looks like our first couple of days out we’ll be battling a headwind, so making 100 miles a day is going to be work I think. Those training days in the wind will pay off after all.

But you never know – the wind’s like that isn’t it? There’s nothing personal in it – just the random chance and whim of weather patterns. It’s so easy to think of it personally – that the wind is doing something to me – when in fact I’m dropping myself onto a piece of ground that has weather happening around it, and the weather doesn’t care one little twit about me and which way I point my bike.

It’s fun to see this little thing build in my tiny little brain – this reshaping of the universe around me riding my bike over the next 8 or 9 days. I find my little brain having fun talking about the “wind gods”, and what the wind is going to do to me. As we have for thousands of years, I am this little human that suddenly wants to define the cosmos and the gods around myself, rather than letting myself move through the moments that the cosmos lays in front of me.

So mile by mile over the next 8 or 9 days, I’ll listen closely to the wind, and see what I hear.

I hope it whispers quietly from behind my ear, and doesn’t blast into the front of my ear.

But of course, I’ll continue to wonder what I did to piss the wind gods off…

Training on the Bike with Dave – Part 1

Dave always starts rides off at a higher pace than I do. I blame it on the few extra years that I have on him, and my body’s need to ease gently into the pace of the ride. Makes me feel better to think this is true. But I don’t really think it is. I’ll keep on thinking it though, and will ignore the fact that Dave is consistently more strong and fit than I am, because I’m sure that can’t have much to do with the fact that he seems always ready to crank it up to 75% effort or more at a moments notice.

On Saturday, we did a nice training ride – something just short of 100 miles with about 5k of climbing overall. As usual, he cranked it right up and was soon 300 yards ahead of me, seemingly oblivious to the growing distance between us. But unlike most mornings, the distance never seemed to close much. Oh, he’d pull over for a minute and wait for me at a light now and again, but as soon as the light turned green, he’d dance up the road and be off to the edge of site rapidly. Because this morning, Dave had new stuff on his bike. Heck, his whole bike was darned near brand-new with the exception of the frame!

It’s amazing how new bling on the bike will make a person feel strong and feisty. In this case, there was good cause for Dave to feel strong and feisty – he had upgraded all of the components on his bike from the “not quite bottom of the line but still super-cheap” grade to essentially DuraAce from front to back. The wheels weren’t DuraAce, but were still Bontrager RaceLites – a vast improvement over his old iron-clad wooden variety (maybe I exaggerate…) So with the same level of effort of a week ago, Dave was flying down the road at a significantly improved pace.

Now, the bikers among you are surely asking why I didn’t just grab Dave’s wheel at those points when he waited for me, and suck it down the road. Nice idea in theory, but it just doesn’t work that often. Dave, you see, is still working on the whole drafting concept. To those of us who are mere mortals, the idea of drafting is a neat little magic trick, allowing us to cover the same ground with about a third less effort. But to Dave, I think this feels a little like cheating or something. He just can’t seem to bring himself to lock into that draft and ride.

Now he’s perfectly fine with the idea of letting me (or anyone really) draft him. Go ahead – try it – I dare ya’. It’s a comedic routine running down the road, trying to stay on Dave’s wheel. Just when you find that sweet spot, he glances over his shoulder and sees you there, and thinks that he must be going to slow, because you’re right on his wheel. So he speeds up. And you try and stay on his wheel, and just when you think you’re going to be able to hang with him, he looks over his shoulder, and sees you again, and jumps up the pace another couple miles an hour (because you must want him to go faster or you wouldn’t be crowding him like that, right?)

I can usually hold on until that second round of acceleration, then Dave is just a rapidly diminishing flash somewhere up ahead of me. If you’re really strong, maybe you can hold on up to the third round. I’ve never seen anyone last much longer.

I’ve laughed at this routine unfolding in the past, and wondered just what it is that makes the drafting concept so hard for Dave. The concept of measuring the level of effort that it takes to pull and draft in a particular line, and just focusing on that level of effort as you rotate through, is one that I know Dave understands. But I’ve come to the conclusion that 2 things make it hard for Dave to execute. First, he’s just so much stronger than I am, (and it’s not as though I’m a fitness slouch myself), that it’s hard for him to crank it down and maintain the level of effort that is comfortable to me and that I can keep up over many hours. Second, I really do think that the whole concept of “this is cheating” plays into the equation to Dave’s highly overdeveloped sense of fairness. I could be way off, but that’s my story for now.

Bottom line – I rarely even try to stay on his wheel anymore – I just watch him fly on down the road somewhere ahead of me, knowing that he’ll stop now and then and wait for me to catch up. And of course, as the day wears on, his rocket runs up the road tend to slow down, and sometimes I’m even lulled into thinking that maybe I’m actually sort of keeping up with him. I think that the one tiny little advantage that I might have is my ability to endure hours in the saddle and measure out my effort to make it last a long time.

We’ll see if this little fantasy of mine holds true on our upcoming DANROPES ride. (Dave And Neil’s Ride Of Pain and Enduring Suffering) We’re going to ride across Colorado and Kansas this month, and I’m looking forward to learning how I can hold up to 100+ mile days one after another. It might be that Dave’s supernatural abilities extend beyond the ability to ride really fast and strong for 50 – 100 miles, and he also has supernatural stamina as the miles pile on in the hundreds. Or it might be that things equal out a bit between us.

Either way I’m good with it – I gave up a long time ago on trying to match his fitness and strength – he’ll either continue to wait for me on up the road, or we’ll ride closer together. But just in case, I’m shorting myself on space as I pack for this minimalist trip of ours, and will make sure that when we’re standing there ready to take off, and I don’t have enough space for all my stuff, I pack the tools and spare chain in Dave’s pack – along with a few chunks of good Colorado granite. Maybe if I can add an extra 15 pounds to his bike it’ll make up for those slick new components that he’s gotten…

10 days ’til that DANROPES ride

10 days, and I’ll be headed across the desert grasslands of Colorado and Kansas with my buddy Dave on our bicycles. Exact route TBD as we go, but we’ll try for something more than 800 miles in 8 days. I’m really looking forward to some quiet and close time with this land that was once the northern reaches of the great Comanche nation – a land rich with a magic of place through many stretches.

The first day we’re hoping to do our first double century (200 miles), assuming the wind gods are kind to us. That day we’ll travel close to (and cross many times) the old middle route of the Santa Fe trail. I’ve hunted birds in that country in the fall before, and am looking forward to the time there during the peak of summer. That day we have 75 miles between civilization in a couple stretches, so we’ll be packin’ enough water for 75 miles in blistering heat.

More on day 2 and beyond later.

2 Day Ride

Riding the MS150 this weekend in Colorado. Good ride for a good cause, and will be my only back-to-back long days prior to the bid DANROPES ride in July. Collaborating on some route options with Dave for the DANROPES ride – I’m trying to make each draft option about 800 miles – I guess I must have 800 miles in 8 days settling in as a stretch goal for this trip…

Ride Saturday

So, this coming Saturday, I think Dave and I will do our one and only joint training ride before the big ride in July. We’ll probably shoot for something around 6 hours.

Bugs?

I’m beginning to wonder a bit about bugs on this ride. I know that in the summer when I drive across Kansas, my windshield is plastered with the guts of armies of bugs. From really small to big like grasshoppers and June Bugs, the prairie has some tiny little flying critters.

What will this be like on the bike? I thought of this while riding beside a creek yesterday, and having to go through swarms of little gnat-like bugs.

I’m fine with everything except the breathing – if I am riding with my mouth open to be taking in any volume of air, will I be able to avoid sucking the little hellions into my lungs?

Anybody have any ideas?

Spin Around Town – new record pace for this season

Well, after last Sunday, yesterday was a walk in the park. Did the loop around town, which is now only 66 miles with some route changes dictated by construction. The weather was beautiful, with light breezes (5 – 10 mph) that varied from the NW to the NE. I would say that generally, I had the breeze in my face for 75% of the ride in one way or another, but doesn’t it generally feel like that?

Last Sunday I got pounded with snow riding down from the Palmer Divide. Like an idiot, I had on only shorts, but did have the presence of mind to be wearing a winter jersey and windbreaker.

But yesterday was nice – really nice. New best pace for the year on this route – 15.2 mph average. I’m going from memory on past years, but I think that 4 years ago when I was in really good shape, I was able to average 17 mph on this loop on a good day. Can I get there this year?

I really need to focus more on keeping the water flowing into me – ended up really dehydrated yesterday afternoon when I was back home.

17.2 MPH Avg commute

Record for this year so far on the commute to work. Last year top time was 17.something – I’ll keep trying to notch it up this year – see if I can have a 19mph ride before the summer is over. Of course, a lot of it has to do with timing of the lights.

Saddle Update – Specialized Toupe

I’m feeling pretty good about the new saddle. Probably three hundred miles on it or so now, including a couple of long rides.

Clearly, the butt is building new tough spots to correspond to this new saddle, and that’s never fun. But comfort-wise and pressure-wise, I think that this saddle is doing very well.

I like it.

The first long ride I used shorts with a really great insert, and used chamois cream to be safe. All was good. This weekend I did a long ride using shorts with a minimal chamois that had been conditioned a week ago. Clear difference, and the sore spots are clearly more evident with the more minimalist chamois, but I’m confident that this will pass as the spots toughen up. This morning I rode to work 25 miles on a cold morning with no conditioner on the minimal chamois, and surely felt the spots from yesterday, but again, these spots are going to toughen up.

My opinion of the saddle is getting better.

UPDATE: October/2010: After riding the saddle all summer, including 700 miles across Colorado and Kansas in July, I have a mixed opinion. For rides around town, I really do like the saddle. I’ve become accustomed to it, and it seems that I “fit” it well. However, I just don’t think this saddle is well-suited to long-distance riding. I think the saddle-sores I developed on the 700 mile trip were partially due to the saddle. I’d recommend this saddle to an around-town rider, but not to a long-distance rider.