Seattle To Portland 2007
So I got home Monday night at 3am from doing this year's Seattle to Portland Bicycle Classic ride.
One day from Seattle WA to Portland OR, 335km, 10 hours 50 minutes (just ride time - doesn't count food/bathroom/rest stops), and we averaged 30.87km/h.
It was both an amazing ride and incredibly brutal/painful at the same time. I don't want to eat another Clif bar/gel shot again for a long, long time.
Three of us, Chris, Simon, and I, drove down to Seattle in Chris's truck on Friday. Crossing the border took quite a bit of time and traffic on the I5 wasn't great either. We arrived at our hotel around six or seven in the evening. After a trip to the grocery store next door to get dinner and the next morning's breakfast we headed to downtown Seattle to check out REI (think MEC but bigger) and pick up an overnight parking pass so Chris could leave his truck at the ride starting line. Unfortunately the parking pass pickup closed a few hours before we arrived so we browsed REI for a bit then returned to the hotel.
We met up with Jay and Erin who were staying at the same hotel as us and hung out for a bit while Jay got his bike gear ready for the ride. We decided on leaving the hotel together at 4:20am Saturday morning.
I'm not sure why, but none of us got much sleep that night. After about four or five hours of sleep (if that), we got up at 3:30am and had breakfast. Peanut butter and jam, an avocado, and Chris had a giant hoagie sandwich. We then headed for the starting line. Chris, Simon, and I had to drop our bags off in Erin's car, but we couldn't find her in the chaos of the starting line parking lot which was incredibly busy with cars and cyclists everywhere. We ended up missing the bulk of the John Henry and Innovative Fitness crew as they didn't know what was going on with us so they left. After figuring out some make shift baggage tags (my bib number worked great for that) we got our gear loaded onto the truck headed for Portland and then finally started the ride ourselves at 5:35am.
It wasn't long before we passed the John Henry two day riders. We wished them a good ride and sped off ahead.
The scenery riding through Washington is absolutely beautiful; I would have liked to have brought my camera on the ride to take pictures but I couldn't sacrifice the space in my jersey pockets, which was needed for food. I was carrying almost an entire box worth of Clif bars and gel shots which proved an excellent idea as the food stops are fairly far apart and at the pace we were going I needed to make sure I was eating at regular intervals (every 30-60 minutes I ate either part of a bar or had a gel shot).
We were riding pretty fast for the first 5 hours, which brought us to the half way point. Largely due to the number of other cyclists we were able to draft. We were doing between 37km/h and 45km/h easily, although few riders in most groups would actually take a turn pulling. It would often be Chris and I up front, although sometimes there were a couple of pretty strong riders that would take a turn pulling for a while. I was really glad I decided to wear my heart rate monitor, as I watched it closely the entire ride and used it as a gauge to tell when I should back off and rest.
It was interesting to watch because as soon as I would move out front to take a turn pulling the pack my heart rate would instantly jump about 10 beats per minute. As I pulled I could watch my heart rate gradually creep up one beat per minute at a time, which I used to determine how long I should pull for. As soon as my heart rate got close to what I know to be a point that I can't sustain I backed off and went to the back of the pack to rest. What I really liked about this was that I could tell when it was time to rest before I hit that point of "holy crap I'm hurting". I think this helped me conserve quite a bit of energy throughout the ride.
We took almost two hours to have lunch and relax in Centralia before we hit the road again. I think the majority of the other one day riders had already left the half way point long before we did, so this time we were mostly by ourselves. We decided to ride slower during the second half, doing mostly 30km/h which was actually surprisingly easy (for a while at least); I think we had a tail wind for a significant chunk of the route.
The last 60km or so was the worst part of the ride. The beautiful scenery was gone, and we were all in so much pain from our saddles (and some of us were cramping pretty bad) that we took it really slow so that we wouldn't drop each other. We made it into the finish line at, I think, around 8:30pm.
We picked up our bags then it was straight to the hotel for a shower and some food. We spent all of Sunday just walking around downtown Portland checking things out and caught a movie before taking a bus back to Vancouver (Chris had to go back to Seattle to get his truck).
So all in all we had an awesome ride and a great weekend.
