Double Cross

It’s early May and I finally got out for a gravel ride on “Double Cross”, my gallant gravel steed. So far this year all my serious mileage has been ridden on rollers down in the dungeon. I tuned up “Double Cross” last weekend. She was covered in dust, one of the tires flat, chain caked with last years crud. She was not very happy, from being ignored for so long. One of her stable mates, “El Mariachi” gets the bulk of the work in the winter.

The weather this spring has been difficult to say the least. Rain, cold and snow. I can deal with cold ok, I have extra layers I can put on. The real barrier this Spring has been the wind, (I even wrote a poem). If I could dial up a tailwind all the time it would be awesome. When there is a tailwind and I am ripping down the road, it is so quiet. I can hear the gravel crunching under the tires and the songbirds singing. I can even hear the blueness of the sky. A transcendental experience.

Headwind

A crosswind or a headwind though and the experience becomes unpleasant. The unpleasantness directly correlated to the speed of the wind. I love being out in nature, experiencing the Great Wide World but there are better ways than pedaling into a 25 mph headwind. So, I’ve been waiting for a suitable forecast to grind some gravel and got it today. The first of many I hope for the season.

My original thought was to ride my age. It has kind of become a tradition but normally I’ve already had a training ride or two. Riding on a trainer in the dungeon is a good workout but there are no hills, no wind, no soft sand or fist size boulders to dodge. To be on the safe side I planned to ride about half my age. I’m old though so it’s still a good ways for an old man on the first gravel ride of the season.

At around the nine mile mark I came into a section with really loose sand. I could see that the grader had been here recently, blading all the junk from the ditch back into the middle of the road. For a gravel rider, there is nothing worse than freshly graded roads. The perfect surface is when there is just a few millimeters of fine sand on the edge of the hard pack, where all the farm trucks drive. Just enough to level up the bumps and make that soft crunching sound. 

Dialogue

As I was slipping and sliding in the loose sand, the two hemispheres of my brain began a dialogue. 

“Man look at all those weed stems mixed in with the loose sand. You know what that means, right?” said the right side. 

“It means we need to be careful, so we don’t end up going ass over appetite and breaking an old fragile bone,” said the left side.

“No, you twit. It means, there are probably hundreds of goat-heads and cockleburrs strewn across the road, like those tire spikes in the James Bond movies. Can you say flat tire, sissy boy?”

“Is strewn really a word?”

“Shut up, you’re supposed to be the emotional side, I’m the logical side.”

“Well, name calling is not very logical, you nerd.”

“You might be right about the ass over appetite thing. It seems like the captain is having some difficulty keeping forward momentum. Perhaps we need to send him a message that he might want to unclip from the pedals, just in case,” said the left side.

“About time you came to your senses, nerd boy. I’ll cue up the fear response.”

Double Penetration

Just when I was about to get off the bike and walk, the surface firmed up as I began ascending a hill. There was no more grader work for the rest of the ride, which is good because the right side perfectly predicted the outcome. By the time I hit the top of the hill the front tire was flat. Two giant goat heads protruding from the Snoqualmie Pass rubber. I bought the tires last season. They were supposed to be tubeless ready but I could never get them to seal and have to run with tubes.

Double penetration. The good thing is that I only had to take the tire apart one time to fix both punctures. It didn’t take long though and the cows kept me company. It was time to take off the windbreaker anyway. Another mile or two and I turned south. I had a tailwind, going downhill, off the top of Firstview Ridge. The road surface was perfect. I was pushing a big gear at well over 20 mph, in that transcendental bubble. You don’t get that on a trainer in the basement.

I Think I Can

It wasn’t quite as nice when I turned back towards home in another half dozen miles. The cross wind making more noise as it whipped around my ears. The temperature was increasing rapidly as well. Sweat making an appearance for the first time on the ride. I stopped for a few minutes at around 20 miles when I found some shade. 

As I turned back north for the last five miles, against the wind and up the hill to Emerald city, I pondered whether I could make another lap. I think I could have made my age if I had started earlier but the key word is think. Right now, I just want to go eat something. The Garmin says, I just burned 2000 calories before breakfast.