464 Miles in Three Days

As planned I headed into the mountain on Sunday. The temperature was well above normal and I started in short sleeves and pretty quickly pulled my knee warmers off. When I got to Woodland Park at a little over 8,000 feet I did put them back on for a little while but then took them off and never had to put them back on. I rode to Guffey and back taking some county roads. There’s very little traffic and the scenery is great.

Dropping into Guffey is always fun although I had a headwind so I only hit 52 mph. I’ve hit 60 mph on the hill before. The only bad part about it is coming back up the climb. It’s not that long so it isn’t too bad but it does hurt. I stopped and had a Coke on the patio of the bar in town. It’s a cool, little mountain town that for the most part seems to be stuck a couple decades ago.

As always the ride back was fun as it’s a lot more downhill than up. I did a little loop through the Garden of the Gods and hills on the west side of town before heading home. I ended up with 133 miles with 8983 feet of climbing and an on bike average of 15.4 mph.

Monday was the day to head out to the east where it is flat and boring. Even though I’m not a great climber, I still rather go into the mountains than ride out on the plains. The forecast was for it to be windy with it increasing in the afternoon. That definitely is not good news for riding out in the grasslands where there’s nothing to stop the wind.

I had a good tailwind on the way out and averaged 21 mph for the 78 miles to Limon. When I turned around, the wind was strong but wasn’t terrible. About 30 miles later though, I was struggling to keep my speed at 8 mph on the flat. At one point I even went down under a bridge few a couple minutes just to get the wind noise out of my ears. My mouth kept drying out so I was drinking quite a bit. I heard on the news after I got back that the humidity had dropped below 5%! I was going so slow I ended up running out of water but had some concentrated HEED and Perpetuem to sip on.

I knew that once I got to Calhan I’d have 8 miles of cross-wind so I figured I could speed up and get a little break but was worried that I still might not make it back by dark. Peyton is where the road curves and would be straight in to the wind. When I got there the flags were still blowing pretty hard straight at me but weren’t making snapping sounds and shaking the flag poles. I actually was able to hold a pretty decent pace. Once I got into town there wasn’t much wind and I got home just as it got dark. It took just under 4 hours to get to Limon and over 7 hours to get back. Limon is only 800 feet lower so most of the speed difference was from the wind.

I got in 159 miles with only 3901 feet of climbing which is about as flat as it gets around here. My on bike average was 15.6 mph.

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