Furnace Creek 508 and wind

I had plans to ride to Forest Grove today with a few stops along the way to take care of some business details.   I got a bit of a late start because I was watching a live webcast of the Furnace Creek 508 check-in.
I watched for just over 2 hours, then left the player embedded here so that you, my loyal blog fans, could follow along easily.  :-)



Live stream by UstreamI finally did start pedaling because I knew I was going to ride at least 55 miles, and much of it would be into a brisk headwind, along with the stops I needed to make.  I was going to need my time.

I fired up my trusty ride oracle,  and mapped out the route.  I started pedaling at 1:30PM under sunny and warm skies.  The temperature was 70 degrees as I passed on time/temp readout.  It seemed about right. There was about a 25 mph wind blowing out of the north in the Tualatin area, and that morphed into an east wind as I lined up with the Columbia Gorge and made my way westward toward Forest Grove.  I had a pretty long run heading west, and knew that though I was pedaling along at a pretty fast rate that the return trip would be considerably slower with the wind likely to be in my face.

I did get my business taken care of, even stopped by my mom's house to tweak a few computer settings for her.  The wind was indeed in my face, but with Furnace Creek 508 starting early tomorrow morning I didn't have to let my mind wander far to remember that I have ridden in a whole lot worse wind. 

The wind did slow me down considerably, but once in the Beaverton area I turned south and the wind started out as a crosswind but gradually morphed into a tailwind, as expected. There are reasons an east wind does this, but this is a bike blog, not a meteorological blog, so we'll let you research that on your own if your are curious. Much of my north/south travel today was on the Fanno Creek Trail. Just south of downtown Tigard the trail crossed Fanno Creek on this bridge.

It's not the most scenic bridge, but I thought I'd snap the photo.  A friend had posted a photo of a portion of path in the Bellevue Washington area and asked friends to identify the location.  I thought this was a non descript enough photo to play the same game, so I posted it to Facebook and asked for guesses, with the hint of somewhere along a route from Tualatin to Forest Grove.  No successful guesses.  ;-)

After taking the photo I continued on my way and  was just glad to not be riding into the wind any longer since daylight was beginning to be a concern.  I finished up at 6:30pm, about 10 minutes before sunset.  I made a couple of laps around the parking lot where my pickup parked, just to bring me up to a nice round 60 miles. That puts my weekend on the "+20 plan", as I have plans to ride 80 miles tomorrow, and 100 on Sunday.  Gotta take advantage of this unseasonably dry weather! 



 ............road bike.......rollers.........mtb.....lifecycle.....total Today..........60..............0.............0..........0...........60 Jan...........105.............34.............0..........0..........139 Feb...........428............108.............0.........24..........536 March.........809..............0.............0.........22..........831 April........1010..............0.............0..........0.........1010 May..........1000..............0............20..........0.........1020 June.........1500..............0.............0..........0.........1500 July.........1558..............0.............0..........0.........1558 Aug...........531..............0.............0..........0..........531 Sept..........730..............0.............0..........0..........730
Oct............135..............0..............0..........0...........135
YTD..........7792............142............20.........46.........7951