Training Archive: bill_lIn the 7 days ending 2007-07-21:
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Saturday Jul 21 | ||
| Event: Seattle Night and Day Challenge | ||
| Cycling race (urban rogaine) 7:30:00 [3] *** 120 km (3:45 / km) | |
| spiked:51/54c slept:6.0 shoes: pearl cycle MTB | ||
| Seattle Night & Day Challenge urban rogaine.
Hooked up with a friend (John) who lives in Seattle. First decision, John's been having foot problems so we opted for 16 hours on mountain bikes. Second decision: $300 to ship my bike, $150 to rent one for 3 days, or use Deb's (John's wife) bike, a 19" Kona hard-tail. Opted for the Kona. (Little small, but worked out great. Thanks Deb!) Mid-week forecast calling for clear skies, temps in the 70's for high's, mid-50's for lows. Sounds pretty good. Friday forecast: rain, rain, and more rain. What a difference 2 days makes. Saturday morning: 0700 - Leave in-laws house in Couer D'Alene, ID for the airport. 1015 - Arrive in Seattle. John picked me up and we went to his house to stow my luggage and get set for the event. Cloudy, some sun. 1115 - Load my pack, bring extra clothes for possible TA, put lights on bike and adjust the seat height. There's one bike thing I didn't check that I'll regret later. 1300 - Leave John's house for Green Lake Park. No rain yet, but clouds are getting heavier. 1330 - Park about a mile from the Bath House. Walk to Bath House to look for closer parking and to register. Find a spot in the lot adjacent to the Bath House. John sits on the parking spot to hold it, I run back to the car and bring it around. Good warm up... The race HQ is outdoors next to the Bath House and and the public swimming beach. Nice area. There are several tents/awnings set up to store stuff. 1410 - Unload car and stake out a spot under one of the tents. Still no rain yet. 1430 - Pre-start meeting, map hand out. No rain yet. 1445 - Route planning: The standard race maps are nice, full color, maps of the city. 2 pages of 11x17? I think the scale is 1:35K. Even better, John had purchased the optional 1:25K, 3 page version. This was MUCH easier to read. Still needed the bifocals for the few street names that were on the map. But otherwise, the 1:25 was easily readable while riding while the 1:35 was not. We also received a single page 11x17, black and white version for indicating your approximate intended red-line route through the course (in case they had to come looking for you). The city of Seattle, (the area covered by the maps) is on a bridge of land, bordered by Puget Sound on the west and Lake Washington on the east. It roughly forms a north/south rectangle, about 15km tall x 9km w, with a large bulge in the middle of the western edge. The start/finish at Green Lake is a little bit northwest of the center of the map. The downtown area is in the southwest corner of the rectangle. Interstate 5 bisects the city north to south. The southern third of the city is separated from the northern 2/3's by water (river?) that connects lake washington, lake union, and the sound and is only crossable (on foot or bike) at 3 or 4 points. We used the 'intention' sheet to determine a couple of potential routes. The black and white made the control circles readily visible, and being a single sheet it was easy to spot logical control groupings. Made our route decision based on several factors: 1) we wanted to get through the downtown area earlier in the evening rather than later. 2) one of the routes across the southern water obstacle is only open between 7AM and 9PM. 3) the cemetary where a northern control was located only open during daylight hours. 4) It looked like most of the elevation gain was on the southern half of the course. 5) Most of the big-money controls are on the south part of the map. Final route selection. Our direction of travel was counter clockwise. 1530: Start the turn-by-turn detailed routing on the big map. We used a flourescent orange highlighter. 1600 - Official start. We're not ready yet. It's started to drizzle. 1610 - Finish the detailed routing. 1615 - Hop on the bikes. I clip into the new peddles and immediatlely realize that I forgot to adjust the springs. Why do new SPD's ship with the springs as tight as they will go? Anyway, I manage to get my right foot free just before toppling over. Dig out the allen wrench and make some adjustments. 1625 - Back on the bikes and on our way to the first control. 1635 - At first control, realize the SPD's are still to tight to unclip easily. Figure it's ok. At the next stop light I fall over. Luckily I there's a grass strip in the middle of the road and I fall on that, but whack my left knee on the bar-end and draw some blood. It's either going to really hurt for the next 15 1/2 hours or it'll be ok in 15 minutes.... Out with the allen wrenches again. This time I make sure they adjusted ok. 1800 - The drizzle hasn't been that bad so far. The streets are a little slippery, but not wet. The drizzle on the clothes is good for cooling and is drying about as fast as it's falling. But now it starts to rain and the streets are wet. 1900 - We easily make the first really important cut-off. The 9PM deadline at the locks. 2.5 hours of riding and we've gotten 14 controls so far. 2000 - We've done some serious hill climbing by now and we're both hungry. Spot a Subway. Decide to eat and dry off a little. Spend about 20 minutes. 2100 - It's getting dark. Haven't had any significant problems finding controls so far. Took me 2 or 3 controls to get my head into the map at first, getting the speed and attention to detail just right, but up 'til now, no problems. The next control is the only 100 pointer on the course an it's at the top of a huge hill (Queen Anne) and a fair distance from the previous control. Our approach is a good one that limits the slope to a rideable 7 or 8%. Unfortunately, I lose contact with the map about 2/3 the way to the control. Blood sugar problem or something, I just couldn't concentrate or make sense of the map. Fortunately, help from bystanders is legal and couple of girls (out walking around in the rain with plastic deck chairs???) told us to go up 2 more streets, turn left, and we'd be there. Bingo. And there's even a port-a-potty! Lost maybe 15 minutes. 2130 - The very next control, IMHO, one of the hardest controls on the course, is only a 60 pointer. It's down the hill we just climbed but the slope must be close to 20%. I'm glad we didn't take that route up. With the steep descent and wet roads, both hands are busy with the brakes so I can't really look at the map. I know we're close, but can't find the control location. Turns out we're about 50 meters short. We need to go down a steep set of stairs and a little further down the hill. Lost 20 minutes. Was able to figure out the problem when a local brought out a detailed map of the area. 2200 - Strategy of using roads that T bites us on the next control which is at the Seattle Center stadium. We hit bridge construction about 2/3's the wat to the T. Neither of us know exactly how far we've come but we now have to detour to find another bridge putting us off our approach to the control and on the wrong side of the stadium. Excellent timing, 4 bicycle cops ride by and give us directions to the players entrance.... 15 minutes lost with the detour and relocating. Oh yeah, it's still raining. 0000 - 5 more controls and another big climb. We've used half our time and gotten half the controls and gone about half the distance. Would prefer to be a little farther on the course since we're both starting to feel the effects of biking for 7+ hours. I'm still feeling pretty good considering. Still thinking we can clean the course but it will be close. Up to now, we've been spending 3-5 minutes at each control: answering the question, checking our route to the next control, eating, etc. Will try to cut that down to 2 minutes or less for the rest of the course. Spend a few minutes here stuffing down the remaining 6" of our Subway sandwiches. 0030 - We getting into an area that John is familiar with so he takes over the nav duties for the next 4 or 5 controls. Fine with me, I appreciate the break. 0130? - Gas Works Park: Park is closed and it looks like the control is inside the park. Certainly the most direct route is a trail through the park. What to do? But wait. The control is at the end of a road that isn't in the park. Glad we don't have to skip this 70 pointer since we road a fair distance to get it. More to come... | ||
| C • How detailed was the map and c... 4 | ||
| Run warm up/down 10:00 [3] 1.2 mi (8:20 / mi) | |
| shoes: salomon 3D | ||