After a night of less than stellar
sleep fighting trains and wishing I'd had a pillow, dawn was actually
a pretty welcoming sight. It was about 32F, but the sky was clear
and the Sun was cutting through the trees and in a way saying, “I
want to warm your feet.”
The Sun was also a big fat liar. It
didn't warm my feet. Screw you Sun.
As I got out of the tent, I flolloped
my sleeping bag on top of Pickles; putting her into a deep coma. I
powered up my nuclear powered stove and made some hot cider in about
34 seconds, which was nice. I'd wanted to have coffee, but harkening
back to car camping, and being an idiot, all I thought of doing was
putting some instant coffee in a small container and that just
sounded like too much work. Karyn pointed out later that Starbucks
makes single serve packets. I'd not thought of that. Yeah, that's
me, I thought of single serving INSTANT CIDER...but I couldn't come
up with decent coffee.
This is why I don't build spaceships.
Some poor crew would be half way to Mars and ask, “Why didn't he
just vent our urine into space?”
After breakfast we decided to alter our
route home; for two main reasons. Another day of mud on the C&O
trail might actually cause Athena to stab a young child, and we
really would rather see different scenery in a spirit of continuing
an adventure instead of just 'heading home'. So, we planned a
farily straight forward road route through farm country that would
drop us back onto the C&O with about 10 miles to go. We also
figured, since it's pavement and all, that it would be faster
traveling and give us more time to goof off.
There was one flaw in that theory.
Maps are flat. MD is not. (For a complete disertation on the
non-flatness of MD, please check out
http://nicholekwarren.blogspot.com/)
The farm roads in MD are designed with the natural flow of the
Earth's contours in mind. More to the point, they are designed to
ignore them. After 30 some miles of straight up and straight down
we'd managed to better our MPH average from the previous day by a
whopping 1. But, we did get to see different scenery. Some went by
really fast, some not so much. Athena still maintained that it was
better than the mud.
We did manage to have enough extra time
to stop for lunch. I'd read in a book (I know...don't even start
with me.) that you should try to acquire food along the way. I took
that advice when planning, but I also failed to plan for 'what if
there is no food along the way?' By about 3 in the afternoon we were
getting pretty hungry. We found a rather upscale tavern near Great
Falls with white table cloths outside and figure that was good
enough.
After lunch, the last 9.5 miles went by
in a blink and Big D met us with Alexis in tow about 15 minutes
later.
So, all in all, lessons learned:
Miles don't matter. It may seem obvious, but until you're pedaling 100lbs of bike down a muddy dirt road, whatever expectations you had from either mt. biking or road cycling go out the window. Athena and I planned (loosely) on a goal of 62 miles. We made just under 50. We managed an average rolling speed of 10.3 mph. Factoring in stopping for clothing adjustments, bathroom and food breaks, etc., we left at 1030 and arrived at about 1615. So almost 6 hours to ride almost 50 miles. We only increased our MPG average by 1 using the roads due to the climbing.
Pains. Spending that much time in the saddle constantly pedaling a heavy load makes you VERY aware of even the smallest misalignment in posture, or geometric adjustment. I have a sore Achilles tendon, we both had sore necks, Athena had a sore knee...even sore shoulders. All of this was due to bad posture that we don't notice under normal conditions. I need to move my cleat further back on my shoe (Achilles), we need to ditch the mt. bike helmets with visors (causing the neck pain) and make sure our saddles are in perfect position from the handlebars (shoulders). I've been riding my bike this way and my shoes this way for years and never had these issues.
Over packing. Why did we take two bike tools? Why did we take 2 Co2 dispensers & hand pump? Why did we take so many flashlights? There was only two of us and 1 tent, and between the Cateye handlebar lights (2), mini LED flashlight (150L), and a L/M Stella 300 that we never used, it was a lot of extra weight. Too many clothes. That jersey I had on over my Underarmor on day one? Yeah, no reason it couldn't have been the one for the next day, but I brought two.
That's not to say we didn't do some things right. We did. Obviously we made it there and back, camped, and aside from an elective lunch at a cafe we required no outside support. So we did fine. Our plan to be flexible and camp where daylight dictated instead of having a hard destination was huge. It would have been nothing but stressful if we thought we had to get to that 62 miles destination, even if that meant pitching camp in the dark.
Miles don't matter. It may seem obvious, but until you're pedaling 100lbs of bike down a muddy dirt road, whatever expectations you had from either mt. biking or road cycling go out the window. Athena and I planned (loosely) on a goal of 62 miles. We made just under 50. We managed an average rolling speed of 10.3 mph. Factoring in stopping for clothing adjustments, bathroom and food breaks, etc., we left at 1030 and arrived at about 1615. So almost 6 hours to ride almost 50 miles. We only increased our MPG average by 1 using the roads due to the climbing.
Pains. Spending that much time in the saddle constantly pedaling a heavy load makes you VERY aware of even the smallest misalignment in posture, or geometric adjustment. I have a sore Achilles tendon, we both had sore necks, Athena had a sore knee...even sore shoulders. All of this was due to bad posture that we don't notice under normal conditions. I need to move my cleat further back on my shoe (Achilles), we need to ditch the mt. bike helmets with visors (causing the neck pain) and make sure our saddles are in perfect position from the handlebars (shoulders). I've been riding my bike this way and my shoes this way for years and never had these issues.
Over packing. Why did we take two bike tools? Why did we take 2 Co2 dispensers & hand pump? Why did we take so many flashlights? There was only two of us and 1 tent, and between the Cateye handlebar lights (2), mini LED flashlight (150L), and a L/M Stella 300 that we never used, it was a lot of extra weight. Too many clothes. That jersey I had on over my Underarmor on day one? Yeah, no reason it couldn't have been the one for the next day, but I brought two.
That's not to say we didn't do some things right. We did. Obviously we made it there and back, camped, and aside from an elective lunch at a cafe we required no outside support. So we did fine. Our plan to be flexible and camp where daylight dictated instead of having a hard destination was huge. It would have been nothing but stressful if we thought we had to get to that 62 miles destination, even if that meant pitching camp in the dark.
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