The weather forecast for Memorial Day weekend was, in two words, going to be hot and windy. Not just kinda hot or kinda windy, but REALLY hot and REALLY windy. Saturday was in the low ninety's and sustained winds of 30-45 mph with gusts of close to 70mph. I was glad I got my run in by 8:30am! I didn't have any other activities planned for the rest of the day, so I just did some stuff around the house and listened to the wind howl! But, I did need a good long ride of about 4 hours on Sunday. With one eye on the weather forecast (I love weather.com!), I planned my ride. I decided I could handle heat or wind, but not both, on the ride. I talked Sparkle into riding with me (actually she volunteered, needed practice for RAGBRAI) and I talked Sid into practicing his RAGBRAI skills as well (he's our sag driver). With the winds forecast to be about 25-30mph out of the south, we picked a little town called Maxwell, about 15 miles SE of Ames, as our starting point, and Iowa Falls (55 miles due north) as our ending point. We'd never ridden any of these little county roads, but there was very little east-west riding to be done so it looked like we could sail all the way.
I called another friend who recently moved to Ames and just bought a new bike, and he wanted to ride along for just the little stretch from Maxwell to Ames. After loading up two trucks with bikes and clothes and all the stuff we'd need at the end of the ride, picked up Kevin, we dropped off one truck at Sid's so he could come get us in Iowa Falls. Sparkle, Kevin, and I drove to Maxwell and headed north on our bike with a nice breeze at our backs, the sun shining overhead, and temps in the upper 70's to low 80's at about 9am. The county roads were smooth, black asphalt and traffic was next to nothing - perfect for cycling. Less than 30 minutes later, we were nearly back to Ames and hadn't really even broken much of a sweat yet. Although this was Kevin's third ride this year, the conditions were so perfect that he opted to continue on with us for the rest of the ride, rather than head back into Ames.
There were times where, without pedaling, we were cruising along at about 20-22mph. It was just a glorious day to be on a bike. We hit one stretch from Fernald to McCallsburg where the roads sucked pretty royally but everything else was great, so we forged ahead. We had a couple east-west traverses to keep us on our new favorite county road, and those times made us bitter. I had to lean about 25-30 degrees into the wind to keep from being blown off my bike and the road, because by now the winds were about 30mph out of the south again. We made such good time, we got to Iowa Falls about an hour before we thought we would. The wide open road gave me a couple stretches where I could really hammer it for 3-4 miles at a time. I think I hit close to 37 mph on a straight, flat section of road. It felt awesome! And it felt great to be able to maintain that for 8-10 minutes at a time. Perfect!
By the time we got to Alden (about 50 miles into the trip), Kevin was wiped out. We stopped at the Casey's for some refreshments and to cool off for a few minutes. The last 6 miles into Iowa Falls were heading east and that sucked! If we'd made Kevin go one more mile, I think he would have sat down be the side of the road and just called a cab from Ames to come get him. He was done. 55 miles isn't bad for your third ride of the year! We found an air-conditioned watering hole in Iowa Falls, drank some beverages of the adult variety, had some food, then all was well! We visited with Sid's sister, brother-in-law, and niece and nephew, had some well-deserved Dairy Queen and made Sid drive us home.
I really enjoyed the "destination" ride. Kinda reminded me of RAGBRAI. Now if only we could get the wind to be at our backs the whole week of RAGBRAI... Truth be told, I think we could have made it all the way to Canada on that ride, if we'd been willing to give it a shot!
Today I wanted to take another shorter ride since yesterday's ride was a little short of my time goal. I somehow talked Sparkle into heading back out with me for another roughly 17 miles, then I had a little brick run to do. The wind was still pretty intense, and the brick run was blazing hot. Last bit of training for the long weekend is another open water swim tonight with the triathlon training group and the IM'ers.
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Sounds like you had a fun ride. Yesterday, I rode up Bogus Basin - 15 miles and about 3200ft in elevation. It took me about 2 hours to go up. Coming down was hard - I hit some sand going about 20mph and went down. Luckily just road rash. My advice to you is to avoid such incidents.
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