Paying the Piper

Around here, we tend to say "why would I ever ride in the rain?"  Indeed, because it's so seldom rainy, why would you go out?  Tomorrow it will be sunny and you can go ride then.  But . . . sometimes I guess it doesn't work out just that way . . .

It was actually a very odd weekend.  High winds were forecast, and the club ride was scheduled to go out to the area around Lake Matthews.  That's usually windy under the best of circumstances, and with high, gusting winds, it just didn't seem too appealing.  Plus, they were planning to take a route that goes up a very steep, I mean wretchedly steep hill.  We've done it on the tandem, and I am not going to do it again.  Just not worth it.

So I'd suggested to Roger that instead of taking that hill, we could ride out with the group, then continue around Lake Matthews while they climbed up.  We'd either meet up with them or not later on, but we'd get a good 65 miles or so.  But then he just really did not want to go out and fight the wind.  And I had a lot of other things to do on Saturday - things I usually cannot do because we are on the bike.  So I went to the Farmers' Market, and we just did not ride at all on the weekend.

Which was fine, because of course - we can ride any day!  We agreed that we'd do a longish ride on Monday, and then we took the weekend off.

Well, Sunday the forecast for Monday was coming in chance of rain.  But, we'd decided it was a good thing to get some time in the saddle, even if it did rain - because we want to be prepared for that in the case of bad weather during one of these brevets, or PBP itself.  So off we went, headed to Banning Bench and lunch at Gramma's Restaurant.

Clouds piling up on the mountains, from Banning Bench

And wouldn't you know it?  We were headed straight into the wind for the first 25 miles or so!  There's no way to get around it, it seems.  You skip one day, you will pay the next.  The clouds piling up over the mountains were beautiful - but a bit fierce looking.  Weenie that I am, I suggested we not stop for lunch so that we could make it back before the storm began.

Roger back at the coffee shop

But Roger reminded me we were out with our rain gear, and that it would be okay if we got caught, and of course that was right.  We had a good lunch, and we just FLEW back down San Tim with that fabulous tailwind, and the rain did not begin until we were enjoying our post-ride coffee at Stell's.  (I knew this would happen.  We were getting a few little sprinkles halfway down San Tim, and I figured that while we were sitting with our coffee, it would start to rain.  Which it did.)

Over all, I was pleased with our pace.  We made it up to the top of the ride, on the bench, in reasonable time.  I think it was 30 miles with 3300 feet of climbing by the time we were there, and we averaged just about 10 mph.  Since that's twice the climbing rate we need for the average "day" at PBP, I felt pretty good about it.  And once we started for home, we were able to bring our average up to 13.5 mph overall.

And it was nice to be able to pull the jackets on, after having toted them to Banning and back!