August 26: Week 8 wrapup
The washing machine has been worked unusually hard this week. It's the final and hardest week of the 4-week cycle, and every day except Friday had something scheduled. So there’s been an unreasonable number of washes to get my noxious gym gear cleaned up, and I suppose it’s been getting steadily worse for the last eight weeks.
The big one was the Wednesday fitness test. This measures the power output over 20 minutes, and decides the target wattage for all future cycle classes. The dilemma is: push hard to get a good high number, and need to push equally hard in every class from now on? Or underperform? I pushed hard ... but (inadvertently!) started the test too conservatively so I ended up only getting an incremental increase. Which I can live with. There will be no more character and fitness tests before I leave, thankfully.
The weekend was two five hour rides. The Saturday ride was most exciting: a storm had been brewing in the forecast for the last few days, but its arrival kept getting delayed. Our wingfoiling instructor texted to say the wind would be good at midday, so I'd split my ride up and gone out for two hours in the morning (bit of rain, storm didn't show), gone wingfoiling for another two hours (quite a bit of wind, storm didn't show) and then headed out for another three on the bike (so calm I didn't even think about the storm).
Because I'm running out of route ideas, my plan was to go north along the Almere waterfront for half the time, then return. Obviously the laws of drama require that the storm shows up right after the turnaround... which it did, and it meant business. The weather went straight from still and warm into serious wind and rain.
I'd like to drop some pictures to back up this unimaginative story. But cellphone photographs don't show rain, unfortunately - there's a heavy temporal filter, which erases all the raindrops and splashes, the like how early street photographs were so long-exposure that they erased all the people. I come back with stories of monsoons and photos of damp streets. And the only hint that it was raining so hard you can barely see, is that the framing is a bit dubious.
From left to right: the windfarm, windy but nice weather. Just after the turnaround, trouble is brewing. A wet cyclepath, what’s the big deal?
Well. Having Googled this I now know about burst mode: hold the shutter button down and slide left. I'll try that the next time I'm caught out in a deluge, because it's memorable.
Anyway. The wind was coming from the side, so strong and consistent that I suddenly realized I was rolling along with a very noticeable lean. The path was not wide, there's a steep grassy bank to the left, but wet rocks and ocean to the right, and I was taking the safe option right down the centerline. Technique smooth, core engaged, grip tight ... while getting sprayed and buffeted like laundry in a washing machine.
But the dilemma is: go slow and safe and get saturated? Or push hard and get to shelter faster - but if the wind does something unexpected and the bike starts crabbing there's less time to react. Unfortunately the moral of this story is "if you ignore a problem it may just go away", because after only a few kilometers I got to the windfarm and Pampus Poort corner, the road turned southeast, the wind shifted to directly behind. I could drop into a higher gear and carefully push, without worrying about getting smeared over the breakwater.
Not far back there was a music festival on the beach, but thanks to the weather that party was well and truly over. Although the storm was winding down the tents were still heaving in the wind, and there was enough rain coming down that most of the audience had cleared out. The evening acts will be playing to the foodtrucks. Crowds were streaming out towards the bikes, the station, even the nearby underpass, that being the only shelter around. Many people were in the same sort of flimsy and transparent rain jacket - meaning someone in there was selling them, and they must have had a very good day.
I'd been planning to take a break in the underpass but it was filled with soggy concertgoers so I went through at ambling speed, dipped offroad to go around the rest. Over the access road, hard right onto the bridge and I have the road to myself again. Mostly inland and sheltered from now, and the storm had moved on, but it had done some damage - leaves and twigs were blown everywhere, there were even a few branches on the ground.
It added up to about seven hours of heavy exercise. I fell asleep with the lights on.
Sunday's ride was a five hour loop I'd originally planned for Saturday. I'd set it up to be on offroad tracks rather than asphalt. Which meant went was often among trees, and there was a lot of visible damage from the storm. Broken branches on the path were common, but in a few places they were so big the bike needed to be lifted over.
And there was lots of gravel. Not sure there will be much in South America - in most of the parts I'll be going through, the towns are small and far apart, with a single road connecting them. Komoot is good at finding interesting low-traffic or offroad gravel routes and I there haven't been many on the route so far, so they must be rare.
Sunday trip pictures. Wish I’d had the presence of mind to show some of the storm damage.
Not many weeks left. Time is starting to run out - deadlines aren’t passing yet, but they’re getting close enough to smell. Need to do a full gear check to find any problems, because time to arrange replacements is getting short. My toeclips are down to one screw, that needs to be replaced. Need another small sachet of tubeless tyre milk, in case I need to top up in the wilds.
And socks. I took a good collection on the European Divide, I brought them all back, but they’re not all here. Which is odd. The only time they leave my drawer is to get worn and washed. So they shouldn’t disappear.
Unless the washing machine is developing a grudge.
