Here’s my description of the STP. It’s a 200 mile ride (322km on my bike computer) from Seattle to Portland. No, it doesn’t follow the I5! You can check out the route map and see that we were on beautiful country roads the whole time. We even spent over an hour on a bike path! It was 11.5hrs of riding, 14hrs from start to finish – a day longer then IronMan. It was my first time doing the STP, and I joined the crazy 1/4 of the ~10,000 riders that complete the ride in one day.

I rode the whole time with my Uncle Doug*. He showed up at my place on Thursday evening and we headed down to Seattle on Friday at around noon. After an agonizing 2hr wait in the border line-up, the short trip from Vancouver to Seattle turned into an epic 5hr road trip. I guess the epic wait fits into the theme of the weekend where everything is just a bit longer then you would like. We stayed at the residences at the University of Washington along with approximately six hundred 12 years old kids. Oh my, I almost throttled them. I’m sure that I used to be that excited to be at summer camp. But when you’re looking at a very early wake call – having kids running around outside your dorm, is not the ideal situation. So after a non-sleep on Friday night, we dragged ourselves out of bed at 3:30am Saturday morning.

From the dorms, we walked down to the start line in the UW parking lots and threw our bags onto the Portland truck. At 4am in the morning, the UW parking lots was alive! Close to 10,000 riders do this event – most Continue reading →

Epic… I did the Populaire ride in 5:48, although it’s very arbitrary how they assign your time. The guy who arrived after me got an arrival time of 5 minutes earlier. I started the day by adding a detour of 7km to the route. I was following a bike group out on River Road, caught up to them, starting chatting with them only to discover they weren’t part of the ride. Uh oh. I did a U-turn right in the middle of that conversation. It serves me right for riding without really being awake. So my version of the Populaire was 148km.

After that I paid a lot of attention to the route. It was funny. This big peloton of guys kept catching up to me. They would zip past me and then after the next turn they would all of a sudden be behind me again. Basically, they were getting lost at every turn. Eventually, they got lost enough that I just dropped them. I rode by myself the whole way – except for one windy stretch where a guy, called Francois, pulled me along. Sitting on his wheel in the wind was awesome, but I paid for the extra effort later.

It was very tough to keep going after everyone else finished. Everyone else was chatting and lounging at the finish. I must have looked out of place industriously filling water bottles and eating way more then my share of the goodies. I did enjoy myself riding. My feet felt great, and the new saddle felt as good as 6+ hrs in the saddle can feel. Riding home from Fort Langley to Richmond seemed like a good plan … However, I did find myself thinking, “Who’s stupid idea was this?!”

Especially when I got lost in downtown Surrey. Continue reading →