Training Log Archive: BigWillyStyle

UW Street Scramble, one week late. Surprisingly (to myself, at least) I did *not* clear the course; I bailed from UW with 6 or 7 close-in low-pointers left and headed for home. I was feeling hot and dehydrated, and at that point was close to 3h anyway. Though the distance is not particularly high, the terrain, as it were, is slow - lots of traffic and stoplights, plus some high-pedestrian/non-bikeable areas like U Village and the Greenlake docks. However, my biggest handicap was the fact that I had only a map, rather than map plus separate answer sheet as per usual - meaning that at every checkpoint I had to arduously unfold the giant map to read the answer sheet on the back, and refold before continuing; my usual silky smooth technique was shot all to hell.

Blue Angels buzzing our house:

Two Bridges route, or, dystopian postmodern 5-520-405-90 endless loop. Converged with a fast guy just before leaving Bellevue and stuck with him most of the way across MI, but the very last little hill before descending onto the bridge broke me and I was ded.

Home -> Kirkland

I wore my nice new O'France shirt, which is a lovely shading of deep blues, with an orange-accented flower motif that seems more Hawaiian than French. Or like something from the book/movie Annihilation, which is a book I found to be somewhat incoherent and largely unsatisfactory. Nothing that happened appeared to have much relation to anything else; the plot seemed merely to be a series of mysterious, creepy/horrific occurrences for their own sake. To be fair, perhaps there is better explication in the sequels.

C • Flower motif 5

Kirkland -> home

Standard MI CCW loop. Really good energy and speed today. Went around a corner and all of a sudden there was this huge group of 25 or 30 fit-looking riders coming the other way; I almost did a 180 to catch up and figure out if it was some kind of group I could get in on.

C • Group 4