Jelly Beans!

I love jelly beans. In fact, jelly beans are my favorite post ride snack. I am especially partial to the cinnamon flavored ones! So it's no wonder that I am a fan of Jelly Belly, who not only make the best jelly beans, but also sponsor a bicycle racing team.

In addition to a bazillion flavors of regular jelly beans, Jelly Belly also make Sport Beans. These are electrolytes, vitamins, and calories in a nice tasty jelly bean shaped package! Some even have caffeine! My friend Cristine got me hooked on the caffeinated ones while we were climbing Monte Grappa a few years ago.

So naturally when I saw that Jeremy Powers,  a member of the Jelly Belly road race team, was putting on a fun dirt road event in one of my favorite places, I had to check it out, knowing that there would be jelly beans on offer. As a US cyclocross national champion, he'd also include some great dirt roads, along with lots of climbing, which of course would bring us up to lovely scenic vistas, followed by some screaming descents.

The JAM Fundo Grand Fundo/Hundo ride takes in some amazing beautiful, quiet, steep dirt (and a few paved) roads in the Berkshire foothills, starting in Southampton, MA. This was the third running of the event. We missed the prior two, because we were away, but this year, the timing was perfect. Earlier in the year I'd bought tickets to the Green River Festival, mainly to see Richard Thompson perform on Sunday. The ride and festival were on the same weekend, and in close proximity, so we decided to combine some riding with some music.

We decided to take the tandem because we've just been having so much fun bombing around dirt roads with it. We also figured we've been doing enough long hard dirt road rides this year that we'd just go for the full Hundo experience.

We booked a room at a fabulous solar-powered B&B, the Starlight Llama, not too far from the start. We'd stayed here a while back and had a wonderful time. John and Dee are fabulous hosts and are quite happy to share a wealth of information about solar power. The llamas, goats, peacocks and other assorted farm animals are cool too.

After a great breakfast, we headed down to the ride start, about 5 miles away and started bumping into loads of friends, and what seemed like everyone in NECX. I haven't seen official numbers, but it appeared there were several hundred riders. I saw that they made over $30K to help out some lucky, hard working young local cyclists, which is very cool.

It was a brutally hot day and while we planned to do the long route, we also planned to take it easy in the heat. So we started at the back, and got to enjoy the sight of cyclists strung out on the road for a long ways ahead of us!

The route is a little lumpy and has quite a bit of dirt. We flew through the first section past lots of ejected water bottles and folks pulled off to the side repairing punctures.


We were feeling pretty chuffed with out fat tires as we rolled along, that is until we hit pavement again and noticed the rear tire was going a bit soft! We had just caught up with Gary, who I'd ridden with on Green Mountain Double, and he stayed with us while we stopped to put in a new tube. We couldn't find anything obvious in the tire, but did discover that our brand new pump was either defective, or that maybe we needed to have a pump designed for high volume, low pressure. It took forever to get air back in, and even loads of pumping, we still had fairly low pressure. We'll have to look closer at the pump before the next big ride.

Anyway, shortly after getting back on the road, Jeremy Powers came riding by and taking note of the tandem, slowed to chat a bit and warn us about the upcoming climb on King's Highway. We had a great climb but managed to lose Gary on the descent. I knew we had a jelly bean, uh, I mean rest stop ahead, and figured we'd regroup there. 

We arrived at the stop and I filled my pockets with more Sport Beans and had a 1/2 banana. We also tried to locate a pump to top off the tire. There were two SRAM neutral support vehicles on the course, but they were still behind helping all the other folks who'd had punctures. Fortunately they rolled in shortly after we did and we were able to get the pressure back up to a comfortable 75 psi (Grand Bois 650BX42 Hetre tires).

While this was going on, Gary slipped past us. We managed to catch back up to him before the famous ice cream truck stop, where he also found one of his teammates.  Cooled a bit by some frozen treats, we headed out for more climbing.

The scenery continued to astound. The sun continued to bear down. Before the ride, Matt and David had talked about stopping at swimming holes, but try as we might, we didn't see any! They would have been littered with hot cyclists!

 

We continued along, enjoying quite a few new roads, with loads of dirt, mostly smooth and fast, until we hit one section where the organizers had painstakingly put orange paint on the various large rocks poking up. We were bombing along this section when we noticed the rear tire seemed soft again. This time we were able to find a small piece of flint. Hopefully we would not have any more issues. We had now used both our tubes, although we could patch if necessary. John again struggled to get proper air from the pump. But we again managed to top it off at the next rest stop, thanks to the SRAM support. 

After doing the extra Hundo loop, we rejoined the Fundo course at the final rest stop. While chatting away about tandems with the lovely ladies handing out jelly beans and cold drinks, John commented how it would be awesome and fun-scary to ride a tandem with Jeremy Powers captaining, especially on the screaming descents. It was at this point that they told us they were Jeremy's mom, aunt and nieces! They joked about having t-shirts made up with these labels next year.

We arrived back at the start hot, thirsty and hungry. It was around the time that I was inhaling the bar-b-q that I realized I'd not had much to eat for 82 miles other that Sport Beans! I think I was supposed to supplement with them, and actually eat some other stuff, but it's good to know that I can survive on them. We made it back in time for the raffle, but sadly did not win Jeremy's cool bike from last season or the Rapha shoes. We did have a great time chatting with lots of folks and talking up tandems.

We were pretty hot and tired and ending up passing on the music festival that evening. And just to give an idea of how hot it was on Sunday, I plotted a nice easy ride up and down the shaded Green River Road, getting us back to Greenfield in plenty of time to see RT!

Richard is awesome live, and did not disappoint.

It was another fabulous weekend. No rest for the weary. We are off to race up Mt Ascutney next weekend before heading out to the Finger Lakes for Quadzilla!

Shifting Gears

We've been doing lots of long distance rides this year - between various brevets, the fleche, Green Mountain Double and Rapha Gentlemen's Race. But last weekend, it was time to switch gears and do a short intense hill-climb race. Due to various conflicts, our first hill-climb event of the season was a biggie,  Newton's Revenge race up Mt Washington! We had penciled in the race up Okemo for the weekend before Newton's, to at least get one pure hill-climb race in before climbing Mt Washington, but as the weekend drew near, we finally had to admit that we were pooped from all the travelling! So we decided to save some energy by not loading up the car and driving to some far-away event for once, meaning Newton's would be the first hill-climb of the year - way to ease oneself into these things, eh?

Fortunately, I did a little hill climb training in the early spring, but truth be told, neither of us has really done any specific training for pure hill-climbs this year.  Since the long events have been coming at us fast and furious every weekend since April, we can barely think about any event beyond whatever is happening in the next few days. So there we were last week, suddenly faced with a Date with the Rock Pile.

Twenty Years

I was reminded recently that it's been twenty years. A lot of things have changed in that 20 years. A lot of things haven't. I'm happy to see some of the changes, sad to see others. I'm disappointed in some of the things that haven't changed or haven't changed enough. And I'm happy to see that some other things haven't changed at all.

I have many before and after moments in my life, some significant point that becomes a dividing line for me. Collectively we share some dates of significance, where we know exactly where we were and what we were doing. Sadly many of them mark deaths - the assassination of John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, John Lennon,  and the events of September 11. We can talk about our innocence or naivety before the event, and how different things were after.  We all have stories of how these events changed us personally.

Bravery

...continued from The Perfect Storm.

A little more background: The Rapha Gents Race is a team event, where a team of 6 riders must do a prescribed route and cross the finish line together and as a complete team of 6. The best way to do this, of course, is to ride together all day, working together, helping each other out and, of course, having fun.  To make it a proper Rapha ride, it also must have lots of climbing and loads of dirt and gravel, and of course, something extra to make it epic - like a blizzard or a grizzly bear!

To quote from the Rapha blog, describing the recent Gent's race in Australia,  "there's no better way to find out if you're a true team, pulling together through the difficulties and attrition to get each other to the finish, or just six individuals racing the clock." This was certainly our theme for the day. 

The Perfect Storm

2012 has been an intense year of cycling for us. We've had some amazing rides. And while I wouldn't say that the Rapha Gent's Race was the focus of our early season, it was a big goal. We had such a blast on the ride last year, when we pulled together a very strong tandem team with experience on both dirt and with long distance, who brought 3 tandems with fat tires, low gears and good brakes to Pennsylvania and surprised more than a few folks, as we crossed the line first and earned some pretty nice swag.

Initially I had assumed that John would like to ride a single on the 2012 edition, but he was so stoked from our ride in 2011, that he wanted to ride tandem again. In fact, he loved it so much that he ordered a new tandem just for this year's event. Well that might be pushing it a bit, but we did get a new tandem, and it really was designed to do Gent's Race type roads. We got it just before Memorial Day and headed up to Vermont for the christening on some amazing dirt roads around East Burke. Those were our RGR shakedown rides, per se, to make sure everything was perfect on the brand new bike.

Green Mountain Double Century - Signs of Sanity

The Green Mountain Double Century was conceived by Sandy Whittlesey, founder of the wildly popular D2R2, for those folks who just didn't find D2R2 to be enough fun. Yeah, bring it on and make it twice as fun. Then see if 1000 people would still show up! For the first year, 2011, more than fifty people inquired about it, but maybe a dozen showed up at the start line, in the pouring rain. Among them was Fear Rothar, along with his Ride Studio Cafe EnduroTeammates, Matt Roy and David Wilcox. The torrential rains stayed with them all day. There may still be sand and grit in the socks John wore that day. But they had a great time and won the race, finishing in a bit over 19 hours. Russ Loomis took a break overnight and finished sometime the next day, but still well within the allowed 40 hours. They were the only finishers.

Sandy has kept the event very low-key. There is no website. There is just the announcement that you see to the right, linked off the UMCA calendar. He wants people who are interested to actually contact him, so he can let them know exactly what they are getting themselves into! And for anyone who has never received the detailed preview from Sandy, let me just say that he tells you everything - possibly way more than you want to know!

Magic Faerie Dust

Magic Faerie Dust is that elusive substance that sometimes comes with new bikes, making them seemingly effortless to ride. It doesn't accompany every new bike, since it results from a combination of good experiences, including the excitement of placing the order, the pleasure of working with the shop, the joy of seeing the results, and the thrill of riding the bike.

Fortunately for us, we had a great Magic Faerie Dust experience last year when we got our custom Seven single bikes from Ride Studio Cafe. So much so, that even after 10,000 miles and numerous rides in heavy rains that really should have washed the substance away by now, I still feel its presence on every ride!  John says the same about his Seven.

So we really should have known that it was risky to our bank account and retirement plan to take a Seven tandem out for a test ride last December. We instantly fell in love with both the concept of that bike and its sublime ride.

DROVES - Days 2 and 3

We had a fabulous Memorial Day weekend in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. Vermont has such an amazing network of lightly traveled scenic, and yes, hilly, dirt roads.  We've been taking trips to various parts of the state for years, and are always delighted by what we find. Late last summer Hurricane Irene did significant damage throughout the state, but the residents and authorities responded quickly. Areas with homes were top priority, and it was amazing how fast many of the roads were repaired. I think one of the things that helped is that so many of the roads are dirt, and is  much easier to go out and regrade these roads than to repair the paved ones.  Our hearts ached for the people affected, and we hesitated to go up last fall amid the devastation, but the word went out that tourists SHOULD come. So we tried to do our part to help out the local economy. We had a hillclimb race up Burke Mountain over Labor Day weekend, and took the opportunity as we always do, to ride as many of the dirt roads in the area as we could do in a weekend. We were happy to fond very little damage in the area. With so much uncertainty about the roads on the original route, and needing to book accommodation early, we decided to move DROVES to East Burke. This gave us the opportunity to share even more parts of this wonderful state with our friends. Also by changing to a single location, it would make it easy for folks who wanted to do shorter rides. A few folks took advantage of that opportunity this year, but we still had plenty of company on the longer rides.

DROVES - Day 1

A few friends joined us in East Burke over Memorial Day weekend for the 2012 version of DROVES - Dirt Roads of Vermont Epic Sojourn. As noted in the previous blog entry, DROVES is an informal gathering of friends who like exploring Vermont's dirt roads. The crowd this year included several past participants, Jake Kassen, Emily O'Brien, Dominique Codere, Cristine Lamoureux, David Lafferty, Emily Searles Lafferty, David Wilcox, Ted Lapinski, and first-timers Matt Roy and Mo Bruno-Roy. Brian and Andreas joined us for half the day on Sunday.

Some folks stayed at the Village Inn, while the rest of the gang stayed at the Bike Barn. We met each morning in front of the general store for our rides.

The gang on Day 1

DROVES - Dirt Roads of Vermont Epic Sojourn

Updated for 2013 -

For the past several years, John and I have spent Memorial Day weekend climbing and descending some of the finest dirt roads Vermont has to offer. Over the years, friends have found links to our routes, guessed our starting times, and ridden the same roads at the same time. We love riding with other dirt-road loving folks.

We will be staying in East Burke, and starting rides at 8AM in front of the General Store. We usually ride as a social group and regroup at the top and bottom of the big climbs.

Misguided Angels - Flèche

Warning: It was a long ride. This is a long post! But it is mostly photos...

Last month I blogged that my favorite randonneuring event is the Flèche Vélocio. This past weekend, The Misguided Angels had an awesome flèche ride. The team this year included members from several previous teams. Dena and I have now done 4 flèche rides together. Norm and David had each been on one flèche (with me) prior to this one. This meant that everyone was quite familiar with the drill. Although it would be a first meeting for Norm and David, which means they would have plenty to talk about over the 24 hours!

This route had some striking differences from my previous routes. First, it had some complicated travel and logistics. It was much more urban, and it was much flatter than any previous route.

So many rides, so little time to blog!

When I started this blog a few months back, I wondered if I would find enough interesting things to write about in the winter to keep a blog going. Well I managed to come up with enough to write about for a few months and had enough time to keep it pretty current. But ironically, as the riding season has kicked into full gear, I am finding that there just aren't enough hours in the day to blog about all the rides!

Regular readers know I kept myself busy with some climbing in March and April. 

Here's some of the other stuff I've been up to.

Just after we returned from our all too brief vacation in California, we had the Ride Studio Cafe Brevet Season kickoff party and 100km ride.  Despite a dire forecast, we had a big crowd on the ride out to Lost Lake. Rob and Patria even took time away from the Studio to join us for the ride!

Gargantuan Bragging Rights

Just back from massage, where Morgan had to spend considerable time working on my shoulder that I likely strained while patting myself on the back!!!

This email arrived in my inbox a few days ago...

Thank you for participating! Congratulations on your Specialized Challenge effort - and what a challenge it was! Specialized and Strava tasked you to put in 47 days of relentless climbing and suffering and that you did. Nearly 11,000 global participants climbed close to 420 million feet of elevation in just six weeks. What amazing results! Without a doubt the most difficult challenge yet, just over 700 riders completed the goal. An extra round of applause goes out to these die-hard riders. A Classic Climbing Challenge from Specialized highlighted a few extraordinary riders who are, apparently, born to climb. In the end, Brian Toone of Hoover, Alabama and Jeremy Philippe of Grenoble, France pushed one another near the 500,000 feet of elevation mark, blowing away the challenge goal in only a few weeks. Ultimately, Toone took top honors, climbing 468,661 feet in 96 rides for an average of 4,881 feet per ride. Not to be outdone, top female riders kept the competition strong as Pamela Blalock of Watertown, Massachusetts and Virginia Vaquero Casey of Morgan Hill, California traded off the lead on their way to over 200,000 feet of vertical ascent throughout the challenge. In the end, the two finished just 4,516 feet apart with Casey inching ahead. She climbed a total of 216, 206 feet over just 34 rides for an astounding average of 6,359 feet per ride. Congratulations again to all the competitors around the world who made this challenge so fun, motivational and truly extraordinary! Keep it up, Strava and Specialized

Purgatory To Pack Monadnock - from Milford, NH

I like riding off the beaten track, looking for new and interesting roads and cafes.

Over the years I have mapped out loads of different rides all of which could qualify as a favorite ride on any given day. I have now created a page with links to RideWithGPS maps for many of these rides. As I go back out and do the rides again, I will add links to posts with photos to help entice folks to try a ride. This is the first!

This ride starts in Milford, NH. Due to a very rough descent, I decided it is better in the opposite direction than I rode yesterday (map link below is in the recommended direction). I'd rather climb a rough road than descend one. Either direction has stupendous views. As with most of my rides, there are a couple sections of dirt.

Flèche Vélocio

My favorite randonneuring event is the Flèche Vélocio. This is a team event where all members of the team work and ride and finish together. Traditionally the event is scheduled for Easter weekend, but in northern climates, a bit of leeway is granted to accommodate for less than pleasant riding conditions at that time of year. In France, there is a single destination, but in the US, we are allowed regional destinations. The date (a range of start/finish times) and actual destination is set by the regional organizer, but the team members select their own starting point, actual start time, and route.

There are some basic rules - 24 hours, covering at least 360km, with at least 25km done in the last two hours and no stop more than 2 hours. You can do a large loop, but not repeated small loops. The team consists of between 3 and 5 cycles - so a tandem or triplet counts as one team member. At least 3 members must finish to be granted credit. Complete RUSA rules can be found here.