RAGBRAI 2008 Day 3

The day is the 3rd one of riding on RAGBRAI XXXVI, Tuesday, July 22, 2008. The ride route is from Jefferson to Ames and it's with a sense of relief (and after a much needed good night's sleep) that I got on the road at Jefferson, starting at about 6:40 after having a banana and some pomegranate-blueberry and cranberry juice.

This was a very good riding day for me although not a day for many pictures. Early on, though, the ride encountered a delay when a train came through.


It was remarkable how quickly it seemed that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of riders were backed up and trying to decide whether it might really be good to get breakfast here (in Grand Junction) or wait until Dana or Ogden (today's meeting, or halfway, town). In the event, though, the setback was minor at only about 4 minutes. This day's ride was also a fairly short one, listed as 57 miles, with level roads. After Monday's difficult trial, it was very much appreciated. And speaking of Ogden, what a great town! The streets were very wide and, of all the towns of the ride, this was the one that seemed the most wide open and comfortable feeling. Basically, this town handled the large number of riders without making it feel like sardines in a can. And this photo shows me sitting on a tractor in Ogden ... marveling at the size of the tires compared to my bike.


Still in Ogden, it was nice hearing some great songs by this couple on the bicycle stage. They sounded very good together ... and I found myself looking around for someone to dance with ... but no joy. But it was one of those nice RAGBRAI ride places to hang out ... they seem to just pop up when least expected.


In my opinion, the RAGBRAI folks did a great job setting up the riding days with a good combination of tough days and easier ones which helped keep spirits buoyed and attitudes very positive throughout.

My odometer mileage at Ames was 1817 with a total of 70.4 miles ridden (quite a few "in town" miles as I went back and forth from the north side of town). With an average speed of 13.4 mph and a total riding time of 5h 13m it was a good day. And I was fortunate enough to get another indoor room, staying with Ruth and Dennis. I spent about 3 hours helping Ruth update her PC ... pretty good trade when considering having a nice room, shower and a good night's sleep (in a bed). I remember going to bed looking very much forward to the more challenging 4th day's ride (to Tama-Toledo) coming up in the morning.

RAGBRAI 2008 Day 2-And More

Well, I'm back riding again. Got 14 miles in yesterday and 25 miles today but I had a surprise in store for me this morning when I went out to the bike at 8am. I had gotten the tires ready last night, checking them for proper pressure and I do recall that I noticed the valve on one seemed a bit loose (and the clamp down nut was loose). I tightened it back up and didn't give it another thought. Additionally, the pressure on both tires was pretty good, although I pumped it up to 85 psi (ensuring that it would be at least 80 after pulling off the pump nozzle). So as I was rolling the bike out of the garage I noticed that the front tire was flat! Immediately I though how lucky I was that it went flat at home rather than on the road. But further investigation revealed something I've never had happen to me before in 40 years of bicycle riding. As I removed the tire and tube I noticed the valve just flopping around. Soon I saw the reason for the flat ... the valve had simply broken away from the inner tube as you can see in this picture:


Needless to say, I'm glad that it didn't happen on the ride, although the solution was pretty simple, especially because it was on the "easy to remove" front tire. I replaced the tube and all was well for my ride this morning. My theory on the failure is that the tube (size 700x28/38C from Specialized) really doesn't fit snugly down to the hole in the rim that the valve stem goes through. So when I tighten up the stem lock nut and then put pressure in the tire, the tire is probably pulling itself away from the stem. Eventually (in this case over 13 months and nearly 5000 miles), something has to give ... and it did.

My solution is that I will now always put air in the tube before tightening the lock nut and then just snug the lock nut up to the rim, adding a second lock nut (from a spare tube) so that they can "lock" together and give support to the valve but not stress the valve's connection to the inner tube proper. Hope that works.

OK, on to the 2nd day of RAGBRAI 2008. The day is Monday, July 21, 2008 and the ride is from Harlan to Jefferson. There is no doubt that this is the most difficult riding day of the week with over 5000' of altitude change (i.e. hills) and about 85 miles in distance. I had some trepidation starting out as I knew that I had gotten only about 4.5 hours of sleep (what with the tornado warning, etc., in the wee hours of Monday). Since sleeping was not the best anyway I decided to get an early start and was on the road by 6:10 am. That part felt good ... very little else did that day as far as the biking was concerned but the end of the day was one of relief and a feeling of great accomplishment. I captured one of my favorite images on this particular morning ... take a look:


One look as I was riding by and I had to stop and take this one. If you look carefully you can see that another rider had already stopped and was down by the lake near the windmill when I took this picture ... and he appears to be taking a picture of a bicycle that looks like it's magically floating out in the middle of the lake (click the picture for a larger image and you'll see what I mean)! I have no idea how he (or, more likely, the farmer that owns the lake) did that. Another nice picture on this ride features an alfalfa field with the hay nicely baled on rolling hills as the riders continue making their way towards Jefferson:


Here's another great image of the countryside around Monday's RAGBRAI riders:


And what would RAGBRAI be without the cornfields? There was some concern about whether or not they would be "tall enough" for typical RAGBRAI rider use this year but ... not to worry. The corn was fine. And if you've never ridden you may never know what happens in those cornfields because ...


Jefferson arrival was a welcome relief and I stopped at the info center and asked if there were any (indoor) rooms available for a lone rider. The gal there said "sure, why don't you stay at my house". How cool was that! Her name was Beth and she gave me the address and phone number and said her husband, Keith, was at home and would be waiting for me to show up and get settled. I think they had 3 or 4 more riders stay at their house that night and they had two daughters, Emily and Heather. Here's a picture of the five of us on Monday night:


From left to right: Keith, Heather, me, Beth and Emily.

The mileage at the end of the day in Jefferson was 1747 with an average speed of 12.4 mph and 86.84 miles ridden. What an enjoyable afternoon and evening ... and I slept really well! Tomorrow we'll cover the 3rd day's ride from Jefferson to Ames.

RAGBRAI 2008 Day 1

The next few blog entries will be about my experience at RAGBRAI XXXVI which ran from July 19 (Saturday, with day 1 in this blog being defined as the first riding day, Sunday, July 20) to July 26 (for more details, click here). And for your convenience, here's a photo of the route to refer to as you read on in this series.


The stay overnight at the starting town, Missouri Valley was relatively uneventful. The trip out there was full of fun conversation with my friend, Sandra, and the interesting part of the day was finding a good location for my Hennessey Hammock (my model is the Ultralight Backpacker Asym and you can check it out here). This was the first real overnight "camping" use for the hammock and I wanted to have a good test of its utility. The picture immediately below shows my bike (2007 Specialized Tri-Cross Sport) loaded with all four panniers, a rack top bag and water bottles in its RAGBRAI configuration (note that you can click on the pictures in this blog for a larger image). The bike and racks weighed 29 pounds and the load (with water in the 3 bottles) was 36 for a total of 65 pounds. Adding my weight of 161 plus 4 pounds for clothing and shoes gave a total riding "weight on wheels" of 230 pounds.


Note the metal device strapped on to the top of the left rear pannier. That is actually a telescoping bipod designed for stabilizing a gun while shooting. The reason I added it to my equipment was as a contingency for setting up the hammock as a tent, should I end up in an area where there were no trees (or other suitable structures) for tying up the hammock. The way this would work is that I would route one end of the hammock cord over the bicycle seat and the other end over the bipod ... connecting both ends with aluminum stakes in the ground. After tying off the center lines for the hammock and its rainfly, I'd have a secure (from mosquitoes, etc.) place to sleep ... although it would be on the ground. In the event, I never (thankfully) had to resort to this option.

The odometer reading at Missouri Valley was 1595, which also represents my training miles for the year (starting in the 2nd half of March). My plan was to make sure I kept track of the mileage to allow reporting on each day's progress.

My initial choice of hammock location was the corner of a covered pavilion. This setup did work, but it turned out to be less than optimal because there were lights in the pavilion and it became clear as the sun started to go down that there were going to be many people hanging out there talking till who knows how late that (Saturday) night.

So I did a bit of reconnoitering around the park and finally hit upon a spot that seemed almost custom made for the hammock situation. There was a cage with a wooden floor that someone guessed might have been used to weight livestock bound for shipment to market via train. No one was using it and so I hastily moved the hammock over to the new digs and was rewarded with an easy setup and a great situation for the night's sleep. Here's a picture showing the hammock along with the bicycle:


Now the funny part of this is that I felt quite a bit like Otis on Andy of Mayberry (except I wasn't drinking, hehe). He was the perennial town drunk always locked up in the jail but he had access to the keys ... and often would come in and lock himself up. Well, if you notice the doors at the far end of the cage, there are identical doors at the near end and I had to throw a swinging bar open to get in or out of the cage ... which brought back the memory of the Mayberry jail and Otis!

Several people were quite interested in the hammock including one fellow from Florida named Bill. He was very interested in the fact that my equipment this year weighed 19 pounds less than last year (36 vs. 55) and most of that change was due to dropping the tent, tent poles, sleeping bag and mini-mattress for the 32 oz. hammock and hi-tech (light weight) blanket plus bipod. I did also cut back on the number of pairs of riding shorts, shirts and socks but the camping gear was truly the big savings. My goal is to get to get to a load size of 30 pounds or less for next year's ride. Interestingly enough, by the way, I put the more heavily loaded panniers in front as the back already has plenty of weight (including me plus the addition of the two lighter panniers and the rack bag) and if the bike's too heavy in back the steering feels too light. I know it sounds a bit weird but that's the way it works best for me. Finally, I also made sure that the weight was evenly distributed left and right and I made a 4x6 card that identified the contents of each bag. You'd be surprised at how helpful that card was in allowing me to quickly and efficiently retrieve (and return) items from the various storage locations.

The night passed without incident although I did use the (supplied by RAGBRAI, bless their hearts) earplugs as there were both trains and plenty of highway 30 traffic nearby.

Sunday Morning ...

Got up a little before 6 and got the bike packed and rolling by around 6:30 (after letting myself out of "jail"). The first day's ride is from Missouri Valley to Harlan and it's very hilly. By the way, here is a nice summary of the day to day riding, giving the towns visited and the "ups and downs" of each day.

I set up the hammock at Pioneer Park in Harlan ... although I was mildly annoyed at having to ride all the way through town to get to the information center and then ride almost all the way back to get to a camping area with trees. Anyway, it was a pretty nice setup, as you can see from this picture:


Then I headed out to a nice little restaurant to have a sandwich and a vanilla shake in some restful and air-conditioned surroundings.

The interesting camping event at Harlan was the tornado warning at 2am on Monday morning. I heard the sirens and turned over for some more sleep and then heard them again ... along with a sepulchral voice giving some kind of directions (to a church, of course). Since I could feel the wind picking up significantly I decided it was probably time to heed the warning and I packed all my stuff on the bike in about 10 minutes and headed to a nearby street. There I met a couple trying to figure out where to go and I said that I heard "the voice" indicate that there should be a church to go to and they knew that there was one up the street a few blocks. So (since they were walking) I told them I'd ride up and check it out and ride back to let them know what I found. Well, the church was locked up but there was a school behind it that was open as a shelter (and already had riders spending the night there). I let the other two know the situation and then I put my bike inside and found a piece of carpet on the floor behind a stove in the kitchen area. There I laid out my blanket and pillow and got another hour or two of rest, or restless sleep. And there was no tornado but maybe 2-5 minutes of light rain ... however it did get very windy outside for awhile. What a tiring night!

For the day, I covered 64.54 miles in an average of 12.8 mph (5h 2m 32s of riding time). The odometer reading ended up at 1660.

Tomorrow day 2 ... Harlan to Jefferson

RAGBRAI XXXVI Completed!

Here's to a successful and fun ride completed yesterday morning at LeClaire, IA on the banks of the mighty Mississippi river! Had a good time on RAGBRAI and met many nice folks, including Beth, Keith, Pat, Heather, Emily, Yves, Ruth, Dennis, Dwight, Rick, Monica and Ben, among others.

Found some good spots to hang the hammock and also got indoor places to stay at for 4 of the 7 nights of the ride ... sweet. I was happy to spend time at two of the houses working on PC's ... seemed like a good trade (a room for some needed advice and updates on a computer) and we all had fun getting "computer stuff" accomplished.

Overall, I rode 504 miles in 40 hours and 3 minutes (about 12.6 mph average). I was happy with that and with the fact that my weight at the end of the ride was identical to what it was at the start ... 161 pounds (I gave a *real good* shot at gaining weight though ... hehe, especially when it came to home made ice cream). The maximum speed I hit was a shade over 38 mph (I know, not too earth shattering, eh?). Over the next week or so I'll be updating this blog with a few pieces of RAGBRAI info that I saved in my journal as well as some pictures taken along the way. I took today off from riding but I did actually feel like getting on the bicycle ... go figure! Toughest day: Monday, hands down ... town that stood out the most in my mind: Ogden ... very fun with nice wide streets and an extremely *non*claustrophobic feeling for the visiting bikers. Most evil deed: some person or persons laying tacks out on the road which caused flats for several riders ... I think this was reported on in the Cedar Rapids Gazette.

It's good to be finished with the challenge of RAGBRAI and it was very much worth doing. More posts to come, including the story about "Ken's laundry" ... stay tuned.

Later ...

Ready To Ride

Everything seems to be "Go" for takeoff to RAGBRAI tomorrow. The final numbers include 1595 miles and 100 hours of training, my weight is 161 and I got the equipment weight on the bicycle down to 36 pounds. That's about 19 pounds *less* than last year (and it includes 3 full bottles of water). The fully loaded bicycle (with me on it) weighs in at 231 pounds. So all the space/weight saving effort actually turned out to be worth it. The new panniers worked great on the final test ride today. About the only thing left before leaving tomorrow is for me to make sure the tires are inflated to 90 psi. I have a feeling that this year's ride is going to be wetter than last year's, based on the NWS forecasts for Iowa but we'll just have to see.

I don't expect to have internet access during the ride so there probably won't be any more updates here until about next Sunday, July 27. And I'm going to post more pictures in this year's RAGBRAI blog entries (OK, well, that's my goal at least!).

Later ...

RAGBRAI Weigh-In, Test Ride

Alright, there is good news! This morning I tested the Hennessey Hammock again and was able to quickly set it up and take it down. And I verified that, while I would normally only need 4 pegs for tie downs, I really need to bring along 6 in case I have to end up setting it up as a tent (two pegs replace the two trees that would normally be used). Again, though, I hope I don't have to use it as a tent as it would be a hard bed to lie on. And, as before, when I crawled inside to test out the hammock I almost immediately wanted to fall asleep ... that thing is sooooo comfortable.

Next, I packed all the bags and mounted them on the bicycle. A quick weigh-in test told me that the current load (with 2 bottles of water) is 39 pounds. I plan to add a third bottle so I'm sure it will hit 40 pounds ... and that's 15 pounds less than last year. My current weight is 161 so that's about 2 pounds more than last year (all muscle, of course, heh). Today I had a banana smoothie in preparation for all the strawberry-banana smoothies I'm planning on downing during the ride this year.

Finally, since one of my old (and smaller) pannier bags lost a rivet last year I decided that was a sign that I should get another set of (larger) bags and so I picked those up this afternoon. Yes, no more fashion faux pas for this rider, now the front and rear bags match up nicely, hehe. One more test ride tomorrow morning and I'll be good to go. Just hope I don't somehow manage to forget something anyway (I told the bicycle shop there was a 90% chance I'd be back there sometime tomorrow after I remember at least some of what I've forgotten). But seriously, I think that my list is pretty good as I've built it on last year's list and it's more complete (and lean) now.

Tomorrow I do have to also remember to mow the lawn (and I hope the rain lets up enough for that to be possible). Oh, and I need to take my bamboo plant to the neighbor across the street as it really likes water every day and it's special enough to me that I'd hate to see it suffer (and perhaps die). Remember, I've been known to kill cacti so it's not like I need to push the green thumb thing (hehe).

Later ...

Kudos to Canon

I was surprised yesterday to receive my repaired and fully operational camera back from Canon after sending it in to them only 12 days ago. Of course, I never figured it would be back in time for RAGBRAI so I got a new (lighter, smaller) camera for that. But my hat's off to Canon as they analyzed the camera's problem, recognized it as a known recall issue involved a CCD sensor failure, fixed it and then sent it back to me in an amazingly short (to me) time. And the camera does actually work now!

Today I will be packing the panniers and making a test run on the bike in its fully loaded configuration. I don't anticipate that there will be any significant problems. I'm also going to practice setting up and taking down the hammock a few times. Later ...