Summery winter epic

Had another long winter epic today, but now the good weather is back so I headed out the coast on a mission to make it all the way to Saint Tropez. It was a shorts and a jersey day, or at least I made it into one with a wind-proof baselayer. Last night I spent some quality time with my maps to see whether it would be feasible to ride to the aforementioned holiday destination, and determined using a slide ruler and abacus that it would indeed be within “reason.” I set the bar of reason at seven hours roundtrip.

Determined to go the distance I threw on a big gear again (45x16) and rode in the drops and on the stick all day. I also turned an entire loaf of bread into a stack of chestnut-spread sandwiches, which is about as appealing as it sounds. It’s really more of a “food system” than a “meal,” and is gruesomely documented above.

After 3.5hrs of riding I was still about 45min from Saint Tropez, and had been going pretty hard the whole time (listened to Tool for the first 4hrs) so apparently my abacus skills need fine tuning. It was disheartening to turn around goal unachieved, and even more disheartening to find that the still day had turned into a windy day and I now had a headwind to deal with the whole way home. I took out my abacus again and realized I would run out of sammies before getting home, so I stopped at a gas station to top off the tank with a liter of coke and a pack of Nutella cookies, which can have been made only by angels in heaven so good were they.

What followed was not pretty. There was drooling, there was pouting, there was lots of staring at my front hub. After a short while I tied my arm-warmers around the tops of my bars to make little “aero-bars,” where I camped out for most of the 3.5hrs home. Yep, in the end I was able to stay on an even split and finished the 135mi ride in just under 7hrs.

Now let us never speak of it again.