I've been busy with business and taking some classes at the university, so I haven't done much training this year. Been off the bike way too long. A few weeks back a friend calls and says lets do a brief credit-card bike tour in Montana. So with a few weeks to go, and finals, I squeezed in on 5 training rides, the longest at 39 miles on the flats, and couple of spinning classes. Hardly enough to consider myself fit and ready.
So last Tuesday I drove from Portland to Spokane and on Wednesday we drove to Jackson, Montana (in the Big Hole Valley). We rode a short 18 miles and spent the night in Wisdom. Next day was mild 37 miles to Wise River, mostly downhill with a tail wind. Perfect! We then had a 53 mile day to Dillon, again mostly downhill with a few little 1 mile climbs at 6-8%, but the final 12 miles was into a stiff quartering headwind of about 18mph.
I had mapped the route with my GPS, and we knew the last day of 48 miles was going to be the toughest with two passes to climb, the first with a steady ramp up at about 3-4% for about 13 miles, and a final pitch of about 6% for another five miles. The second was the highest at 7400ft, and it too had a tough climb at 6-8% for about 4 miles. The strong wind out of the southwest had not died down overnight, so 44 of the 48 miles was going to be dead into this headwind. It was one of the toughest days I ever had on the bike, mostly because I'd spent all the glycogen in my legs the day before (and because typically on a tour day 3 or 4 is the hardest as your body gets accustomed to the effort.) I wanted to quit before the climbing even started, just from the effort into the headwinds. But... I finished. I was completely spent.
Here's a few pics... the southwest portion of Montana is extremely sparsely populated, and in the Big Hole valley there are very, very few structures of any kind. Just miles and miles of wide open spaces, with a snow capped mountain range in the distance whichever way you look. And we caught the timing right as this is one of the greenest years many locals could remember. Rather than the hill sides being dried out and brown, the grasses still had some green in them. It was spectacular!