Week 6

Date
February 12, 2017

Distance
101 miles

Strava Link
Week 6

Route Map/Profile

Weather

Ride Video

 

Ride Report 
The bad weather continues. I did a long ride on Sunday, which ended up being pretty windy. Monday was supposed to be windy and rainy (the wind came, but not the rain), so I did a little MTB ride and some work around the house. Then I found out that I had to work on Tuesday. That sucked, but Tuesday was super windy and not a good day to ride anyway. That meant I was forced to get this week's ride in today. It's never good to only have one specific day to ride in February. There's a decent chance the weather could be bad. That goes for any year. This year has been especially crazy, so I was a little nervous.

Luck was on my side today. The weather was great. It was sunny all day and there wasn't any wind. I actually have to work on Tuesday again this week, so I'll be doing another one tomorrow. Hopefully the weather is just as nice.

It's good to do a back-to-back, because I officially decided on my south to north route. I decided on the El Paso Route. There's a link to the map and the itinerary here. The ride still needs a name. If you have any ideas, let me know. I may call it SNAP, which is the South to North American Passage. I actually wanted to call my other route CRAP (Calexico to Roosville American Passage), which would have been a lot more fun. All of my other ideas have been bad. For example: RASN (Ride America South to North), pronounced like "raisin". I could eat raisins every day. That's not very inspiring. There are so many better dried fruits out there. Or how about ARSN (America Ride South to North)? I could set the whole country on fire! Pretty dumb.

I talk about it in the video, but since this is a credit card tour like Petoji I have a lot of things squared away already. There will be two main changes this time. (1) I'm going with full aero bars. My #1 complaint during Petoji was hand pain. Hopefully the aero bars can help a little. There's not much climbing on this route (I think the biggest day is only 8,000 feet.), so the extra weight won't make much difference. (2) I'm doing a different bag setup this time. Last time I wore a little string backpack, which wasn't very heavy yet still managed to annoy me. I'm going to get one of those large saddle bags (something like this) and maybe a slightly larger frame bag (like this) to go with it. I'll get the saddle bag first and see how much stuff I can fit in there.

I'll talk more about gear and a packing list as things get closer and I make all of my final decisions. For now I'm just happy that the route is set and I have something concrete to train for. Bring on July.