Team Mango

Tour de Blast - June 18, 2005

No Meato Burrito (aka Jason Land), Milkshake (aka Scott Steffens) and myself (Johnny Methane, aka John Methot) braved the danger of pyroclastic flows to ride the Tour de Blast. The complete ride is 82 miles with 6270’ of climbing.

We drove down the night before and stayed at the luxurious King Oscar Motel in Centralia. At 5:30am we rose to our various alarms. You can see that Milkshake and No Meato were raring to go. You can also see that No Meato is clearly over the line in his bedshare. I won the right to a bed to myself in a scintillating 1-round game of Rock Paper Scissors (me: rock, both of them: scissors). Rock on!

After a delicious breakfast at the Calico Kitten (or something like that [ed: “Country Cousin” I’m told]) we were off to the ride. We planned to start at 7:00, but we actually started at 8:00. No Meato had to search for a tool, first in his toolbox and then elsewhere. We eventually decided that he *was* the tool.

It was a beautiful morning with some clouds but mostly blue sky and very pleasant temperatures (high 40’s at the start, about 70 later in the day).

No Meato kind of hammered right off the bat, and after about 7 miles Milkshake had had enough of that and sensibly decided to ride at his own pace. I was dumb enough to try to keep up. I failed, but I latched on to a couple of strangers and caught up with No Meato at the first rest stop at the Hoffstadt Visitor Center.

From Hoffstadt, it is a long slog up past the Forest Learning Center (where Weyerhauser tells visitors how wonderful they are) and on up to the Elk Rock Viewpoint and the second rest stop at almost 3800’.

We later learned that Milkshake turned around at Elk Rock, which is very smart since going past it means one has to climb a bunch on the return leg of the ride.

From Elk Rock the road descends more than 1200’ to Coldwater Lake, whereupon it immediately starts climbing again to the end of the road and high point at the Johnston Ridge Visitor Center at 4200’. The climb is pretty consistent until the grade suddenly kicks up for the last 1/2 mile. Ugh. But there was another food stop at the top with oranges, subway sandwiches, bananas, brownies, Gatorade; plus an unrelated hot dog stand of which I availed myself. No Meato and I also visited the overlook and viewed the obligatory 3D model complete with zillions of tiny lights that simulate the various stages of the 1980 eruption.

After strutting around among the tourists in our spandex for long enough, we got back on our steeds for the big descent. Six miles of 35-40mph downhill. Yippee! Past a whole lot of people grinding up the slope an hour or so behind us and looking at us enviously (like we did all the riders descending while we were climbing).

Then the “worst” part of the ride: the 1200’+ climb back up to Elk Rock. You always think it is around the next bend, but it never is. Well, eventually it is, obviously, but you know what I mean. A brief snack at the Elk Rock food stop and then another nice long descent back to the Hoffstadt Visitor Center. Now there’s only 17 miles to go. No Meato and I hooked up with one small group of two experienced paceline riders and one not-so-experienced. That’s always a little terrifying - going 40mph 6” off the wheel of someone you don’t trust. But he eventually blew himself out and got dropped so his two buddies dropped away and No Meato and I continued on. With about 10 miles to go we hooked up with a solo rider and scooted back into Toutle toot suite. On my cyclometer we rode 84 miles in 5:33. Kind of a low average (15.7mph) but we had a lot of headwind on the return downhill portions.

It turned out Milkshake had only been back a little while, so the timing worked out pretty well. The showers at the high school were cold, and we were disappointed to learn that the rumor we’d heard that the cheerleaders were helping to soap up showering riders turned out to be completely false. But there was still the pasta feed that was included with the ride fee; that was some consolation.

We got back to Seattle about 6:00pm. I got home and collapsed on the sofa and felt worse than I usually do after such an event. Perhaps it was my diet that day: pancakes, bacon, egg, OJ, then brownies and oranges and a sandwich; more oranges and bananas; then a hot dog; then more oranges, bananas and brownies and finally the pasta feed. Plus a few liters of Accellerade (sports drink) and Gatorade sprinkled in throughout the day. Oh well, all was better in the morning.

Posted by jmethot at June 20, 2005 3:14 PM