so as dick said, keegan and i did a bit more biking to warm ourselves up (and get to seattle). however, this plan backfired as we just became more cold and loathed leaving any indoors area, or heated bus. what follows is the extra riding keegan and i did.
the first leg is his house to the bus:
i know what you're saying right now, "holy downhill balls dieter! i've never seen 12% on a downhill elevation graph before!" it was kind of scary. mainly because the morning slick was still on the road (it was about 8am), and that there were stoplights almost every block we had to stop for. anyhow, no ascent to speak of, it was cold.
after we got on the blissfully warm bus, we rode it as far as you could for $3. then rode to dick's place:
this was apparently something like keegan's commute he said. it's pretty close to right, though wrong, because i didn't really know where we were (i tend to stay off the burke gilman, and bridges). notable ascent of around 270ft.
after our cold, yet entertaining journey in which we saw plenty of group rides involving middle to elderly riders, and brainstormed the adornments of our dream home on mercer island (pointing out neat houses is a tradition on this ride, but we ended up unclear on where the ram is w/relation to the bear at this point), we ate some chipotle and watched some 30 rock, some bear grylls and then headed out for the bus.
this is my "commute" (from dicks place to the bus). mainly flat. notable ascent around 213ft.
after a bonk filled bus ride, keegan and i arrived in tacoma as it was getting dark, but we tried getting off the bus somewhere closer to his house and planned to go by the spaghetti factory road in an effort to avoid the 12% grade we saw earlier:
as you can see that wasn't successful. in fact we found an entirely new 14% grade by shortening our ride by almost 0.7miles! this is an amazing climb with a few plateaus and stoplights scattered throughout it, but it's approximately a 322ft climb over 1/4 of a mile. keegan had to stop several times during a climb because his bike was "shifting on its own" while climbing (but seriously, it does).
it's hills like these that we'll need to be able to tackle if we're planning to do hpc (high pass challenge) this year. while this hill if more difficult than any hill we'll face in the upcoming chilly hilly, it bears mentioning now that two weeks into training, i'm pretty confident that we'll be able to handle it by the time it comes up in february (course and elevation chart follow for reference).
it should be noted that mapmyride's elevation chart shows around 1200 ft of ascent, while cascade's reports around 2800.
however it would appear that baker hill is a meager 8.5% grade, while 19th is a brilliant 14%. we'll investigate this ourselves in two weeks.
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