Great roads, great weather, and friendly riders again sum up our experience with riding the Cache Valley Century. On Friday we drove up to Logan Utah to stay the night. After a lousy experience at an expensive Italian restaurant in the town last year, we decided to eat at the Olive Garden, which was much better.  We returned to the motel to get an good nights sleep, although Franz didn’t think he slept that well.

Right at 6 am, we got up to get ready. The Best Western motel we were staying at had a great breakfast buffet so we fueled up before heading up the 12 miles to Richmond for the start.

We started at 7:40 am, along with two Utah Velo riders we knew.  Last year we had damaged the rim on the front wheel of our tandem while we were in a pace line because the rider in front of us didn’t signal, but did manage to escape it himself.  Riding a tandem is more difficult than a single bike because you can not try to bunny hop over such a hole.  So this year we decided to not do much drafting.  It would be fine if other riders wanted to ride behind us, but we didn’t want to get into a large pace line nearly as much.

We rode mostly solo, or with one or two other riders behind us for the first 35 miles where we made a stop at the second rest stop (we skipped the first one). After a short stop we were back on the bike, skipping the 3rd rest stop with a plan to stop at mile 69 for lunch.  About five miles before the lunch stop, a very long train passed us and we decided to get into the line, being a bit weary of taking the headwinds all alone. That group was going very fast, 23-25 mph.  We had to join near the rear and some of those riders were erratic, so we made our way up to the front and ended up taking a 1 mile pull.  So the four miles of drafting was about it for the ride and after lunch we went back to solo riding.

We rolled into the finish averaging 19.2 mph, a total of about 5.25 hours riding time, and about 35 minutes of stopping time. It was a lot of fun. When comparing it with last year, the solo riding did end up taking another 13 minutes to finish and reduced our overall speed by about 1 mph.  But it was much easier than being on constant guard trying to ride a tandem in a pace line.

Here are the stats for the past two years.  It is interesting that Franz’s average heart rate was exactly the same.

Categories: Cycling
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