The Glorious Mt St. Helens bicycle ride!

I am alive! The ride up to Mt St. Helens was by far the hardest, best and funnest ride I have done yet. However during my 40 miles of non stop climbing I wasn't saying how fun I thought it was, I was saying what the world have I done to myself. I virtually had no training when I signed on to do this. Longest ride was in July and in Aug I think I did a 30 mile ride with several small rides. Then I decide, oh this would be great to do a 114 mile race 2 weeks to the event. Anyways lesson learned and not being able to walk on Sunday night would attribute to not training. I have never been up to Mt St. Helens before so this was a great experience. Next time I would like to drive up there and spend a day of it and take a bunch of pictures. Here is the information on the Windy Ridge lookout where we stopped to head back down the Mt.

Windy Ridge is one of the best places to get an overview of the area devastated by the 1980 eruption. The landscape is littered with sand and gray rocks from that event. Deposits of the debris avalanche are visible to the west. These include the lower parts of The Spillover, where the debris avalanche traveled up over Johnston Ridge and into the South Coldwater area. The blast stripped most of the vegetation and some soil from many of the older bedrock surfaces, revealing to geologists and visitors previously hidden chapters in the geologic history of the area. Rockfalls from the crater walls stir up ash clouds that curl over the edges of the crater rim, especially in late summer. A faint bluish-white volcanic gas plume is often visible rising from the Lava Dome, and sometimes fumaroles or clusters of fumaroles can be seen there.

I stayed at my Uncle's place in Centralia on Sat night prior to the ride on Sunday. Got up and left at 5:30 am and arrived at the parking area in Packwood at 7am. The start line opened at 7am and closed at 8am. It was pretty chilly out (50 f) and by the time I got the bike ready and myself sorted with all my food and all the little stuff it was 7:30. Of course I started all alone so that was tough to start out by myself with out a group to ride in and pace with. I was able to get up to a group of 7 riders about 2 miles down the road and latched onto them for the next 10 + miles. Then we took a turn and the fun began. These hills would range from the lowest gear on your bike sitting down to out of the saddle standing up. Very seldom was there a chance to shift up to go a little faster but when you were able to it felt like you were going down hill. It was a nice feeling but a false one at the same time. This went on for 40+ miles. It was never ending. I paced myself pretty good throughout the first half of the day. I would get passed as we would start the hill by a couple guys then end up passing them halfway up as there steam shut off. As we came out of the woods and got more in the open air we came around a bend of nice green trees to see the effects of the eruption. Trees all laid out everywhere and the area wide open looking like it was logged a few years ago. It was a pretty amazing site. Getting that close to the Mt was pretty cool and was a great experience. There were some down hills on the way up but were just rolling hills that turned into more hills.

Now the fun part of cruising down. This was so much fun. I think my top speed was in the 40 mph range. Of course wearing tights and a bike shirt going down at that speed would be fairly painful but everyone I was around rode really well. I began to pass several people on the downhill sections so I suspected the motorcycle racing was paying off in this avenue of the ride. Which gave me alot of confidence. Not to much but enough to know that both sports worked well together. Once we got to the bottom we still had 30 miles to go in order to hit the 114 miles. At this point I had been riding alone for a while. My left knee was begin to really bother me. My whole goal was to finish in the silver medal range which was by 3pm. Gold guys finished by 2pm which I will shoot for next year. Coming down the stretch I was getting worried I wasn't going to make it. I had a 15 miles to go in 30 minutes and I didn't think it was going to happen, especially riding, "all byyyy myyyself (singing the tune)". I kept looking back in hopes of a group of a couple of riders to tag along with. Then I saw them coming, it was a huge relief because everytime I looked back they kept getting closer and closer. I moved over to let them by so I could jump on at the end of the line and have them tow me to the finish but man there must have been 20+ riders in the group. So 6 hours 52 minutes and I got a hat and a silver medal. I went and set the bike down got a hotdog, chips and a beer and laid down. I don't like hotdogs much but it sure did taste good...
The fastest time of the ride was 5 hours 55 minutes. My goal next year is to finish in gold!

I wish summer was longer than 2 months here.

2 Wheel addiction

Its been a while since I wrote in my blog and thought I should give everyone a update as to what's been going on, could be a bit long. First thing is my longtime girlfriend Lindsay and I have purchased a home in Burien about 10 miles outside of Seattle. That has been alot of work to get moved. Plus, I like to cram some additional things in there for fun, 6 hour endurance race and a 114 mile bicycle race this Sunday up to Mt St Helen's.

Getting ready for the 6 hour endurance race consisted of a complete bike tear down and rebuild. Earlier in the year Jake Frame and myself had a frame from one of the other bikes extended to allow more fuel. Buell is a unique bike with the fuel in the frame rather than on a standard motorcycle. The capacity is down a bit with it being in the frame so we were able to customize it a little to get us some additional capacity for racing endurance. Jake picked up Jeff Wieand's stock XB9R racebike and brought it over to the house and we began the week long process of getting it ready. We took the bike to Adrenaline Freaks track day there at Pacific Raceways on Friday to get the bike sorted out and let Jake ride a Buell for the first time. With it being a stock motor he was still pretty impressed with it and loved the way it handled in the corners. We had some issues we had to work out through out the day but was able to get it all sorted and ready to go. Jake also has a 190 horsepower Honda Fireblade 1000RR that he had at the track as well. I have never rode a Japanese Inline 4 cyclinder above 600cc's. I told Jake several times that I didn't want to ride it because I was scared of it. What do they say about peer pressure and never give in to it? Well Jake came in after running a few laps and rode up to the pit and said get your stuff on, your riding this beast, then proceeded to take off to the track again. He came back around a few minutes later and there I was with all my gear on! I wanted to ride it but man was I nervous. I got on and got the pre flight debriefing and off I was. As soon as I got on the straight away I opened it up and man o man that was weird, the power delivery was scary fast. I still flogged it though coming out of corners, short shifting it like it was the Buell. After a couple laps I was getting more and more comfortable on it and was able to get it up to 10,500 rpm which equates to about 165 mph on the front straight. I came in and the professional photographer that was there gave me some sh$t about riding it like a girl, Jake joined in on the fun too. I felt pretty good about how I rode it. I didn't care what anyone said. I just rode a super fast bike for the first time in my life and was able to ride the bike back in one piece. Don't get me wrong the Buell is fast but only has 115 horsepower.

The race on Sunday started out bad as it was raining and we were late getting our tire changed so we started 2 laps down. Jake went out for the first stint on the bike and lap after lap he got faster and faster. At the 30 minute mark it was pouring down rain and Jake was still out there. Now the normal tank on the Buell is 3.6 gallons and on a standard motorcycle (Honda, Suzuki, etc) is 4.8 gallons. The custom frame we had made probably got us to the 4.0+ gallon mark. At the 40 minute mark Jake had moved us up to 6th place out of 11 teams. We kept expecting him to come in for fuel as most of the teams now had already made a fuel stop but he stayed out there. At the hour mark we heard on the corner worker radio that the Buell was having problems. Jake was coming down pit lane with the bike still running so he was running out of gas on the back side of the track but was able to get it back to the pits. We filled it up and Pete Ross (another Buell racer) jumped on board and took off. Talk about getting good gas mileage, Jake went a hour with out pitting and that put us up to 5th place and then Pete moved us up to 4th place before he came back in 10 minutes later with motor problems. It was a downer for sure for the motor to break like that. Especially with all the time and effort everyone put in to get us up to 4th place overall. We did finish 3rd in the heavyweight division and got a trophy. That was the good thing and we were able to bring something back to Downtown Harley Davidson Buell who spent the money to get us to race and who really put in the effort to support us.

In between all of this crazyness of moving, yard work, taking trailer loads of garbage, and building a endurance bike I thought it would be a good idea to sign up for a 114 mile race/ride up to Mt. St. Helens. I haven't been training to seriously since the STP (Seattle to Portland) but have been riding a few times a week and on the weekends. In between moving and getting the bike built I have been squeezing in some bicycle rides so hopefully I will be ok for this ride on Sunday. It has over 7500 ft of climbing and you have a time limit of 10 hours to complete. I am pretty confident I should be able to finish under the time limit but you always have that doubt of your body crackin on ya.



Take care and until next time.



Brad

P.S. Big thanks to Downtown Harley Davidson Buell for all the support and getting behind our racing effort. Check them out at http://www.downtownhd.com/
To get more information about us racing click on bikes, racing.