GB left early in the morning, while I stayed behind to get a little work done, and then to load up the car, secure the house and catch back up to him. I ended up leaving about 2.5 hours after he did, and that turned out to work fine. The first scary part was a tunnel at Gaviotta peak, which GB described as pure terror for 200 yards. The bike lane is a couple inches wide and the car lanes are narrower, too, so the passing vehicles were very close to him. Plus it's dark and really loud in there to go with the tight conditions.
Once he got through there, it was on to Lompoc, for our planned food stop and refreshing of his on-bike supplies. However, I got through the town, and never saw him. How could I have passed him and never notice him? Are bicyclists really that anonymous and commonplace on the side of the road that I never saw him? And then I got a text from him about how he'd taken a wrong turn (two, in fact) and now he was trying to find his way back to the right track. As I was trying to figure out where he was to try to help with that, he figured it out, and was outside of Lompoc headed north again. Apparently he went north a different direction than we'd planned, though, because as I got back to the route, I still never passed him. It turns out he went the other side of a diamond and we ended up at the same point on the other side, even though I was ahead of him. My way was a lot prettier, but his way had a lot less hill climbing to do. I'd call that a win-win.
After turning back to the only other route I could imagine he was on, I eventually saw him northbound while I was headed southbound. 700 miles later, when I could actually turn around, I did so, and caught back up to him, and spent about an hour leapfrogging him and taking pictures. Our modified plan had us stopping in Guadalupe for lunch, and we got there about noon. The last 15 miles coming into Guadalupe had GB riding straight into a pretty fierce wind, so by the time he got in he looked pretty spent. It was a good thing we planned to stop and regroup there. We ate at a Mexican restaurant there that was nice enough to let GB bring his bike inside (Heather forgot the bike lock -- oops!). We ate well and did a good job selecting light foods. GB ate a grilled tilapia fillet with some rice and a small salad. He ate it slow, to give it time to digest a bit before heading back out. Then we set him up with a better route plan, more liquid and more food to eat on the ride and sent him on to San Luis Obispo. There was some talk of going 40 miles further to San Simeon, but I was just so tired from driving that I pushed for stopping at SLO instead. :)
I passed him up and headed to the rendezvous point, sending text messages along the way at confusing intersections. I stopped at two bike stores, looking for a certain gel GB likes that we couldn't find in Santa Barbara before we left, and eventually found it. I put gas in the car. Then I got to the hotel and checked in and started unloading the car, and GB was right behind me. How'd he do that? Apparently, he took another wrong turn and ended up shaving about 20 miles off his trip!
And thus, Day One was completed. It was about 3:15 in the afternoon, and the rest of the day/night were spent eating or sleeping. We are watching three main consumables that he needs a lot of this week -- calories, protein and unsaturated fats. He needs water, too, but he's pretty good at hydration, so we're not watching that with quite the same insanity. Today we ended up doing great with protein (targeting between 100 and 150 grams per day), okay with calories (targeting 7000 per day), and terrible with fats (targeting about 350 grams per day). We'll see how that translates into today's ride, and we'll adjust from there. Well, actually, we already started adjusting, so I hope we're adjusting correctly.
Here was the route that was followed for the day's riding, as opposed to my driving route:
Day Two is already underway with GB having left just a few minutes ago, on slightly under-inflated tires. Ugh. I forgot the bike pump, so I'll be working on correcting that this morning. Our goal is Carmel-by-the-Sea, but it's a pretty agressive goal, so we'll just have to see how that goes.
Statistial Summary:
- Time on the road: 8.5 hours
- Time in the saddle: 6 hours, 46 minutes
- Maximum speed: 72 km/hr (45 mi/hr)
- Average speed: 26 km/hr (16 mi/hr)
- Distance ridden: 177.4 km (110 mi)
- Calories burned on the ride: 5876
- Calories consumed: 4250
- Protein consumed: 214.5g
- Unsaturagted fats consumed: 90.5g
- Weight: Up 0.5kg
- Number of wrong turns: 3
1 comment:
Very cool! I hope day 2 is just as good -- I don't know if wrong turns are bad or good -- seems the unplanned turns can work to his favor, so may all the turns get you to the right place! :) It's all so interesting! So much more excitement than I would undertake. I'm curious, how do you know all the stats? That's neat too.
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