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What is this?

This is documentation of a personal century ride for the UMCA Year-Rounder Challenge. The basic idea is to make at least one 100-mile ride in each month of 2007. It gets me out when it might otherwise be too easy to say “too bad the weather wasn't better this month.”

September 1, 2007

Route Overview

I began with the GEARS group, escorting David Kroodsma and Nicky Phear of Ride for Climate out of Eugene and out over Wolf Creek toward the coast. I assumed this segment would be slow, considering David and Nicky were on fully loaded touring bikes, and of course it was. We rode with them a little west on the Siuslaw highway before turning back east toward Lorane. At Lorane I split from the group to continue east to Cottage Grove and bring it up to 100 miles. (The others proceeded to Eugene through Crow, getting about 80 miles on the day.)

Route map

As gpx (open in some route viewing applications, including GPS Visualizer) or as kml (open in Google Earth).

I had a lot of problems keeping a signal on the GPS, a Garmin Etrex Vista Cx that I was keeping in the back pocket of my jersey. It hadn't occurred to me before that the orientation of the device would matter, but part way back on Siuslaw Highway I turned it in my pocket so the antenna was facing up and not blocked by power bar wrappers, and after that the signal seemed to be more reliable.

I probably lost a few miles in the accounting because of gaps in the GPS record, but I was well over 100 so I don't care. More amusingly, when I ran a speed profile on this track, my max reported speed was upwards of 1000 mph, and sure enough that speed seems to have been reached in a segment where the recorded track is nowhere near the highway. There were some good descents, but I don't remember going that fast, nor leaving the highway to take short cuts through the forest.

Time/Distance Plot