Poolesville!

Lord, you ought to been uptown

And seen that train come down

You could hear the whistle blow a hundred miles

Well, I didn't make it a hundred miles today, but I did make it 80. Gmaps says less, my bike odometer says more. I'm splitting the difference.

Today was one of those rides that just kept changing, morphing in response to the terrain, my physical sensations, the scenery, the position of the sun in the sky. When you have the opportunity to experience a long stretch of road first hand in a relatively short period of time, these types of changes become magnified. You are, after all, sitting on two wheels by yourself, for hours. One of the few other times I've experienced this sensation was during a Longs Peak summit attempt last summer. You begin at 9000' of elevation and work your way up toward the top at over 14000'. That's nearly a vertical mile and everything from the temperature to the geology to the ecology and the thinness of the air change right before your senses. This is a much longer day, as I believe it takes something like 12 hours to summit and return back. I don't know for sure because during my attempt I fell victim to the altitude (started feeling sick somewhere around 13500') and the subfreezing temperatures, sleet and fog (it was the end of July yet it seemed more like an east coast winter). I had to throw in the towel a mile from the summit, but that's another story altogether.

Today's metamorphoses were more subtle than a Colorado fourteener, but things I picked up on ranged from the radial progression of city to suburb to exurb (and the socioeconomic implications of such), differentiations in watershed ecology, and my own physical ebb and flow in response to things such as hills, food and water intake, and traffic.

I turned the iPod off within the first 1.5 hours. This is atypical of me but as soon as I shut it off I was glad I did.

I won't (nor do I believe I even could if I tried) recount the trip mile for mile, nuance for nuance. I began very early, and I felt pretty sluggish and wondered if I would decide to turn back at the 20 mile mark. But as I've heard from other riders and runners, a day can't necessarily be judged by how you feel at any given moment. It's the sum of the parts that's more important. The sluggishness toward the outset was probably more related to the time of day than anything else (I had a 5am departure) but I didn't exactly have the freshest legs either.

Democracy Rd is a bear of a hill, long and steep enough to make you work. Just around every bend there is more hill. My mood picked up markedly as I turned onto S Glen Rd: narrow, winding, and car free.

I picked up another rider for a short stretch out in Darnestown, and he hung as long as he could before dropping off and turning off my course. Darnestown Rd was a pain in the ass. The forest had given way to corn fields, allowing a mean headwind to slow me down. And it seemed that it was uphill for the whole 10 mile stretch of it to Beallsville.

The roads out near Poolesville, MD are pretty ideal for riding. At one point I passed a couple perched on camp chairs on the side of the road. Thinking they were just out for a morning picnic, I waved good morning and carried on. It was after I remembered a story by a co-worker that I realized they were there spectating. There was a bike race underway (or about to be) and eventually I road straight into a swarm of shaved-legs types. Somehow I got turned around and wound up in "downtown" Poolesville which is really just a crossroads with a gas station. It turned out for the better as I really needed a water refill so I popped in the gas station and filled up.

I made it out of there before the gun went off and I luckily didn't find myself amidst a race peloton. River Rd seemed like it took forever and after turning off of it I found a second wind. This was largely mental as I was really looking forward to being done with the ride and I could sense that I was getting close. Altogether the door-to-door was somewhere around 5:15 and the saddle clock read 4:51. The former accounts for some short breaks I took for eating, drinking, and peeing. I brought 3 energy gels and half a bagel. I think it was more than enough but I have to find an alternative to the gels. They just get gross after the 2nd one.