Yes, “on the Zoo” is a strange wording; the reason for it might become apparent.
This afternoon I went on a bike ride. I go on a lot of bike rides; most of them don’t really warrant mention (got on the bike, rode, went home). This one might have showed up on Facebook as I sometimes do, so that my riding friends can “like” the ride as an indication of their recognition of my awesome cycling prowess (not really), and the rest of my facebook friends can… well, I’m not really sure what they think of those kind of rides, though “what a nutjob” is probably a good start…
You can look at the – which I cleverly named “A Grand Squaky Zoo” after the three hills I climbed (Grand Ridge, Squak Mountain, Zoo hill) – here. 38 miles, 4186’ of up, which is a lot for me in April.
But I digress…
The climb up Squak was a bit more painful than I had hoped, and I planned on skipping the Zoo hill climb, but I had to ride by it on the way home and turned up the hill on the spur of a moment. And immediately thought I’d made a mistake, as the bottom part up to the Zoo is steep. I came around the first turn, and noted a rider up ahead of me.
That’s a good thing; riders up in front of you are rabbits and you can focus on getting closer to them.
As I drew closer, I looked at his bike, because a bike can tell you a lot. Steel frame, fenders, pretty wide tires, and a handlebar bag in the front. That’s a touring setup. But many touring cyclists don’t ride hills, which meant it was most likely a Randonneur. Randonneur is a long-distance cycling discipline with events that are pass/fail based on elapsed time, so a 200 kilometer event (120 miles, or nearly 1000 furlongs) must be completed in 13.5 hours. Which isn’t really that out-of-the-ordinary, except that 200 km is the entry-level distance and the routes tend to be more than a bit hilly.
Where it gets to be a bit nuts is rides of 300, 400, or even 600 km; the local Seattle International Randonneurs 600k route involves nearly 22,000’ of climbing, is 383 miles long, and as a 600k has a time limit of 40 hours. There are also 1200k rides with a time limit of 90 hours; in that time you will climb 38,000’.
I like hills, but that seems a bit excessive…
As I pulled up next to the rider – why am I quite a bit faster than a randonneur rider? – I slow down to talk to him. Any distraction is welcome on a long climb, and this one is going to take me 36 minutes today – so we start talking, and he mentions that this is a training ride for him; he rode over from Freemont and he’s going to ride up this climb 6 times and then go home.
6 times. Well, if I was going to ride it 6 times (for about 7000’ of up total), I guess I’d be riding it fairly slowly as well.
Turns out his name is Doug Migden, and he’s training for the Transcontinental Race, a self-supported race across Europe. In 2015, he rode the 4200 km and climbed 35,000 *meters* in 446.5 hours. There’s a great writeup of his experience here.
I often wondered what you do if a 1200k ride isn’t long enough, and now I know. It’s always nice to run into people that are crazier than you as it lets you feel that you are sane.
We chatted and I learned a lot about long-distance self-supported riders. As we got about 3/4 of the way, I turned left to head to the classic top of the climb. Normally I don’t think you have done the Zoo if you don’t do the top, but a) Doug was going to an alternate top, and b) he was doing it 6 times, so I think I’m going to cut him a little slack.
And damn, was that descent cold.
So, what do you think ?