So on Saturday I tackled (with some other crazies) the SOS ride to prepare for TransIowa. The Sloppy Oppressive Sludgefest (SOS, get it?) certainly lived up to its name. It started in fog, then rain, then more rain, then hills, and slop, and doom, and finally some sunshine and some pavement. Here’s my story/perspecitve of how the ride went down: I rolled into Gilbert about 6am, the scheduled start time. It took me 15 mins or so of driving around to find the street where Paul lives, and we were meeting for the ride. Luckily eveyone was still there, so I unloaded, grabbed some water and we hit the road, gravel that is. It was incredibly foggy, and visibility was 1/4 mile at best. Riding in the dark and fog, holes and washboard bumps came out of nowhere and just had to be dealt with rather than avoided. Once the sun started to come up, the fog lessened, but the rain started. The roads were already a touch damp but not bad. Once the rain started, the roads quickly became soft, sloppy, horrible things to ride on. We pressed on. After some time we got into Ledges park and rode the killer hills there, the good part? pavement. The bad? 6-8 inch deep creek crossings. At ledges these things are built into the roads, and work really well, for cars. Sure there’s some stones on the sides to walk across but they were either missing or underwater, so we just rode through. More hills, lots of gravely slop, lots of fun. Two of the six of us opted for a shorter ride for assorted reasons(no shame in only riding 75-ish miles of this stuff). The remaining four pressed on to what would be a 107 mile day. I have no doubt, given good conditions I could have made the planned 150. Paul has a killer ride report/write up on his blog. I won’t even try to match is but here’s some highlights/things I learned.

1. Wet gravel gets everywhere, even in your shorts. Plan for this. I failed to have any chamois creme, bag balm, etc on hand. This was stupid. Not taking an extra pair of shorts was mistake #2. I chaffed myself in the whole region pretty horribly, and could hardly stand to sit down on the drive home(punny?). I had no hope of getting on the bike the next day, and maybe not the day after. It needs a good cleaning anyway.
2. 105/Ultegra 10 speed doesn’t like to be covered in mud, make sure it’s 100% dialed in before you try to tweak it back into proper function on the road. My gearing got so gunked up that I left it in the granny ring in the front and the middle 8 in the back, having lost either end of my cassette to gunk build up or cross chaining.
3. There are some hills that still take tons of effort even in the granny ring. Like most the ones we rode, thanks Paul.
4. Wet gravel is fun for a short time. Well, it is more fun now looking back at what I did, rather then while I was doing it.
5. You’d be surprised what kind of slop you can ride through on 700×38 hybrid tires. There were soft spots everywhere, most the gravel only let you make a slight imprint. Soft spots let you leave a 1-3 inch track. Up hill spots like this really tested the wills and balance skills of all invovled.
6. You can, in fact, be too tired to eat until you are full. After the ride I had approximately 2300 calories of ravioli and was still hungry but I went to bed anyway because I was fairly sure I couldn’t stay awake long enough to cook/eat more.
7. Always bring a camera. I charged mine, but totally forgot it because I busy remembering other stuff. Thusly I don’t have pictures like i should. Cory took some killer shots, as did Paul. Check them out.
8. A beer after a ride taste better than almost anything else. Also beers without riding are good, but not even close to as good as a beverage earned through suffering.
9. Even if you’ve had hard days on the bike before, there’s always room for one more.

Now that I’ve unintentionally rhymed it might be time to call it a day(night?) and just post this and try to get back on the bike tomorrow.

Big thanks to Paul for organizing/hosting this ride. It was awesome. Check out the links above for pics, especially Cory’s as he’s a pro, and his shots are awesome.