San Diego Epic Ride

As I’m leaving San Diego for Northern California I put in my last Saturday ride with the San Diego Cyclo-Vets a couple of weekends ago. Naturally it turned out to be an epic ride. An epic ride…every roadie has had an epic ride at least once in their cycling career. This is a ride where something happens to make that ride particularly challenging. It could be running out of food and water, getting lost, going much farther than you originally intended, getting rain, hail, snow, etc., on the ride.

On this, my last Saturday ride in San Diego, I got several of the above conditions. The ride started as usual and we made it to the first regrouping point without incident. As we left for the Torrey Pines part of the ride it started raining. Not a downpour just a light rain. It turns out that San Diego roadies hate and fear rain more than most as they are used to 72 degrees 24/7 and 12 months out of the year. Since my primary residence was in the Mojave desert, where we long for rain, it was no big deal for me but the other Cyclo-Vets panicked and wanted to end the ride. After much discussion it was decided to keep riding but alter the ride to head East and North and into the neighboring city of Poway. The idea was that the weather was coming in from the West and by heading East we could avoid it.

This diversion worried many of the riders as they had not been in this direction before. Now myself, the non-native of the group, wasn’t worried a bit because I take this same ride on my own on Sundays. My only problem was that I didn’t eat as much as I usually do for breakfast as I was only expecting a 43 mile ride of various intensity levels. I also carried water and food for a trip of about that length too. Though I was wearing arm warmers I didn’t have leg warmers or any other type of cold weather gear – this is San Diego after all.

Well to make a long story shorter, the ride out to the far point of the ride went without a hitch, with the exception that the weather did not improve but only got worse. We were now climbing the tough pitch up Scripps-Poway Pkwy road and I’m now consuming more calories than I planned on. I’m also cold and wet but realize I only have to ride 12 miles or so and I’m back in a warm apartment with plenty of food. We get to the top of the grade and wait in the drizzle for the tail end of the group to finish the climb – this takes longer than I expected as the last guy had fallen pretty far behind. My teeth even started chattering from the cold and this is San Diego in the early summer. Thank God, the tail end guy comes up and says, “go without me, I’ll be okay.” So off we go down the screaming descent of Scripps-Poway Pkwy road. Somewhere down the descent I realize that I can hardly feel my legs as they are actually getting numb from the wet and cold and I also realize that I’m hungry and I’ve already eaten my one and only power bar and have drank most of my sports drink and water…but I’ve only got 10 miles to go, on what has now become a 50 mile ride instead of 43.

We finish the descent and make the left turn onto Pomerado Rd and the group wants to stop again, this time at a mini-mart for food. I’m real hungry now and pretty short on fluids too so you would think that I would welcome this stop but I get impatient. I’m smelling the barn and have done this ride many time in the past – so I say my goodbyes and take off on my own and figure I’ll be home in less than an hour. Look at my MapMyRide map at the end of this post and you can see what went wrong and how I ended my last San Diego ride in Epic proportions. I should have stayed on Pomerado Rd but for some reason, probably because I was feeling sorry for myself, and had my head down while I was riding, I failed to make the left turn to remain on Pomerado Rd and instead was now heading West on Spring Canyon Road. About 2 miles in, I realize I’ve never seen this particular scenery before and must be going the wrong way. To make matters worse, I took a right turn and realized I have no idea what direction I’m going. The cloud cover and drizzle prevented me from getting any bearings and stupid me, I forget I’m riding with a GPS unit (Garmin Forerunner 205 though I now have the 305) which has the capability of giving me heading information. So I do a U-turn and back track and end up on Scripps Ranch Road and the Scripps Ranch neighborhood. This friggin neighborhood is all vertical and all the roads start with Scripps this or Scripps that. I’m now completely out of food and drink and realize that I loaned my emergency money, the $10 I keep in my bike bag, to my daughter the other day. I grab my cell phone to call my wife and find out that the battery is dead…damn, I’m going to have to stop and ask for help. I find a guy working on his front yard and he kindly tells me how to get back to Pomerado Road but his directions sound like, “take Scripps (fill in other part of name) to Scripps that, turn right on Scripps this, and another right on Scripps that and you’ll be there.

I finally make it back to the apartment, wet and cold. I’ve covered 63 miles and have sat on the bike for 4 hours and 19 minutes. I expected a ride of 43 miles and a total bike time, including regrouping stop points, of around 2 hours 45 minutes. I usually eat a large bowl of oatmeal and drink orange juice before a long ride but since I didn’t expect this, I had only a half bowl of cereal and no juice and didn’t even bother to completely fill one of my water bottles. At least the other bottle had a sports drink in it. I didn’t even bother taking my gel flask as I figured the single power bar and sports drink would be enough. There is a moral in this story somewhere…now I have to spend the next 6 hours moving all the stuff in our apartment into a 16’ truck for the journey back to the Antelope Valley to prepare for our move to the Napa Valley...