Seattle-Woodinville-Carnation-Issaquah Saturday Loop

We were supposed to be doing the Carol's Greater Seattle century today, but instead Robert and I followed the route for a while (until Carnation), but then broke off and headed home. So we ended up doing what I'll call an "88-mile century".

He needed to be home earlier rather than later, and I did a century+ last week, so I was in no real rush to actually do the whole ride anyway. And when the ride is unofficial it's soo much easier to bail. I guess we wanted to get all of the the "I want to quit" feelings out of our systems. And hopefully we did.

Before rolling, we had coffee and more at Vivace on Broadway.

Cue sheet for the day:

Once in the U-district it was already time for the ride to start (9 AM), and we were still on the BG Trail. So we just continued north on it, hoping to run into the back of the pack, or be passed by the front of it at some point. But we never saw the pack!

Instead, we just rode on, pedaling over roads new and old - even if most of them do look exactly the same!

Great views on Snoqualmie Valley Road:
A nice winding road:

Old structure in "downtown" Carnation:

After Carnation, we decided to break off the official route and start heading back to the I-90 bridge. But not to be lazy about it, we were sure to include the 8-13% Tolt Hill Road, as well as 244th Ave leading to Sammamish. On the way down Inglewood Drive I think we hit close to 50 mph, but that damn stop light at the bottom meant we never got a chance to really push it there. Oh well.

We made our way south on E. Lake Sammamish Blvd, a road that both of us remarked seems to always slog on forever. I think the problem with that road is that each part of it looks about the same as the last, so there aren't any punctuations that tell you where you are along it.

In Issaquah we headed for Newport Way, stilll heading back to Seattle. We passed a rider in a yellow jacket, who ended up catching up to us and chatting a bit. Turns out he was on the WTS ride as well, but felt it was too "competitive" so he dropped out. We tried to explain that the WTS rides were jointly run by Cascade & SIR, and that it was probably the Cascade riders that were getting competitive. (Then again, some randos do this from time to time... but we made sure not to scare the guy away!)

Lucky for him, we were headed back to Seattle as well so he bike-pooled it back with us.

In the I-90 Tunnel, Robert and our new friend (Allen, I think):

Full photo set on flickr. Hopefully Robert will post a "snot-rocket" shot he got of me, that should be a good one!

Here's a graph of elevation (orange) and speed (blue) from the 141 km ride - we paced really well!

In fact we paced so well that our "peak 60 minutes" (based on speed in this case) was actually towards the end of the ride.

And here's a map of the route we ended up doing. We just about got lost up north in the Woodinville area, but eventually found our way back on course.


Entire workout:
Duration: 5:53:13 (6:33:57) (~40 minutes not rolling)
Distance: 141.617 km (~88 miles)
Elevation Gain: 2291 m (7,516 ft? That's what WKO reports. Garmin Training Center reports 5,200 feet)

Min Max Avg
Speed: 0 75 24.7 kph (15.3 mph)