[bike] Seacoast Century

fredrickegerman and I rode the Granite State Wheelmen's Seacoast Century yesterday. It was a pretty good route, for covering all of coastal New Hampshire and then some; we went down into Salisbury, MA almost to the Merrimack River and up into Maine past York Beach (and the Fun-O-Rama there). There were also enough little loops off the main road to satisfy some "huh, I wonder if that goes anywhere" curiosity. Somewhere between 99.1 (if you trust my bike) and 100.8 (by the cue sheet) miles, in just over 8 hours. Route map (kinda slow coming up for me right now, need to fix JS)

The weather was pretty nice for the ride; it was a bit chilly leaving Hampton at 7:20 AM but it did warm up. The canonical problem with the New Hampshire coast is a strong wind from the south, which kicked in nicely leaving New Castle. I think part of the point of the random 10-mile inland segment in North Hampton and Rye is to break up the death headwind, because the last five miles were really painful that way.

There turns out to be a lot to be said for being in the big group ride, and actually staying with the group. We'd occasionally get passed by groups of a dozen or so really fast people, but when we turned around in York it was pretty clear we were right around the middle of the group that had left Hampton right after registering. Having it be more of a group event, and less of a solitary thing, was kind of reassuring in its own way.

Big group of us southbound got hosed by the lift bridge between Portsmouth and Kittery. Road construction was mostly better than during the summer, in that there were only a couple of 10-foot sections of totally unpaved road. It was a good ride in all, though, and I'll probably do another one...eventually.

More musings on bike accessories

From the ride yesterday:

• Almost everyone had a bike computer and clipless pedals of some sort. I had among the least-nice bikes of the people there.
• Almost everyone depended heavily on the ride support. Few people had anything beyond a butt bag with emergency repair supplies and two water bottles.
• A couple of people carried small Camelbak bags, supplementing their water, but there visibly wasn't anything else in there.

Which says to me that the cool kids don't try to carry a full day's worth of supplies for this sort of ride in any case. Which in turn says that if I am going to carry a full day's worth of supplies, it's not any more wrong to put them on a rack instead of my back.