Day 7 - Roanoke Virginia to Waynesboro Virginia

I just completed what I expect to be the toughest day of the trip. It was 130 miles with 12,000 feet of climbing. Most of the mileage was on the Blue Ridge Parkway with about 5 miles on each end of city streets. We rode down the longest descent I've ever been on, 12 miles. On the way down, a car pulled out from an overlook in front of Ethan and me and stayed in front of us because we were catching up to a slower rider in front of us so the car could not pass him and so the car slowed down and we ended up catching up to the car. Finally the car pulled over and let us around him. After being on the Parkway for 5 days you learn that most drivers have no concept of your speed when you are descending. He really should not have pulled out in front of us but our speed was hard to judge. Two miles after this incident, we came around a corner entering a straightaway and there was a car in the middle of doing a 3 point turnaround literally in the middle of the Parkway! With all the overlooks and pull offs available to turn around he uses the roadway itself. We didn't even brake, just kept coming and by the time we got to him he had cleared our lane and was in his lane pointed the right way. Some of the things people do on these roads is just mind boggling.

I got my first flat tire on Pactour today. I
was coming down a big grade at about 35 mph and hit the expansion joint of the approach to the James River bridge. I got a pinch flat where the joint pinched my tire tube between the metal joint and my rim and punctured the tube. I had my weight over the front of the bike descending so that didn't help matters. It took less than 10 minutes to fix it by putting in a new tube. That's just part of riding unfortunately.

Since we had a lot of descending today, I wanted to talk a little about the advantages of riding with one or more people in these mountains. On the climbs, the advantage is you have someone to ride with at a steady and constant pace that doesn't waste energy. Once you summit, you roll some momentum over the crest of the grade and as you start down, you shift in to your large chainring. Now you have your biggest gears ready for the descent. The advantage of riding with a group on a descent is each rider creates a huge slipstream that at speeds of 35 mph plus trails out for at least 20 feet behind them. So if you are riding behind this person, you get a huge advantage because once you are in that riders slipstream, you are expending probably 25 to 30 percent less effort than the rider whose slipstream you are in. When you get in the slipstream, you know it immediately. The wind changes from a constant rushing noise to more of a buffeting or almost popping sound that is hard to describe and the required effort to maintain speed immediately drops. We have spent hours over the last few days doing this to save energy and ride faster. To give you an idea of how much it helps down the mountain grades, if I am riding behind someone, they can be pedaling going downgrade and I will have to occasionally pull out of the slipstream to check my speed and I'm not pedaling at all. Otherwise I would literally either run the other rider over or have to hit my brakes. So now you know how to ride up and down mountain grades if you ever decide to do Pactour.

Tomorrow we will ride up to Front Royal using Skyline Drive. It will be less climbing and fewer miles but should still be a challenge.