On Saturday July 10, 2010 I attempted to ride the Mt Greylock Century. Since moving to the northeast in 2002, this is a ride that I’ve always wanted to participate in. Last week I was in Benidorm Bikes, and ran into my friend Coleman who invited me along for this year’s event, so I jumped at the chance.
The Mt. Greylock Century climbs to the highest point in Massachusetts and includes a number of other challenging climbs. The ride hasn’t been held for a couple of years while the road to the top of Mt. Greylock was being reconstructed.
Saturday morning I met up with Coleman, plus Chip, Mike, and Rob from the Eastern Bloc Cycling Club and we carpooled to the start at the Berkshire Mall in Lanesborough, Mass., about an hour and a half drive from where I live in Connecticut.
The forecast was for increasing chances of rain, and we remained hopeful that the weather would hold, but as we approached the start, the heavens opened, and it began raining harder than I have seen in a long time. We stopped at a Starbucks to discuss over coffee if we really wanted to ride in this weather.
The rain eased up a little, and since we had driven all the way there, decided to go for it. After all, a day riding in the rain beats a day not riding at all. At least the temperature was somewhat warm despite the wet weather.
It’s never fun starting a ride in the rain.
The route started out on a bike path, and then climbed Mt. Greylock pretty early in the ride. It was raining pretty hard as we climbed, but at least the rain kept the tourists off the mountain, so the roads were pretty much car free. The climb from the south starts out pretty steep, and I’m glad I put the lowest gear on my bike that was mechanically possible. The second half of the climb was much easier. There wasn’t much of a view at the top since it was clouded in.
Wet and clouded in at the top of Greylock (3400 feet)
The descent down the north side of Greylock was a little sketchy in the rain with some tight switchbacks. From the bottom of the climb in North Adams we headed east on Route 2 toward Charlemont. This stretch of road was very scenic, and included another challenging climb and fun descent.
At the 50 mile mark it was still raining pretty hard, when we turned south and started a 4.3 mile climb that I thought was the toughest of the ride. Maybe it was just that we had already done a lot of climbing, but it was steep.
At the 50 mile mark. You have to be a little crazy to ride in this weather.
At the top of the climb was the lunch stop for the ride, which provided pasta, fruit salad, and fixing for PB&J sandwiches. I don’t know if it is just me, but it was a little weird that the food was served out of large plastic storage bins like you would store stuff with in your garage. But, hey, I was hungry. so I’d eat anything.
The Lunch Stop
By this time in the ride, we’d had our fair share of rain and one of the guys I was riding with was concerned about getting back home too late in the day. When he suggested that we cut the ride short, there wasn’t much protesting, so we decided to take an alternative route back to the start.
At route 116 we turned right, and followed that to Adams (including a fun descent into town), then we took the bike path the final 10 miles back to the car.
This is the second time this year that I have started out to do a century ride, but cut the ride short due to riding in the rain all day (I also rode the Seattle LIVESTRONG Challenege). We still did a total of 86 miles, which was my longest ride of the year so far.
I would love to do this ride again in the future when it is not raining, and I lose some weight to get up the climbs a little faster.
Garmin Issues
On a side note, this year I have been using a Garmin 705, and recently started preloading the ride routes to follow. On this ride we started off on the bike path instead of the road that I had mapped out, and the Garmin kept wanting me to turn around and take the fastest point back to the start.
I figured out how to reslove this by changing the routing settings recalculate option from “automatic” to “off”. I hope this helps anyone else that has experience this frustrating default behavior for the Garmin 705.
The Garmin elevation also was not accurate for the ride, and I suspect it was thrown off by the very wet and humid weather since the unit uses barometric pressure to determine elevation. I hope no damage was done to the GPS from riding in the rain.
Photos
View More photos from the ride on flickr
In announcing the new Garmin Edge 800 cycling computer today, we took the best of Garmin Edge technology, added a touchscreen color display and made route planning easier than ever before with a one-stop shopping for creating, previewing and downloading routes to ride. New mapping options such as Garmin’s BaseCamp route planning and BirdsEye™ Satellite Imagery make it perfect for training, touring and riding on the trail.
