I broke the streak of bad luck

Amber and I rode the RMCC 400k on the 7th of June in Louisville, CO. My last two brevet attempts failed due to mechanical problems. I have also been having problems with my knee lately so I was a bit worried.

RMCC has an interesting way of running.brevets. You join the club for $25 and you can ride as many brevets as you want. They have a very full calendar so there's a lot of opportunity to rack up the km. If I lived closer I'd join up every year. On the down side - there's no support at all. You get your brevet card at the start of the ride and that's it. Definitely on the unsupported edge of randonneuring.

It's a two day drive to Louisville from Los Angeles so we kept an eye of the weather on the way here. Friday was predicted to have early storms, Saturday was cool but with minimal rain, and Sunday had heavy rain and even tornadoes. Our ride had temps from 55-60, steady wind about 10-15mph from the east, and only 30 minutes of rain.

We started at the ungodly hour of 4am and headed north into the cool night. It was overcast with leaden skies and recently rained upon roads. We were ready for rain but hoped it wouldn't come to that. Fear of jinxing stopped Amber and I making any comments about the weather.

The first real challenge was the climb up Poudre Canyon which was running very high. Even so there were quite a few rafters coming down. We saw a kayak pinned against a rock but there was no-one inside fortunately.



Top of Poudre Canyon

Then we dropped down Poudre and climbed up to Forks. Nice restaurant but a nasty climb alongside a busy road. We turned around dropped back down alongside the same nasty road. Then we headed north to Wellington where we started working our way back to the start of the ride.

About 9pm it started to rain which messed our Garmins up so that we got lost and missed a turn. This only added about three miles but it was three miles we didn't need. The rain only lasted 30 minutes and was actually quite pleasant. This last 100k was the most difficult to navigate because it kept crossing our outbound route which was very confusing. I went into calorie debt and spent the last 50 miles trying to get out but never really succeeding. Part of the problem there was the oddly spaced controls (19 miles then 40 miles, etc).

Around mile 220 we came to the scene of an accident. There must have been six police cars there blocking the road. Normally they would not have allowed us through but we asked very politely and  a police officer escorted us through the accident scene. I've no idea how we would have completed the ride on time otherwise.

We got to the end later than we had hoped because the last 100k took 7 hours instead of the 5 that the others took. Nevertheless I managed to break two bad streaks - major mechanicals and DNFing on the Colorado rides. No flats, no mechanicals, no crashes, minor rain, great temps, minor diversion.

The next day we took it easy to help my bad knee recover. We watched the tornado reports on the television. Thank God we weren't out in that weather.