Dart Populaire

I rode my first Dart Populaire last Sunday. This is one third of a Fleche so it's 120km and you have eight hours to complete it. Other than that it has all the weird Fleche rules. It was hosted by the San Diego Randonneurs. There was only one team and it consisted of...

Myself
Kerin Huber
David Danovsky
Hector Maytorena
Keith Olsen

We started in Dana Point and rode along the coast towards Torrey Pines, then mercifully headed inland. Hector originally planned to finish at the top of a gratuitous climb called Mt Helix. I said "screw that" and he changed the end to a brewhouse.

The first control was at the southmost Angelos in Oceanside where I had a pineapple sculpin beer and a breakfast burrito the size of my head. Fortunately the pineapple dominated and you could hardly taste the sculpin at all. We lounged around here for quite a while but eventually had to move on.

Heading down the coast with a tailwind and a strong wind we made much better time than you are supposed to on a team event. I was pleased to ride on the Hwy 56 bike path, which the San Diegan riders user frequently, but I had never experienced. It's always nice to discover a new bike path. We also had to climb up a road called "Montezuma". I still haven't found a hill called "Montezuma" that I liked. For some reason I'm always going the wrong way.

We were soon at our next control which was a Shell gas station. We didn't really do much here because we had an enforced control (25km within the last two hours) within a few miles.

The 25km-to-go control was at a Carls Jr. I had DNFed at my 600k the prior weekend because of a nutritional error (too much protein and fat, not enough good carbs) so I was focused on eating carbs today. I was carrying two Trader Joe's scones which really hit the spot. I think I'll be using Perpetuum, Endurolytes, and scones on Willie's 400k in two weeks.

We covered the last 25km in 90 minutes to arrive at BJ's brewhouse at 4:30pm.

It was crazy busy so David got all our bikes into the back of his F250 which reminded me of Willie except not quite so "homemade". He drove us through nasty traffic back to the start of the ride and we all ate at Habit burger. Damn that's a good burger, especially after 80 miles of riding. Sorry, I was too hungry to get a photo of it.

Weather was great, route was great, good riding buddies - nice day.