Amber and I have been riding in the evenings to try to avoid the highs in the mid-nineties that Anaheim is experiencing. The problem is the traffic coming down off the mountain is insane on a Sunday mid-afternoon. But this is Southern California, so we expect it.
My friend, Michele Brougher, just rode London-Edinburgh-London, a 1400k - 5 day event. They missed the worst of the European heatwave, but she told me she still had to deal with temperatures in the low 90s in Scotland. It's insane that Scotland has about the same temperature as Southern California.
Some hotels in the UK claim to have air-conditioning. They don't - not by my standards. Their air-conditioners waft out air that's a few degrees cooler than the room. You have to hold your hand up to the vents to even know they're on. They're going to have to work on that.
If things keep going then Southern Californian RBAs are going to have to cram an entire brevet series into January and February. By March it'll be too hot.
Edgar, my son-in-law just bought a Lynskey GR300 titanium gravel bike. It arrives in October. Hope he likes it. Because it's made in USA it's very competitively priced with Chinese carbon bikes and I think he will like it a lot more. He thought about a Litespeed, but in the end the endurance and touring options offered by a gravel bike won him over.
Your comment about having to squeeze the entire series into Jan & Feb made me laugh out loud. Alan Johnson, LONG-time Raleigh Region RBA typically starts his series in late March or early April, with the 300 in late April, the 400 in mid-May, and the 600 in early June. I have ridden the 600 when the official high temp certainly challenged the 100F mark, and the temps coming off the asphalt were certainly in excess of that. Oh, and there is actual high humidity here to "augment" the temps.
ReplyDeleteThis year, we got lucky -- okay, I got lucky. Somehow, we managed to have mild temps for the entire series (and also the Centenary 300 which was the Saturday immediately after the 600 finished on Sunday -- although I pre-rode solo on Friday so that I could help Alan if anyone actually decided to take advantage of Alan's suggestion for a post-300 cook-out -- also, IF there had been a cook-out, and I rode on the day of the event, I would have finished long after the cook-out among the fast-crew would have scarfed all the food).
I also got lucky in that 8-time PBP finisher Doug Kirby decided to do an entire series this year so that he would get in a 600 and get a better place in the 2023 PBP pre-reg queue (last time, Doug had only ridden a 200 the year before and barely got in). The lucky for me part is that I had someone with which to ride the entire series.
I think you probably don't approve comments, but ...
Martin Shipp
Unfortunately most of the comments I get are just spam so I don't make moderating them a high priority. I do enjoy proper comments, though.
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