6:36 AM - left house in SE Portland
8:00-8:10 - stopped in Oregon City
10:05-11:00 - stopped in Canby
2:40-3:00 - stopped in Mt. Angel
5:30 PM - arrived at dad's in NE Salem
So I left Portland easily, as Clinton/Woodward hit the river pretty much right at the start of the Springwater Corridor. I spent the first couple of miles checking the half-mile posts and wondering how long I would care. Answer: about ten miles. I had my directions in my pocket at first, and at the top of nasty hill in Milwaukie, I noticed they'd fallen out. I didn't want to climb that hill again, didn't know how far back I'd lost them, and didn't want to waste time. I knew what I was doing out to Oregon City, so I decided to keep going and find more directions there. Luckily, a Best Western Inn was right there when I rode in, and they let me use their lobby computer to recreate my entire directions.
Oregon City was horrible. It was all uphill through the city, and the main road to Canby - Central Point Rd - was very difficult. There were long stretches of downhill coasting at 20-30 (?) mph, followed by equally long and steep hills, some of which I had to walk up. It was well-placed in the day, and I was also lucky that the clouds didn't start to clear until I got to Canby. I'm not looking forward to those hills during the third quarter of the last day in the afternoon sun when I do it the other direction.
I was surprised how quickly my strength rebounded. After about an hour sitting in a park in Canby and eating lunch, I felt practically new.
Just outside Canby, it was a series of flat country roads in between nice gardens. When I got to the longest straight shot - Needy Rd - it presented a series of medium-height valleys. Each hill on the other side, I wouldn't have wanted to climb starting from flat, but with the momentum from each preceding descent I could actually coast about halfway up. Eventually however I came across this confusing intersection:
It looks like a straight shot on the map, but there's just enough of a curve to make it look like a more or less equal three-way split at the intersection. My notes only said that Monte Carlo turned into Barlow, so I picked the wrong Barlow Rd and wasted several miles before I noticed the sun was behind me, and I was pretty sure all the temporary jaunts north were supposed to be done by this point.
So I got into Mt. Angel later than expected and pretty tired of riding. I knew I needed a rest, but I also knew I didn't want to spend a lot of time there. So I sat and leisurely but methodically performed each task I might want to do to prepare for the last leg: reapply sunscreen, eat an energy bar, take pictures, refill my water bottles, make room in my bag for my hoodie. It took about twenty minutes. I knew I was (give or take) around two hours out of Salem, so I mentally divided my remaining distance into the first hour - which I was ready to undertake immediately - and after I'd finished that, I'd have just one more hour left - no worse than a long cross-city trip in Portland.
The last leg was the weirdest. The terrain was pretty flat, hot and dusty. I'd tired out my legs and made good use of my lungs in the Oregon City hills, and through the midpoint of the trip my butt got sore and I needed my food and water more often. Now, my wrists and elbows started to ache. But after so long riding, so much physical demand, it was like my body said "ok, whatever. I'll do whatever you want." I was aware of the ache in my joints but it didn't bother me. It must have been some kind of endorphins, but it wasn't the same rush I'm familiar with after running - the pain wasn't entirely gone and there also wasn't any pleasure, just a lack of suffering.
The mental weirdness had started partway between Canby and Mt. Angel, but peaked here. Every so often, I would "wake up" and think "yup, I'm still riding my bike." It was as if I suddenly noticed it was unusual, yet had been doing it for so long I couldn't process it as anything out of the ordinary. I had little sense of progress sometimes - I couldn't tell if I'd been riding for fifteen minutes or forty minutes since the last road change, or the last time I "woke up", and in the course of an eleven-hour day, couldn't care too much. The ride stopped seeming like something with forward movement, as I'd rightly thought of it in the first half, and became a cyclical, immanent state of being like the fact that one must prepare meals, eat them, and do the dishes repeatedly in everyday life. As much as the amount of distance covered and time elapsed, I think it was this shift in my state of mind that made the hills of Oregon City seem so very remote when I remembered them. Really? I was gritting through those nasty hills this morning?
STATS:
Miles traveled: ~70
Hours on the road: 11
Hours in the saddle: 9.5
Bottles of water drunk: 7
Energy bars eaten: 6
Emergen-C's consumed: 2
After I finished, my wrist and elbow joints felt swollen and hot, and I felt like I had a post-run endorphin rush only it lasted for more than an hour. My hunger for dinner was different; it wasn't hunger pangs in my stomach, nor the cranky dissatisfaction I associate with low blood sugar, but a primal certainty that I needed food in order to live. My tiredness cast itself in life-and-death terms too; I felt like the sleep I needed was far more than the sleep I normally get and would have to be a temporary death, a complete dropping out of the world. I woke up at 6 because my dad was getting up to set up his moving sale, but I took another nap later in the morning and hunted down protein all day. I was surprised how little soreness I had in my muscles. About 24 hours after I'd arrived, I felt totally normal again.
I'm glad I planned this trip out to be so lengthy. I get to do this again, and then I'm in Eugene, yay, and then I get to wind it all down by going over it in reverse. Tomorrow, it looks like there are some tricky hills just outside Salem, but nothing like Oregon City. It looks to be a steady grade up out of Harrisburg into Eugene, but quite possibly some mild up-and-down like Needy Rd. We'll see.
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