RAIN 2012 Part I

Many of us are still decompressing from a very successful weekend, some club members riding and many club members volunteering to make our Ride Across Indiana a big success. Special KUDOS to the main organizers as well as the cadre of day-of volunteers who made it all possible.

I first rode RAIN in 2001, and didn't actually expect to do it again. But Tom Whitehead organized a Ride to Remember team through the palliative care unit at Wishard Hospital and I was one of 5 Bloomington riders who joined 40+ others. I rode with CE Taylor, Gail Morell, Kathy Cummins, and Ken Dau-Schmidt. Through OWLS we all knew we were compatible riders. We got organized and practiced our rotating pace line a few times and were prepared, as well as we could be.

Our group stayed at Saint Mary of the Woods overnight. We benefited from a special supper buffet provided by the Ride to Remember folks. The dorm accommodations were good and the breakfast buffet provided with the room was excellent. (Note to self: Next time you use your cell phone for a 5:15 am wake-up alarm please remember to turn it off. Being awakened at 5:15 on Sunday morning was not so nice.)

Here's our group just finished with last second preparations in the parking lot at SMOW:

(Note to self: if your tire is flat when you take it out of the car, just change it. Don't inflate the tire with its slow leak, only to have to stop within 5 miles or so to change it on the road.)

The start was neat, but we were so far back that we neither saw nor heard anything at the start. But the giant group of 1300+ riders started smoothly without incident. Here's a photo a bit closer to the start line than we were:

I like to follow bike routes on my Garmin Edge 605 and record basic ride data throughout the day. I was a bit concerned because the 4.5 year old unit has been acting a bit flaky lately. I missed a few minutes at the start because it seemed so slow loading and calculating the route that I started it over. Then 10 miles or so into the ride it just shut down. I bravely but without much hope restarted it on the fly. It started up again and performed perfectly for the next 12 hours! One amusing side effect of the missing few minutes of location data was that it got very confused about my max and average speed. Check out my maximum speed!:

The moving time is a little low because of starting about 3 minutes late and then having to re-boot. The elapsed time is a little high because I forgot to stop recording right away at the finish line. The average speed reflects the jump at light speed early in the ride. Earlier in the ride I had an "average" in the 50 mph range for a while. It gradually became more realistic as the day wore on. But the average moving speed is about right. This screen shot doesn't show the estimated calories consumed: over 9300.
And here's the recorded route:

Here we are changing my rear tire early on (thanks to Ken for the photo and thanks to everyone else for their patience):

One effect of this was that we were riding much more alone afterwards until we gradually started reeling in other groups.

To be continued.