“I’m older now and still running against the wind.” —Bob Seger
Shortly after posting yesterday’s entry, while Jon and I were cooling our heels before dinner, he texted me the weather report for Flagstaff on Tuesday. It was… not good: the wind was picking up, the temperature was coming down, and there was a chance of afternoon rain. I’ve biked with Jon long enough to read between the lines of his texts, so when we met for dinner, I asked if he was contemplating what I was also now contemplating: that we go back to the original plan and tackle the 60 miles between Winslow and Flagstaff in a single day. Yep. That was exactly what he was thinking.
Last night, we decided to shift our usual 8:00a departure forward by 30 minutes. But when Jon texted me at 5:30 this morning that he was heading for breakfast at 6:00ish, I met him there and we shaved an additional half-hour off the clock. Although we’d never have a direct tailwind this morning, we’d be heading to the northwest with the wind coming from due south; we needed to take advantage of that left-shoulder vector for as long as we could before our route bent southward.
The revised-revised-revised-revised plan worked like a charm. We made it to the Travel Stop at the Navajo Casino—which would have been our stopping place if we had split the final day in two—by 10am. The challenge then was that we were more than halfway finished with the ride, but we still had approximately 1,000 ft of elevation to climb in the final 20 miles… and our weakening legs would be turning into a strengthening wind.
As anticipated (and, frankly, as we had planned), those final miles were a close second in difficulty to that first-day climb out of Albuquerque, maybe more difficult because we were on Day 6, not Day 1. The I-40 approach to Flagstaff is just one long ascent after the other, with small catch-your-breath plateaus in between. Even after getting off of the Interstate with roughly 10 miles to go, the wind on those final 10 miles was blasting into our faces. If we’d left Winslow even 30 minutes later, and had to face those winds on the Interstate, we’d have been smoked. Aeolus was reminding us that he had been letting us off easy the past few days, but he was still very much the master our fate.
We pulled our bikes to a stop in front of Lumberjack Pizza at 12:40pm, and I hit the “Finish Ride” button on Ride With GPS. Our tale of the tape: 59.0 miles in 5:40 total time/4:55 moving time, with a net +2,065ft elevation gain, and an average speed of 12.0mph.
We did it. (And the pizza was outstanding.)
Rideworthy 