Have you ever been driving down the highway and tried to beat a storm and felt good about it when you succeed at it? That’s exactly what we were doing early this morning from the get-go and it didn’t work.
Today was yet another milestone day in that about 30 miles into our route today, we reached the Central Time Zone – but we also “lost” an hour and today also marked the 2nd set of 3 back-to-back centuries that we will complete on P2P – but not everyone completed it.
We had an early morning start of it from America’s Best Value Inn in Kadoka and rolled out at 7 AM with a slight wind in our faces and dark clouds gathering in the west behind us. I don’t think anyone had rain on their BINGO cards today but just 8-10 miles into the ride we started feeling intermittent rain drops but we thought we were staying ahead of the storm. The way I figured it, the low pressure storm behind us was sucking all the air in the area to fill that void and creating the slight headwind against we were fighting. Little did I know at that point how bad it was going to get.
The ride was going well and we sorted out into our groups after maybe 10 miles or so and made it to our first SAG stop at mile 18 with no real issues other than the wind picking up. As the ride progressed we could easily notice that we had made it into the grassland region of South Dakota. When Katherine Lee Bates wrote “America the Beautiful” in 1893, I would bet that she was inspired by vast fields of alfalfa because that is exactly what we were seeing with those “amber waves of grain”. And by our SAG stop at mile 42, the wind was really starting to make them wave more vigorously. We were along side roads mostly paralleling I-90 again, all of them lined with huge fields of corn, sunflowers, sorghum, hay and alfalfa. It looked mostly like these crops will be harvested in the next month of so. Huge flocks of blackbirds appeared to be feasting on the sunflower fields. They know a good meal when they see one.
In any case, after our lunch stop near the town of Vivian, we knew the headwinds weren’t going to get better and we were then in it. I can’t tell how hard the wind was blowing but it was gusting at times and it was like a persistent block headwind. When I am on flat land with no wind and I am generating 175 watts of power, I am probably going around 18 MPH, but today at 175 watts, I was making 9.5 MPH. I don’t know how to do the math on that but it was brutal and we still had over 60 miles to go.
At our mile 76 SAG stop, we had a bunch of people throw in the towel for the day, but I wasn’t one of them. By the time we hit our 98 mile SAG stop, we had 3 others get in the van but I kept going. The only thing worse than riding against the wind like that is riding by yourself – and at mile 101, I hopped back onto my old friend 1-90 and had to dig deep to crank out the final 12.5 miles to Exit 260. So today I spent a total of 8 hours and 36 minutes on the bike and expended 4,644 calories on the ride according to my Strava app. It was a tough day.
We are staying tonight at The Baymont Inn and had dinner next door at Big Al’s Oasis, it was a great meal and hopefully I replenished a lot of those burned off calories. Tomorrow we head to Mitchell, SD and by the end of the 76 mile ride – we will have pedaled over half way across the United States! 1,930 miles!
So now we are on Oacoma, SD which sits astride the Missouri River near where Lewis and Clark passed through on their exploration in the early 1800’s. I wonder if they had to deal with the brutal winds back then like we did today?
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