Quote Originally Posted by Dog View Post
Thanks TTaylor. I'm getting excited for the ride - picked up my packet from REI today. I think I will be good from a conditioning perspective, but really concerned about the hours in the saddle as well as the mental challenge. The good news is that the weather is looking favorable! Thanks again for the pep talk!!!
How did your ride go Dog? I can tell you this year was much tougher than years past because of the heat, although the tail wind was a blessing. Lots of really bad crashes, more than I have ever seen on a ride before and all seemed to happen right in front of us. There were four of us riding in our group and two of us went down in one of the crashes on the West Valley Hwy when a rider right in front of DH touched a tire. I think he may have broken his nose...lots of blood and nothing to give him to stop bleeding. We luckily came out unscathed. The other crash happened on the trail in Tenino, we were doing around 27 miles an hour and a rider clipped one of those big orange posts. It was a pretty bad crash. Hope the rider is okay!

We finished in 10 hours 45 minutes of ride time, but we got to Portland later than usual because we had to take more stops due to the heat. The Longview bridge was a torture chamber...I don't know why the heat was so bad there, but it was awful. DH started suffering from heat exhaustion at mile maker 170. We had been keeping a pretty fast pace all day and I think he just didn't get enough fluids. Pretty scary though and he was feeling so poorly at the end he couldn't even finish his beer (that's when I knew he was really sick!) All in all, first hundred miles was fun....last hundred was not!!!!

Hope you made it to Portland okay!!!! Would love to hear how your ride went.