Day 14: It is what it is

As fellow tourist Tony expressed it, when the tribe is moving camp we have a powerful drive to make sure we go with the group. And every day, the caravan gets packed up and the tribe moves on. So it doesn't really matter what the conditions are, the tourist has to move on with the tour. That's the psychological state I found myself in this morning facing the insistent quartering head wind as we left Gillette, Wyoming.

A rider has to choose a strategy for how to deal with the wind. One can choose to tough it out by oneself which means riding at a slower pace, ergo more hours on the bicycle which for me is equivalent to prolonging the agony. Alternatively you can ride with others and try to get some shelter from the wind by drafting the rider in front of you and rotating to take turns in front, which comes at a cost of constant attention and demands compatibility of riding styles.

When confronted with a cross wind the drafting needs to be offset in the leeward direction, creating a echelon formation.

Here is an example of a straight pace line which is used when the wind is from straight on:

Susan and Lon (PACTour owners) demonstrate the echelon form with the wind coming from the curb side:

You can see that Lon is offset in the leeward direction (toward center of road), so he can get the most protection from the combination of side wind and forward motion. So the problem with echelons is that they need width on the road.  If there were four riders above instead of two, then to get the wind break the back riders would need to be riding out to the left of the white line, in the traffic lane, and 70 MPH is the Wyoming speed limit on roads like this. So the PACTour crew was encouraging us to keep the groups small so they would fit on the shoulder. Of course that means that one's turn up front is going to come more often and most likely the average speed will suffer.

The strategy Paul and I took out of Gillette was to ride as a duo. After 30 miles we picked up Craig who we caught up with riding by himself, then the three of us worked together in an echelon until the lunch break at mile 77.

Paul and Craig in echelon formation as we work our way across the windswept Wyoming plains:

After lunch it was back to just Paul and me, both of us were tired, so to mix it up we started doing 1/2 mile rotations on the front with Paul taking the first half mile of the odometer and me the second.  Fellow tourist Lisa is an advocate for this practice, that's where the idea came from. A half-mile is rotating quite bit faster than our normal habit --- it made for an more even effort that fit the condition of our legs and spirits. When I was tired and following Paul I found myself just staring at Paul's tire, like this (not quite accurate because I was a little more jerky in this movie 'cause I was holding the camera):

We got the the border then pushed on to the final rest stop.

So it was a tough day today. But as the bard said, all's well that ends well, and today's ride ended surprisingly well. After reaching the last rest stop at mile 96 we entered the Black Hills national forest. As you can see from the photos below, the miles from 96 to 114 were scenic, varied and protected from the wind for the most part.

Box canyon

 Trees!