Super Randonneur (rahn doe ner) - A special medal awarded to those randonneurs who successfully complete a challenging series of brevets (200, 300, 400, and 600-kilometers) in a year. A hard-earned honor unto itself and worthy of being any randonneur's goal for the cycling season, the Super Randonneur series of brevets is usually needed to enter a 1200-kilometer event.
To be perfectly honest this was never in my plans for 2015, I had planned to ride a 300km event and possibly even the 400km but never the full series.
Note this is a long post by my standards.... short version I did it with a great group of friends and lots of sunshine.
200k event
My randonneuring season started with the 200k Palmer spring classic. I didn't have the greatest of starts to that event, I over heated and was cramping up by mile 30. Luckily I was riding with a great group of people and thanks to Oscar, Chuck, Chris and Ryan letting me wheel suck/draft I managed to complete the event well within the time frame.
Photo Album
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| These guys let me draft a long way :D |
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| Riding gravel, the guy on a cross bike gets a flat.... go figure |
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| Almost there |
300k event
Following on from the Spring Classic we were back riding again four weeks later for the Anchorage Palmer Anchorage event. Last year this was the first time I rode an event with the
Alaska Randonneurs (
see here for the blog post) This year I upped the distance I was going to ride. This time I was going to attempt the 300km event. We couldn't have asked for a better day out, sunshine, great temperatures and again another fantastic group of people to ride with.
Photo album
After the effects of the 400k had worn off and I found out the 24 Hours of Kincaid was not going to be happening for 2015. I started to seriously consider riding the 600k event. I talked with Amanda and after calling in a lot of kitchen passes :-) I booked the time off work and committed to the event.
The original plan for this event was to ride up to Talkeetna and back which was a change from the normal event they have previously ridden (
ride report) normal route page
here. All this changed last week due to some serious wild fires closing the road we needed to ride.
The Alaska Randonneurs managed to put two approved permanent routes together for the 600k event, this is very important for anyone using this as a qualifier for Paris Breast Paris (
PBP). For us this meant that we would be riding the 400k event we rode the 3 weeks ago then completing a 200k event afterwards, this is normally how the event is split but for us this would mean a lot of time on the Seward highway which although has a reasonable shoulder by Alaskan standards also has a lot of traffic.
The route started at 6am, this is 2 hours later than we normally start to ride down to Seward and the traffic was noticeably higher. The weather was definitely not as warm and sunny as three weeks ago which was actually a relief, firstly we wouldn't be so inclined to stop and take pictures and two it was a great riding temperature for the majority of the ride.
Photo album
Down to Girdwood we let Oscar do some of the pulling until he rode off the front and we didn't chase him down but we did appreciate the tow whilst it it lasted. We also saw the bore tide.
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| Bore tide |
After a quick stop at Tesoro in Girdwood we were down to four people (Jan, Tom, Narciso and I), we rode as a group all the way down to Seward and back to Tesoro, mostly together, I didn't take many photos on the way down, the light wasn't that great and I mostly forgot :D
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| Stocking up on the way out of Seward |
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| Tail winds galore |
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| I forgot my towel |
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| Getting ready to roll again, we had some horrible headwinds after this. |
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| A quite moment along the arm, didn't get much darker than this. |
Jan was taking part in the 400k event, I think he finished at 02:00 I finished got back home around 00:30 and was asleep by 01:30 to get up at 05:15 to complete the 600k event.
