Ouch. Hail Hurts!

April 9^th, 2010

Today was the day that the forecast was looking promising for our ride. 30 percent of AM showers. “Not bad” as I thought to myself. It was almost impossible to believe but it for once looked like we may have a dry and sunny ride. I woke up at my patients house, made us some breakfast and coffee and headed out at around 8:00am. As I was driving towards the meeting spot with Ry I looked to the west and say sunny and partly cloudy skies. I looked to the east and say nothing but black, menacing, “going to rain on you” clouds. “Great…can’t seem to catch a break”. My iPod was even against me! “No Sunlight” by Deathcab for Cutie was playing. I pulled up, parked the car, greeted Ry, and started to get my gear together. I looked across the lake and saw the rain coming and suggested to Ry that we wait in my car for it to pass over. As we sat in the car we could see to the North and Northeast that it was sunny and nice. We sat, crossed our fingers, and caught up on matters not involving biking. The rain finally passed but noticed that another shower was soon to hit. We discussed if we could make it to the sunny part of the trip just about a mile north before the next rainstorm hit. We decided to go for it. Sure enough it started to sprinkle as soon as we took off but to our delight a mile north on the route it was dry pavement and sunny! It was nice for a change! We biked through my new favorite part in the arboretum and made our way to UW to connect with the Burke-Gilman trail that would take us north to Kenmore. The ride was nice. Dry, sunny, however a bit chilly but I was happy about the sunny and dry part, “I’ll deal with the cold”. I was feeling good physically and mentally. I’ve been keeping my breakfast consistent before all of my rides. Eggs, fried potatoes, and whole wheat toast with a glass of coffee and tropical punch cool aid. I will admit that I put cool aid in my water bottles instead of water. Most people would see this as a very bad idea, however have I noticed a significant improvement in my performance. As weird as it sounds cool aid actually works better for me then water…I have no idea why. Perhaps it is due to my mild case of hypoglycemia? Soon enough we made it to the most northern part of our trip. Kenmore. I did some map looking a few days before our ride and altered our lake Washington look slightly. We were about to enter the undiscovered country. That undiscovered country started with a 10 minute hill climbs…not a good start. After being out of breath and my quads screaming I made it to the top. The rest was going to be fun for it would be a curvy, windy, and technical downhill. It was worth the climb. Unfortunately the weather was about to take a change for the more worse. You are thinking hail, right? Wrong! Think colder and harder and more damaging then rain. Did you guess it? Hail! It started to hail as we were descending the hill at 30 mph. We pulled over to complain about our misfortune. We decided to wait it out but 5 minutes later it was only getting worse so we moved on…slowly. I could barely see but eventually the hail let up and the no precip clouds came back. I remember looking over to the west and seeing downtown Seattle in sunlight. We moved on weaving our way through Kirkland an eventually Bellevue. We both looked off to the south and too notice that the clouds didn’t look to friendly. We both agreed to skip doing the southern loop of Lake Washington and just cutting over on i90. This unfortunately cut our trip short about 23 some miles. We tackled a few hills on Mercer Island and made it over the i90 floating bridge to our cars.

The trip wasn’t too bad. I still felt good afterwards. I could ride through rain, sleet, snow, and wind and be absolutely miserable, but as long as I feel good at the end that is all that matters.

-Jason