Who said Canada was cold?
Tuesday, August 17, 2010 at 12:26PM Two scorching days in a row, the temperature today hit 103 degrees. The shame of it is that I was riding extremely fast today. I had a slight tail wind and predominantly downhill or flat conditions, there were only a handful of climbs and none of them were very big. I covered the nearly 70 miles in a little under 4 hours. Yesterday, I spent about six hours out in the sun and heat. So by the end of the ride I was extremely dehydrated, after that I didn’t want to push it today. I could feel that I was not absorbing any of the fluid I was drinking so we stopped for the day.
Tomorrow is going to be another hot one so I have been drinking nonstop since we arrived. In the last two days I have put down over six gallons of fluids and still I am dehydrated. The heat doesn’t seem to be going anywhere so the only thing I can do is continue to pound the liquids.
Today, I road into the Fraser Canyon and I have about 100 miles of it left. I know from the drive up and from what I have heard from other cyclists that it will be one of the most dangerous sections of the trip, if not the most. Steep drop offs and sheer walls on either side extremely narrow sections of road, with about 7 tunnels, and a few pretty big climbs. It will definitely prove to be pretty interesting. Hopefully the wind will be with me tomorrow as well. 
A few weeks back I had a really close call with a truck. I didn’t write about it at the time because honestly, I was too shaken up by it to write about it. I was on a rather narrow section of road with no shoulder, and a line of traffic was on coming. I could hear the truck coming up behind me using his Jake brakes to slow down. He must have known what was about to happen. Lucky for me, he was being cautious and trying to slow down as much as possible. Even still when he passed me there was a vortex of wind coming off the front of his truck and it hit me and sucked me in. I really don’t know how I wasn’t sucked under the truck, had he been going faster I am sure that I would have been pulled under. I am thankful that this guy was courteous enough to slow down, and that he was intelligent enough to know his load. Countless trucks have passed me and this was the only time that this happed, so I am fairly confident that it was the type of load he was carrying. Hopefully, I don’t have to relive that experience while I am in the canyon because it is very narrow, a two-lane highway through a canyon is not a good place to ride a bike. I will be really relieved when I hit the other side of it.
Azure wanted me to post this next picture. But first I will explain, yesterday a Badger ran out of the brush and stood up on two legs and made a pretty scary face at me. Who knew Badgers had such big teeth! Lucky for me, he charged back into the brush as quickly as he had run out. Azure made me do an impression of the badger before she would give me my breakfast, this is what it looked like.
(If a badger was a huge sun burned guy wearing cycling cloths that are too tight.)
8-13
87.24 miles
14.5 mph average
50.9 mph max
5:59:12 ride time
8-14
67 miles
19.14 mph average
48.6 mph max
3:32:15 ride time
Reader Comments (1)
Whew ! ! I could feel your "anxiety." I call them "three-ways" on a two-lane road. The biker loses.