3 day total:
~15 hours motorcycling
~10,000 feet cycling ascent / 7 hours ride time
I’m pretty beat. Today was Palomar and then ~7 hours of motorcycling home. Palomar is #39 out of the top 100 US road climbs. If Nate Harrison is the WORST road conditions possible, Palomar is probably the best. I can see why people like to do long effort training rides on it. It is smooth and fast and not particularly pitchy, and the switchbacks tend to give you a nice break.
The lower portion along the highway isn’t super fun – lots of 3″ wide shoulder and curbs, but I left early so it wasn’t so bad. But it IS a busy highway, I took no pictures.
Once you get to the turn off for the park, traffic dies off and it is smooth sailing.
I planned to switch from “Ride as slowly as possible” to “Ride as fast as my knee could handle” – but it turned out there wasn’t much difference, my knee just isn’t happy with any significant power put through it (or standing up.)
That’s okay though because the lights started going out with about a mile to go. Zero power in the engine room. It felt like that last mile went on and on and on. Once I finally got to the top, I had to rest up a bit to have the mental energy for the descent. Was starting to feel kind of ‘sea legs’ with all the time spent on 2 wheels.
The descent is super fun, on a good road bike and familiarity with the curves you could do this with barely touching the brakes. The upper 1/3 is also freshly paved.
I made it safely back to the hotel and packed up the moto-bicycle rig and slogged my way home across LA. That is really miserable with 1000s of big rigs screwing up the air flow plus the usual mountain pass cross winds. To add insult to injury there was a 6+ car pile up 5 miles from my house. So close! By the time I got home I was super super beat. That was a lot for 3 days with so few miles (bicycle & motorcycle) on my body.
Not sure what climbs are next, we’ll see how the knee does!
Dennis Rides - Motorcycles & Bicycles 