Climb to Sunrise

Seujan and I had a great ride today. It was "mountain pass" brick day on the training calendar, so we drove out to Greenwater and rode from there into Mt. Rainier National Park and up to Sunrise. We'd ridden up to Paradise at Mt. Rainier a few times last summer, but neither of us had ridden up to Sunrise...and some other friends of ours were riding up there today, so we sort of coordinated with them and eventually found them en route. The route was pretty much a very gradual steady climb for the first 12 miles, then more of a climb for about 10 miles, then a bit more of a climb for the next 10 miles to the visitor center. In the 33.5 miles from Greenwater to the Sunrise visitor center, there was just under 5,000 ft. of elevation gain and it took exactly 3 hours to get up there. Being the climbing fan that I am, I loved it. Fun route, good scenery, and it was mostly a challenging, but not killer grade. It seemed there was less traffic (not so many dang RVs) and it was less steep than riding up to Paradise, so I was digging that part, too. There were some clouds, so we couldn't see all of the glacier and it wasn't as warm as I'd have liked, but there were lots of wild flowers and scenic overlooks.

We were supposed to do some speed play and create some TT pieces within the climb, but I'll bust myself here and admit that I didn't exactly carry out that part of the task. I felt strong and rode most of the last 10 miles a little over AT (HR in the 140's), but my legs (assisted by my brain) just didn't have it to push super hard. I'm still a little sore from the monster run on Thursday and decided that a good, steady push was good enough.

It seemed that riding a bike up the mountain was a novelty for many of the tourists visiting Mt. Rainier for a hike and some photos...at least 4 different people asked me where I'd started from, how was the ride, etc. and a few little kids thought spandex and a bike were both very interesting.

The altitude at Sunrise is about 6,100 and the temperature was a bit brisk...we both brought a few more layers to wear on the way down, but we were still cold on the way down. The descent is really great, but all of my fingers were numb/asleep and I lost track of a few toes, too, so that was a buzzkill, for sure. I hogged the middle of the road on the way down because I was shivering and I'm always afraid that I'll crash into a ditch when I'm cold like that. But it was sunny and before too long we got to pedal again and warmed back up. We ran into Duncan a few miles down and he turned around to ride back with us and hitch a ride home in our car...he and Shane had ridden out there from Seattle and racked up 130 miles on the day. Impressive!

When we got back to the car, I tossed all my stuff and grabbed my running shoes to do the brick...Seujan's stomach was acting up, so she and Duncan loaded the bikes and gear and met me and our other friends down the road a bit. The descent hadn't involved much hard riding, so the brick wasn't tough at all...the 3 miles flew by and I felt really good.

Summary:

Bike:
67.6 miles
4:39:56
Avg HR on 3 hours up: 120
Avg HR on 1:40 down: 94

Run:
3 miles
30:22
Avg HR = 138