Bike Angels earning their Wings

Atlanta has had 3 month's of rain over the past 5 days. My lawn is happy, but the bicycle miles are drooping. We discussed canceling a scheduled ride this morning because the rain was still coming down, but I announced via email to the group that I would ride anyway.

The ride we had scheduled was a practice run for escorting runners in a new half-marathon scheduled for October 4: the Atlanta 13.1. The bicycle escorts are often referred to as Bike Angels.

Looking at the red bands of heavy rain on the weather radar -- and we've had a few of these recently -- I couldn't help but think "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread." Perhaps my desire to get more cycling miles suppressed my fear, or perhaps I'm not a very good angel, but I decided that 1) I wouldn't be rushing and 2) on a bike, you're not technically treading. The phrase "earning our wings" was more appropriate to the state of mind I wished to carry.

Maria Isabel, Butch, and Jeff met me at the usual spot for our Sunday morning ride and as soon as we start out, the rain begins to drizzle. We didn't know how much we would have to endure to earn our wings, but our mood remained upbeat.

There were a few question marks on the course. The main reason we ride the course ahead of time is to answer those questions and learn the turns without thinking. I got lots of practice trying to see where I was going with fogged-up, droplet-covered glasses.

Through Blackburn Park, the course follows the PATH trail. These are not marked on the Google maps, and the satellite image is only good for showing the spot where the PATH disappears into the trees, so we needed to perform a ground survey for that stretch. Coming out of Blackburn Park, the route follows a road that is a dead end on the map, and magically shows up on the next street over.



Blair Circle didn't connect to Durden Drive and it looked like you would have to go through someone's backyard on the satellite view. I drew the route (in purple) that accomplished this feat of magic.

During our survey, it appears the backyard is no longer there. Or the house. In fact, we found that most of the houses were gone and that a new road had been recently built that follows the path in blue below.



Our contact for the race course details has thrown in another twist. Somewhere in this vicinity, the course will add in a short section to make it exactly the right race distance. I haven't attempted to draw this, but I expect we'll be following the "red" route on the map immediately above.

There was one more correction to the course map that I had entered in bikely.com: at the end of the race, we believe we have figured out the route inside of the Oglethorpe campus. The cue sheet simply says "follow the cones", and the streets aren't marked within the campus, so we wanted to sort this out before we had a 5-minute per mile racer waiting for us to decide which way to turn. The map reflects our new knowledge.

Although we got plenty wet, the buckets of rain never came. It actually slacked off as we got back near Virginia-Highland. We won't know until race day whether or not we've been awarded our wings, so we'll keep working at it until then. I wouldn't mind if we were tested with 72-degree sunshine and horribly blue skies next Sunday.

Ride Summary

Round Trip Distance: 30.1
Number of Cyclists seen: 2 (not including the 4 of us), and one of those had full rain gear.
Weather: Not quite blinding rain, but maybe an inch of it over the course of our 2 hour ride.