Rain on Pacific Coast Highway

Dear Rain God: Are you serious?  It has not rained in weeks and you decide to finally send rain down on us during the few hours we were out riding?  Seriously?!?

We joined up with Shifting Gears at Helen’s Cycles to head out for a ride up Pacific Coast Highway (PCH) to Malibu.  We had originally planned to do this ride the day after New Year’s, but the forecast called for rain, so the Shifting Gears training ride leaders decided to do a more local route that day and postponed the PCH route.  So here we were again, the rescheduled PCH ride and another chance of rain!

The morning was just as cold, if not colder, as a few of our previous training rides.  It felt especially cold on the first part of the ride.  We faced a bit of head-wind and the cold breeze was relentless.  The fact that we were by the ocean didn’t help matters, I’m sure.  But other than the chill factor, all was well for the first seven miles.  That is, until the rain came down.  Gee, thanks, Rain God!

Riding on PCH is already pretty scary sans rain.  Heading northbound, bikers have a very narrow “path” (if you call it that).  Between the speeding cars on the left and the mountain cliff on the right, there is little room to escape in case of an emergency (by “escape”, I mean “get out of the way”).  There’s just not a lot of wiggle room, especially if there is debris on the road.  So when the rain started coming down, it made for a pretty dangerous situation.  At first, it was just sprinkling and I thought, “okay, we can do this.”  And being that we were on PCH, it was not like there were many places to pull over.  You only have one way to go…forward.  But soon the rain started coming down harder and there was nothing to do but stay extra alert and ride very, very carefully.  Thanks, again, Rain God!

The rain stayed on us for another seven miles or so.  We were drenched; water was dripping down my helmet, sunglasses and clothes.  At one point, we caught a little break when the rain stopped.  It was then that I felt the cold breeze again.  When it was raining all I could think about was the rain itself.  I didn’t realize how wet I was until the rain stopped and felt the heaviness of my wet clothes.  Wet clothes would be annoying enough, but add wind to the equation and you’ve got one uncomfortable cold ride ahead.  I even wished for the rain to come back, so that I didn’t have to feel that cold-wet-clothes-on-me feeling, if that makes any sense at all.  I guess my wish came true, since the rain did come back.  Thanks, Rain God!  No.  Seriously!

If there is a bright side to riding PCH, it is that you can go pretty far without stopping.  There are very few traffic lights and that morning the lights were often green.  So we actually made it to our pit stop in Malibu relatively quickly.  The rain had slowed to a small drizzle by then.  Getting off my bike, I could feel the heaviness of my bike shorts.  The “padding” in my shorts had soaked up a lot of the rain water, so it felt like I was wearing a wet diaper.  Yuck!  And we also found out that we had mud all over us.  Riding in the rain and over muddy water, you are bound to get mud splattered all over your legs and backside.

We didn’t stay at the pit stop for long.  We didn’t even need to re-fill our water bottles since we didn’t catch much of a break to drink during the ride up PCH.  Plus, who’s thinking about drinking water in the rain anyway?  We decided not to continue further and skipped the optional longer route, which would have added another 20 miles.  So after a little break, we hopped on our bikes and headed back toward Santa Monica.

Riding southbound along the oceanside of PCH presents another obstacle.  Here, bikers ride alongside substantially more parked cars than northbound PCH, and therefore have way more drivers getting in and out of cars to avoid, many of whom are surfers wielding surfboards.  I’ve heard of stories of bikers getting into serious accidents on these sections of PCH.  Fortunately, that has never happened to me.

We were able to avoid rain most of the way back.  Once we reached the Temescal Canyon area, we got off the main road and rode down the bike path along the beach.  We weren’t on the bike path for long.  When we arrived at Will Rogers State Beach just north of Santa Monica, we had to get off our bikes to cross PCH by going through an underground tunnel.  That is the only safe way to get to the other side of PCH.  After that, we faced a short, but steep, climb and it was smooth sailing from there back to Helen’s Cycles.  We got back by 11:30 am and rode 28.47 miles.

This ride is dedicated to these awesome sponsors: Emily C. & Bill R.

I also want to wish a Happy Birthday to Shifting Gears Training Ride Leader Beth!