Originally Posted by
gif4445
Wyoming can make you wonder what the heck you are doing. At least it made me hate life for awhile. Cuz there are headwinds and there are HEADWINDS. Actually the worst winds I have encountered were in Idaho, going from Mountain Home to Fairplay. Fighting altitude and a 30 mph headwind. Stupid. Should have stayed put. Nebraska was second with 30+ mph headwinds and 104 degree heat. Blast furnace. My current headwind strategy is to, first of all, take full advantage of tailwinds and get some 100-150 mile days in. Then try to avoid the strong headwinds by studying the hourly and daily forecasts. Riding early or later in the day, avoiding the solar winds. Or just using a rest day. So far, I have had a fixed number of days to ride, so several days of headwinds would require me to the HTFU.
funny !
i got going early enough in the season on my 2010 cross-country tour to not have any blast furnace days, thankfully. looking back, i remember thinking being from southeast Texas, where it's "windy" all the time, that the purported winds in Wyoming (and along the west-bound Columbia River in Washington/Oregon, another brutal adventure...) would be no big deal. man, was i delusional !!! i remember grinding along at 4-5 mph for hours, day after day, across Wyoming. the demoralizing memories were of pedaling hard on otherwise steep downhills to keep from being blown to a stop. on the day from Lander to Dubois, i remember noting i had 20 miles to go, and at the 4 mph pace i had been able to sustain, it would take 4-5 HOURS to get there. being exposed out in the open, nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. THAT was a HTFU moment !!!
in the end, you get to where you're going. knock down a few beers, rest up for the next day, and have stories to tell, just like this. and from the experience, you find that you're tougher person. nothing bad about that.