If there is such a thing as a routine, easy brevet, then the SRCC 200 K brevet, Saturday, March 12, was it. The weather was great, the times were fast, the administrative infrastructure held, the route worked, and everybody had a great time. Well, not everybody, but I'll get to that in a minute.

Forty riders showed up to start the 200. SRCC club members included Martin Clinton, Bill Ellis, Bill Mattinson, Bob Redmond, Craig Robertson, Charlie Rowell, Tom Kuhn, Dave Batt, Ford Greene, Douwe Drayer, Bill Carroll, and myself, Donn King. It was going to be a beautiful day, and everyone knew it. I decided to start out with bare legs, something that I haven't tried since October. I only carried one water bottle, because I wanted the other cage for a folding spare, and I didn't think the day would get warm enough to need two.

If there was any wind at all going south through Alexander Valley and down Silverado Trail, it was slightly in our faces, and nobody said anything, but I know that everyone was hoping for a tail wind returning. I rode with club member Bill Matinson and stoker Jan Coulter on their Ibis tandem from Pine flat Road all the way south to the turnaround, and we hardly dropped below 20 mph the entire way, fast for the likes of me. In fact, there were five tandems on the ride, which tells you that this is an extremely tandem-friendly course.

One of the games that riders play on a brevet, especially a friendly brevet like our 200, is to race to get to the control before it opens. Control opening and closing times are one of those things that are determined in France, and they are carved in stone. It's generally not too easy to beat a Control opening time, but if the course is flat enough, it can be done. It was done in both directions on the 200, but only by the fastest riders of course. If you get there early, you have to wait around until the Control opens, and you only get the time that is the Control opening time, but the bragging rights are real

There was one crash. Just after the turnaround, on the way back, there was a minor dust-up in one of the lead groups and things went a little haywire for a few seconds. When the haze cleared, Bob Redmond and Michael Arreguin, from Sacramento, were on the floor. No one was seriously hurt, but Bob was a little scraped up and Michael's wheels weren't rideable. Both decided to call it a day at that point.

The theme of the 2005 SRCC 300 K was Wind.

In Healdsburg, at the Start, there was no wind. I overheard several optimistic comments about this from riders, but I had been out at Valley Ford the day before, checking on the rest stop location for the brevet, and at 4:30 in the afternoon the wind from the northwest had been ferocious. I heard Bill Mattinson say in low tones that there had been nothing in Bodega Bay for the last two days below 20 knots, and I knew that we were in for it. Sure enough, when we got out to the coast in the morning the wind was blowing hard from the north, and it held all day. Consequently, there was a pretty strong tailwind from Jenner down to Pt. Reyes Station, with flags standing almost straight out even at ten and eleven in the morning. An evil portent for the ride back home in the afternoon though, and everyone knew it. Even so, the riding south was easy and what's not to like about that? Bill Ellis and Craig Robertson, with Peter Burnett from Sacramento, got out ahead early and did nothing but widen the gap all day.

Although the rest of the field split up and formed and reformed into and out of clusters all day, the times separating the clusters was very small relatively speaking. This was a very experienced field. A very rough, unofficial count shows at least 25 onetime Paris-Brest-Paris finishers in our field of 31 eventual brevet finishers last Saturday. The last rider to finish the event was a 2003 PBP finisher. The experience showed. Riders were cheerful but businesslike, and the stops for refreshment were economic. There wasn't much complaining about the wind. Everyone had been there many times before. Indeed, the 300 K, at 185 miles, still has to be considered one of the shorter brevets, a distance to get out of the way, in order to get to the really difficult distances that lie beyond.

As windy as it was, I was expecting it to be a lot harder to get out to the Lighthouse from Inverness than it was. I was ready for an ordeal, and due to an accident of geography and wind direction, the ordeal was saved for later. When I got to the Lighthouse Dan Brekke of Berkeley was standing there with the most thoroughly broken pedal that I had ever seen. Unfortunately for him the ride was over.

For the first time in my experience, because of the particular wind direction, I found it harder to get back to Inverness from the Lighthouse than it had been to get out, and when I finally struggled back and turned the corner into Pt. Reyes at the south end of town and felt myself turn straight up into the wind, I knew that the real fun was about to begin. Sure enough the wind was blowing from the north, and hard. At least it wasn't raining. For the next 45 miles back up to the River Road turnoff it blew and blew and the constant rollers of Highway 1, into the wind, became fatiguing indeed. I was in my granny gear at times, climbing the long rollers between Valley Ford and Bodega Bay, and I wasn't the only one. When the turnoff onto River Road finally came and we left the coast, Martin Clinton, Dave Leonard of Sacramento, and I, it was suddenly like it had never happened. All of a sudden it was quiet and you could hear yourself think. There was a slight tailwind and no more hills. It was a completely different ride.

Times were actually fast for this year's 300 K, and except for Bill and Craig and company at the front, the clusters of riders, while out of sight of each other on the road, were not that far apart in time. Incidentally, Bill and Craig and Peter finished in 11:34--pretty nice for a hard, windy ride with about 9,000 ft. of elevation. Even I knocked a half hour of my previous time for that course. SRCC riders included Martin Clinton, Jan Coulter, Bill Ellis, Mark Gunther, Tom Kuhn, Bill Mattinson, Craig Robertson, Charlie Rowell, and myself, Donn King. Unfortunately Martin developed a gastrointestinal problem in Monte Rio on the way back, and was unable to continue.