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All in all it was good weekend. Mark, Jarret, Andrea, and I drove out to western Arkansas to do some climbing. Memphis has some good riding routes, but nothing that even comes close to climbing. The plan for the weekend was to ride Mt. Magazine (Arkanasas’s highest point) on Saturday and some route around Petit Jean State Park on Sunday. The weather was supposed to be around 50F and moderately Sunday….

Saturday: We got an early start driving out of Memphis and got to Paris, Arkansas around noon. After trying to figure out where to start and getting dressed we were wheels down around 1pm. The start it was in the mid-40’s and cloudy. It felt so cold… As we started out of Paris on AR-309, there is a big hill right outside of town testing our legs immediately. As we came up to the top of the first hill by the reservoir, the sun started to come out…. it would be short lived. The road up to Mt. Magazine from Paris gradually climbs from around 400 feet to 2700 feet (see previous post, Paris-Havana-Paris route). The temperature was fairly chilly… and there was even some residual snow up on the top falling out of the trees in the wind. The grade up to Mt. Magazine was generally moderate since the 2300 feet of net gain are over around 16-17 miles… After doing a loop around the top, we dropped down the steeper side. On the Havana side, a similar amount of elevation is lost in only about 6 miles with another 2 of pretty flat roads to Havana. The worst part of the descent was the extreme cold….

After we turned around at the Havana store, we started up the climb…. Once on the climb we all climbed at our pace to the top. I felt pretty good about my effort. I am climbing better than I have in years. I think it is a combination of maintaining off-season weight, weight-training, and good general fitness.

After coming together we dropped off the mountain starting out around 35-36F at the top down to a still seemingly cold mid-40’s… it must have been the dampness, but the last 16 miles back to the car were some of more miserable riding miles I have experienced all winter. I guess I was just under-dressed.

Here are my Polar graphs broken up to 4 files (each climb and descent are separate):

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Sunday we started out at Petit Jean state park visitor center. We rode a short loop on Red Bluff drive (which turned out to be a hard-packed dirt road) and then rode down off the plateau for about 10-11 miles and turned around to ride back up to the visitor center. This climb was a shorter one with more variation in pitch than the Magazine climb.

Polar plots:

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March is full of potential racing oppuritunities… I was going to hold off racing until mid-April, but I might do some selected racing in March. The first one is the CARVE Crosswinds Classic outside Little Rock. Since it is day-trippable (a rarity from Memphis!), I might go. The course is flat, so I hope I can stay with the P123 field for the 76 miles. I need to get used to that when I race in Mississippi and Arkansas since most are P123 (without the separate Cat III field as in TBRA).