Rosedale Rookie

[ornoth_cycling]

The Rosedale Ride is an annual fundraiser for Austin’s Rosedale School for students with disabilities. While previous editions began in Austin, this year they moved it half an hour out of town to more rural Taylor, TX. I had never done this early-season metric century before, so I decided to check it out as my first organized event of 2026.

It was cursed. I mean, the ride itself was fine, but I suffered one mishap after another. Nothing too serious, mind you, but a dozen of them… So many that I’m structuring this ride report entirely around my pratfalls, with a brief reflection from a broader perspective at the very end.

Typical central Texas farmland

So what went wrong? Let’s start with the weather. After eight straight sunny days with highs exceeding 87°F, my ride never got above a temp of 63°. Chilly enough that this spokesmodel for cycling sandals donned socks and regular shoes, a baselayer, arm warmers, and a windbreaker! The sky was socked in with heavy clouds that never cleared, instead dropping a few isolated raindrops on riders partway through the course.

But worst of all was a cold north wind that blew steadily at 15 mph gusting to 21. It made the first third of the ride a slog before riders turned eastward, only to discover that the wind had shifted with them toward the northeast. We fought against the wind for about 70% of the ride.

But I’m getting ahead of my narrative. My problems began as soon as I parked the car. Somehow while donning my cycling kit, I managed to lose my cell phone. After considerable searching I enlisted another rider to try calling my phone number so that it would ring, only to realize that it was still silenced from the night before. At the last minute, I realized that it had somehow fallen down into the back of my bibshorts, where it was comfortably nestled between my cheeks! Good thing I had yet to jump onto my saddle! But that delay flustered me and put me under time pressure to get registered and line up for the start.

Not having time to go through my usual preride routine, I started noticing problems as soon as we rolled out. First was that my bike computer was displaying no heart rate data. That wasn’t a huge surprise, because my HRM had been complaining about low battery for days, and I was just waiting for it to run out completely before changing it. So its time had come, and I wasn’t going to bother fixing it until I got home. No heart rate data isn’t the end of the world.

But what would be the end of the world is having no power data. It seemed like my bike computer decided that if it couldn’t connect to my HRM, then it wasn’t gonna connect to anything at all. So the first few miles of my ride were spent fiddling in my Garmin’s menus to manually reconnect my power meter pedals, then again to connect to my electronic shifters.

At that point I thought everything was settled. I was wrong. A couple hours later, I noticed that my phone had made a couple notification chimes, but nothing had come up on my bike computer, and another light bulb went off. I had failed to open the Garmin Connect app on my phone, which meant I wouldn’t get phone notifications during my ride. Or weather updates. Or a lot of other useful information. So I spent another few minutes soft-pedaling while I opened the app and got that connected, too.

After 55 kilometers and more than two hours fighting the headwinds, I pulled into our second water stop in Granger and went to record my usual rest stop voice notes… but my phone’s screen was frozen. Unhappily, it refused to respond, and I could neither reboot it nor power it off without screen input. While not having voice notes isn’t the end of the world, I worried about what I would do if I couldn’t rely on Google Maps for the drive back to Austin!

Granger Dam reservoir on a grim day

Next, as I approached the third water stop, I started feeling a pain in my inner thigh, as if it was rubbing against something sharp with each pedal stroke. As it become more intense, I felt down there and discovered that there was a hole in my bibshorts. At the rest stop, I found the culprit; the hard plastic hook-side of the Velcro attaching my saddle bag to my seat post was sticking out, and had abraded my bib shorts. It had torn clean through them and started abrading my inner thigh, had ripped through my skin and muscle before opening a hole in my femoral artery, whereupon I died from blood loss. Well, maybe not that last bit, but after 16 thousand pedal strokes it sure hurt a lot, and now I have to throw away an otherwise good pair of $200 bibshorts.

After all these minor mishaps, I started getting jumpy, questioning every rattle coming from the bike as it traversed the rough roads of Texas farmland, vowing to hand-check every bolt after I got home.

But Pæthos held together and I completed the 100 kilometer course in 4h8m, which is very respectable given the pervasive headwind, with an average power of 151 Watts.

But lest any of us thought all my mishaps were over… When I packed up and drove off, our 2009 Accord started flashing a “check gas cap” warning. Yeesh! So that was my terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.

But stepping aside and reflecting, I’m still glad I did it. It was great to introduce myself to another popular local event. This one has a generally nice, flat route that briefly runs alongside the Granger Dam reservoir. And it’s a good season-opening metric century to build up a little training stress to start the year. For all these reasons, I was glad to have ridden it.

But from a course perspective, it was extremely similar to the Red Poppy Ride and the Fire Ant Tour. These events are all held in the flat farmlands north and east of Austin, presumably because the organizers think cyclists prefer avoiding the lumpier Hill Country to the west. However, they’re really only exchanging hills for brisk headwinds, which are just as physically demanding. So I’ve come to expect windy conditions on these rides, while casting a more interested eye toward any events being held to the west of here.

But despite the cool weather and misfortunes, I’d say Rosedale was a good ride and worth a place in the annual ride calendar.