There’s a particular type of long adventure ride that speaks to me. If there’s any one style of “signature ride” I can claim to have, it’s this meandering, self-supported road trek, the main features of which are:

• Minimal pack - one 10-liter camelback with a 2L reservoir and a bottle in my bottle cage plus my usual tiny saddlebag for tools
• Mid-ride lunch stops and incidental sightseeing - none of this ‘go as fast as you can from point A to point B’ nonsense, but also nothing forced or hokey. Stops can and do change fluidly, and while the most important thing is getting to my destination before dark, the second most important is having fun trundling along
• Long - while there’s a type of adventure ride for me that favors rougher terrain and therefore packs the same ‘adventuriness’ into a shorter route length (see quicksilver mine 2017 and WCC 2014), this specific long adventure ride format is almost always above an imperial century, often around a double metric
• Alone - this one’s a little flexible in terms of solo-solo or with one ride partner, but above two people total it stops being the kind of flexible ride I love
• Often on a holiday weekend - this was a facet of my college rides because there tended to be less traffic, fewer commitments, and most importantly no class

These tenets were built up over time, some becoming more or less important to capturing the feeling of an adventure ride. But they all started here, with Irvine to Santa Barbara.

In February of 2015 I was a freshman at UCSB, just starting my first race season with the team. I was by this time already known for the absurd amount of time I spent on a bike (for an undergrad, at least). That January I’d purchased my first road bike of my own, replacing the team bike I’d been generously lent, and immediately ridden a hundred miles to Ojai on it. Like, as my second ride. Side note, I don’t recommend that at all. My bottom bracket was misfit during construction or loosened during the ride or something, and I needed to stop at a bike shop in Ojai and ask them to readjust it, the creaking was so bad. But anyway, by February I was ready to tackle something longer.

My general competency with road bikes tends to the endurance side of things. I’m power-forward enough for short sprints, but I have zero cardio and am not on the stick-thin side, so I tend to prefer longer, meandering rides. This was true even (especially?) in 2015. Coastal riding in SoCal is especially nice, so I’d had my eye on a long jaunt that spring. We were down in LA for a race weekend that happened to fall right before a Monday holiday, so I asked one of my high school friends if I could stay with her Sunday night and ride home to SB starting early Monday morning. She was kind enough to take me in, and after a long night of catching up, I set my Garmin to charge and fell asleep.

The next morning, just after 5 AM, I set out from Irvine toward Santa Barbara. I knew my route would be mostly coastal, but there was a portion of the PCH near Malibu that had been washed out in the rain, and I was going to hook up through Topenga. The route was around 150-160 miles, something like 4,500 feet of elevation gain as planned. My hope was to get to campus by a couple of hours after nightfall.

Irvine to Santa Monica was fairly uneventful. This is a section I’ve done since, although in the other direction. Rolling by the coast is a lovely experience, the cars are used to cyclists so there’s not that much by way of fear for your life compared to more remote sections, and I remember the weather being overall quite nice as well. Below is the route for that portion - knowing I wasn’t enough of a climber to do a hilly ride this long, I had purposely routed myself around any obviously hilly portions (thanks, Strava route planner, you redeemed yourself after the December 2014 ‘Private Road Indirectly Leads to Lisa Falling Off the Side of a Mountain’ debacle).

That first part of the ride was leisurely - I stopped for breakfast early on and then had my fair share of 3-5 minute stops along the way. I got to Santa Monica around 11:30, and from there started my trek upward through Topanga Canyon Road.

Topanga Canyon was a nice climb, it definitely wasn’t as car-filled as I had feared (or, at least, as I have come to fear in the adventures since). However, it did take me a while. By the time I sat down to lunch in Topanga itself it was already 1:30, and by the time I finished 2:30 had rolled around as well. The break was worth the time, though. As I’d started to realise, with a ride that big and the way I was riding it, I would be in the saddle all day anyway. Assuming I managed to make it home before the night well and truly fell, it would just be silly to try to economise by reducing all my breaks to their bare minimum. This is a mindset that has stuck with me, for better or for worse, but I do rather think I have more fun on my rides than I would if I were watching the clock that ardently.

I do rather recommend that little lunch stop in Topanga, though, if it’s still there. One of the most picnic-like mid-ride lunches I’ve had.

After lunch came the last bit of the climb and then the descent into Calabasas. There weren’t any major climbs after that, but what I underestimated then and was exceedingly careful to correctly estimate later on was the compound effect of rollers.

Calabasas is a lovely area for riding, it usually brings me the least amount of worries in terms of coexisting with traffic, and the roads are typically well-maintained with lots of trees, in the areas I rode for this and other journeys like it. But there are so many rollers. Rollers are kind of the bane of my existence in that I’m not at all enthused about climbing and the compound effect of small hills drains me pretty quickly. Especially when I’m weighed down by a pack and in that long-ride state of “low and slow,” it’s just not what my body wants to be doing. So when I planned this route and didn’t take that into consideration, I did myself a mild to moderate disservice.

Which is not to say that I didn’t enjoy it at all, it was just hour 12 by the time I got to the descent into Oxnard and I was definitely actively singing 99 Bottles of Beer On the Wall out loud while riding.

The descent into Oxnard was very pleasant - I almost always take Potrero in and out of Thousand Oaks, it’s brutal to climb in the sun but otherwise an enjoyable ride. And in a way it’s become indicative to me of the ‘gateway’ into Thousand Oaks, so it’s this sort of ritual that’s pleasant in its own right. Anyway, I came down into Oxnard around 5:30 or 6 in the evening, by which time it was getting dark. Riding through Oxnard’s field section in the dark-dark would have been kind of a stupid idea, but thankfully I was out of there before the real evening.

Port Hueneme (pronounced Why-Knee-Me, by the way) and Oxnard proper are fine in the evening, and the ride up to Ventura is quite pleasant as well. Not much traffic then, nice coastal ride.

By the time I got to Ventura, though, the dark-dark had arrived. I looked for the coastal bike trail but was having stress-induced difficulty finding it (to be fair, it’s mildly tough to find the first time around, especially from the Ventura end), and riding in an unfamiliar non-urban area in the actual dark frightened me to the point where I called my friend and made him talk to me until I’d found where I was going.

Coming into Ventura I’d stopped for coffee, but once I was at the seaside the choice was whether to take the coastal trail or abandon ship and take the last train home. I made a spur-of-the-moment decision to take the train, spent a few minutes desperately searching for the moderately well-hidden Amtrak stop, and caught the last train of the night home. That’s the big sea-cutting line on my Garmin where the GPS caught up when I unpaused - no maritime adventures were had that day (thankfully?). I got on the train about 9 PM and was in Santa Barbara less than an hour later. I feel like, having ridden through Ventura on a number of occasions now, I might have opted for the trail. Coast trail to Carp and then Carp side roads to Santa Barbara would likely have been not that bad, and a large part of it is car-free by nature. But I’m still a little bit of a wimp riding in the dark on my own. Perhaps if I had had a buddy different decisions would have been made.

Anyway, some of the Amtrak trains that serve Santa Barbara stop north in Goleta, as well. Whether that one did or didn’t, I chose to alight at Santa Barbara proper, I think to feel as though I had ‘cheated’ the shortest distance possible. Swinging by IV to pick up the duffel bag I’d sent home with the team, I got to my dorm just before 11:30.

Your first big ride (and your second, and third) are likely to hold a special place in your heart. I’d definitely do this again with pretty much no modifications, except maybe having a friend tag along. It was freeing and beautiful and extraordinarily exhausting, I slept for 13 hours, woke up to ride downtown for coffee with a friend, then came back and went to sleep again. And therein I fully fell in love with endurance adventure riding.