Day 13: Pampa, TX to Anadarko, OK
Strava Link: Petoji Day 13
Day 13 was the longest day of Petoji at 180 miles. You may remember that back on Day 7 I mistakenly thought I was riding the longest day until Day 21, but I found out later that I was forgetting about Day 13. Ever since then I was hating the idea of Day 13, and it wasn't even Day 13's fault. In my original itinerary I had planned to go through Talihina, OK and Days 13 and 14 were in the 150s. However, I couldn't get a hotel in Talihina, so I ended up switching to Heavener, OK and adding a few miles to the overall route. I changed Day 13 to 180 miles and Day 14 down to 104. It seemed like a fair trade at the time.
I didn't doubt that I could finish. I just wasn't looking forward to a long day in the wind. My hands were my main concern. It's funny, you'd think my legs or my butt would hurt more than anything, but my number one source of discomfort ended up being my hands and wrists. I had Deda Metal Blast aero bars, but those were essentially useless. I wanted full-length aero bars so I could get some weight off my wrist and I actually thought I had a pair mailed to Pampa until my wife told me that they showed up at home in Reno. I'm not sure how that happened. I ordered them on Amazon and put the hotel address in and everything, and then I noticed that overnight shipping was less than $5, so I went ahead and switched to that option just in case. It must have switched back to the default shipping address when I did that and I didn't notice. By the time I realized my mistake (a day and a half later) it was too late to ship another pair.
Oh well. All I could do was man up and just accept that it was going to be a long, slow day. The day started off on a good note. The previous night's stretching had paid off way more than I thought possible and my knee wasn't really stiff at all. I couldn't believe how much of a difference one day of stretching made. I figured I would continue to be a little tight for a while and that it would slowly improve day by day, but the relief was immediate. To be honest, up until this point I always thought stretching was a load of BS. I never felt like it made any difference for me. Petoji changed my mind about that. I know Petoji was an extreme stress on my body and this wasn't a normal situation, but if it was possible for my muscles to be so tight that my knee started hurting and for stretching to actually take that pain away, what other tight muscles do I have and what can regular stretching do for me?
I made it to Oklahoma about 60 miles into the day and had a major route scare. As I mentioned, I was on highways all throughout Texas and they had generous shoulders. As soon as I crossed the border into Oklahoma the shoulder was gone. This was on 152 and it wasn't super busy, but there was a lot of truck traffic. I still had more than 100 miles to go on 152 and I was starting to freak out a little bit. I didn't want to ride like this all day, and who knows how many extra miles an alternate route would add. That definitely was not what I needed on an already long day. What was I thinking with this Petoji route? Was it going to be this bad all the way to Georgia?
8 miles later there was a split in the road and 152 went southeast to Sayre while 8 went east to Elk City. It turns out that 8 was the busier of the two and all of the sudden 152 got narrower and seemed like more of a county road than a highway. It turned out to be a good route after all. There will be times later on when I will suggest changes to the Petoji route, but I don't think Day 13 will be one of them. That 8-mile stretch of 152 isn't the best, but it is only 8 miles and the rest is solid, so I wouldn't worry about it too much. There is a county road to the south of 152 that could be used to avoid most of the bad stretch of 152. It doesn't look like that one is paved, so it's a toss-up, really.
Towards the end of the ride, about 25 miles from Anadarko, I got off of 152 and rode on some small country roads. I had been on highways for quite a while, so that was a nice change of scenery and it kind of reminded me of my younger days when I was a kid riding around on the farm roads in Indiana.
My hotel was on the outskirts of town and there wasn't any food nearby and nobody was delivering, so I ended up riding a total of 5 extra miles that night to go into town and get some food. That was the last thing I wanted to do after a long day, but it was important to get a lot of calories in me after a ride like that. Day 14 was a shorter one, but there's still no way you can get behind on your calories on a 23-day ride like this.
