I realize I have not written much lately. I have actually been doing a decent amount of sewing, but I am too lazy to take pictures…maybe soon. I have also been back to racing again, and I guess that focused training and racing drains my literary energy. I managed to enter and complete 4 crits in a two week period…for me that is some sort of a record, since I used to race less than 4 crits per season. I decided that I like crits better…I’m never going to win any, but they are a boatload more fun than hill climbs. And unlike obscure hill climb events that nobody enters or bothers to watch, crits at least enable other people to see you race.
My return to focused training after about 18 months of generally fucking around while pretending to be a serious athlete (I call that my triathlete phase) has brought me back to where I was in 2007 – that is, I enjoy training, I enjoy doing hard workouts, and I enjoy racing. I was actually kinda pissed that there were no races this past weekend for me to enter, because after Concord Criterium, Gate City Criterium, Witches Cup and Gran Prix of Beverly I was starting to feel like I had some decent fitness. Not “peak form ready to win” fitness, but more like “this is where most people probably were in April” kind of fitness. Which is fine for me, because I am going to focus on cross this year, and unlike years past where I focused on road and then just kind of coasted into cross season on residual road fitness and fizzled out by early November, this year I plan on making it through the entire season with a peak coming around December. I most likely wont do nationals because
A.) I am not that good, and even the Masters 30-34 category is pretty stacked
2.) I have no money and that is an expensive trip with a bike
III.) I’ve done the whole nationals thing and although it’s fun, there is certainly nothing going on there that I cannot afford to miss.
So, my cross season training commences this week. Up until now I was focusing on establishing a much needed base after the 18 months of fucking around training. I wanted to do another race this weekend, but Andy was racing at the Timberman triathlon and there was no road option for me for Sunday. I knew that I would not get any training in on Saturday while Andy was racing, so I decided to take advantage of Friday not being a typical Friday. Normally, Fridays are short and easy rides to prepare for the weekend of racing. No racing meant Friday was Epic Ride Day. We needed to be at Ellacoya State Park in the evening for packet pickup. We were also staying up there with friends. Andy was working all day, and I had nothing better to do, so I decided to ride the 85 miles up to our friends’ house. I packed a bag of stuff for the weekend and stuck it in Andy’s car and I mapped out a route that would avoid as much traffic as possible.
My route took me out of Nashua on 102, into Derry. That part sucked because 102 is a busy road, but after about an hour on the bike the road got quieter and I eventually made my turn onto Old Auburn Road, which led me through lovely rural farm lands and new housing developments. So far, so good.
My first surprise of the ride came when I turned onto Pembroke Road in Auburn. The route I had mapped clearly stated to take this road to the Chester Turnpike. I headed down Pembroke Road, past the town post office, the police station…and there the road turned to dirt. And it wasn’t hard pack well traveled dirt..it was freshly graded loose stones dirt. Normally when I encounter an unknown dirt road on a ride I turn around and head back to civilization. But, I knew that this was the correct route. Sadly, this should not have surprised me…it is New Hampshire after all, and it is perfectly normal for the main road in a town turn to dirt. Fortunately the dirt section was not that long and I met up with pavement again at the end of the road. I turned left on the Chester Turnpike and went on my way.
Now, I don’t know about you, but when I look at a map and see a road called “Turnpike”, I get an image in my head, and that image usually involves several lanes of traffic and maybe a tollbooth or two. The Chester Turnpike was more of a winding paved country back road. I was initially worried that the Turnpike would involve heavy traffic, but fortunately for me this was a New Hampshire turnpike. So there was no traffic at all. It wound its way past small homes and wooded lots and everything was fine.
That is, until I passed the town limits sign for Hooksett – where the road immediately turned to a Class 6 ATV trail, plummeted down a steep slope into a gully and back up the other side, where it ended abruptly at what appeared to be a snow mobile trail with a gait over the end of it.
I was on my road bike. 23mm tires at 110 PSI, rocketing down this rock strewn dirt descent. How I did not crash I’ll never know.
At the end of the road, I looked around. Nothing. Clearly, this was not the way the map made it out to be. You see, I made this loop using MapMyRide, and MapMyRide uses Google maps. And according to Google Maps, the Chester Turnpike runs along the western border of Bear Brook State Forest and connects to Turnpike Street in Pembroke, which leads directly to Rte 3 North.
You see, kids, this is what Google Maps showed me:
And this is what s actually there:
Yahoo Map of The Chester Turnpike
Which, upon closer inspection of the road map, revealed this:
The End
Fortunately for me I had a cell phone, so I called Andy at work and had him confirm my suspicions. I was also fortunate in that I only had to backtrack about 1.5 miles to get back to another main road, and I was able to get where I needed to go without adding any extra mileage. I was unable to avoid traffic, but after my stint in the woods, I was OK with that.
Now, I know that a lot are you are going to say “always check the satellite image, because the road maps can be wrong”. But the problem is that with Google Maps, they will draw the road onto the satellite image, even if it is not there. So a satellite image would have done nothing to help me in this instance. What I did learn from this is, MapMyRide is useless for planning rides.
August 24th, 2009 | 
If you go to google maps, and find exit 28 on rte 3 in billerica massachusetts, then zoom to the 2000 ft scale, you’ll see the middlesex turnpike in the southeast quadrant and turnpike road in the northwest quadrant (chelmsford actually). It easy to see a line that would connect the two. In the middle of this line, you’ll see another road that has the name old middlesex turnpike, but is not connected to either the middlesex turnpike or turnpike road.
Before the internet days, maps published as late as the late ’80s would show one long continuous road that went from where the middlesex turnpike where it intersects with concord road all the way up to turnpike road. I used one of those maps when I first moved to lowell in ‘86 and was looking for alternate routes to work in lexington. Imagine my surprise when turnpike road ended in a row of hedges.You can still see the old bridge pilings where the ‘pike’ used to cross the concord river from old turnpike road, which – as late as ‘97 – was a dirt road with alot of houses on it.
You can ride turnpike road on an MTB from where it appears to end on mill road in chelmsford all the way to rte 3, but I wouldn’t recommend a road bike.
Then there was the time I used a map to go from newton new hampshire to waterville valley for a mountain bike race. There’s a road that goes from center sandwich up to rte 49 called sandwich notch road. It turns to a rutted dirt road for about 5 miles before getting to 49.
fun.
These roads are called turnpikes because they were built around 1800 to 1820 and were at that time the main road for stage coach horse-drawn traffic. They had tollgates, taverns, and other stops for travelers. In the modern age of freeways and state highways, they have become discontinuous, overgrown dirt roads that are being re-purposed into residential housing developments. Some of them have actually been made into state highways (paved, one lane each way, 40-50 mph). The Londonderry Turnpike for example, connects Salem, NH and Concord, NH.