I did an evening start flèche this past weekend too! We started at 6pm Friday, had a 405km route planned. We had some stiff headwinds for the first 200km, though we'd planned a 2h sleep stop just about halfway. It was nice to do and surprisingly easy to fall asleep at 5am. Our route had a bit of tailwind on this section but the meaning of that wasn't quite appreciated at the time. It was unseasonably hot too, I think we might have hit 30C around noon on Saturday and it was really humid. I guess conditions were perfect for a rare type of storm called a
Derecho to form and it
made quite the mess across the area we were riding through. We got soaked while in farm country with no where to hide (except under the trees by the overflowing ditches!) so we just rode the high winds, stopping only to go around downed trees and power lines. Our route was fairly flat though there was rolling hills as crossed the Niagara escarpment and headed toward the finish on the shore of Lake Ontario. We only made 372 out of our 405, but no one had a problem with that... luckily we finished closer to our hotel than we would have if we'd finished the route as planned.
Headwinds on the first night, 40-60km/h gusts for the first 4 hours, gusts died down at night but winds stayed around 20km/h
This was the storm that was pushing us on the second day.
Incredible amount of damage across Ontario and Quebec, wind gusts of 132km/h were near our route
I also rode a new bike for this one, only did a 30km shakedown ride to make sure nothing was loose and luckily I managed to put it together well enough. The hydraulic disc brakes were great in the rain, as were the full fenders. The geo on the bike is very close my other bike so it was easy to get the fit.The 650B was nice to have for the gravel we did and I like having full fenders that don't rattle. I'll still use my road bike for shorter brevets and those without rain but this purple bike is probably gonna do most of the longer ones from now on. I kind of wish I'd built it up with 700x32 and carbon rims, but it's not bad at 9.9kg (~22lbs) the way it is now. Pretty standard gravel drivetrain; shimano ultegra, 46/30 and 11-32 out back. Tires are gravelkings, RH are too expensive and the sidewalls don't seem to last IME. Wanted the gravelkings in black but LBS only had the gumwall, but at least they have more rubber on the sidewall than the regular RH tires.