RockStar Route Bike Adventure

October 18, 2023 by EdgeofMountain Leave a comment

Adventure friend, Caleb Johnson and I decided to do this thing..

I suggested it to Caleb a few months ago. I had seen this route promoted by the Virginia Endurance Series group. I was highly interested, but the mileage is really high, and I was not interested in doing a 2 day overnight ride. At first I thought it would be good to do the last 100 miles as a partial completion and century ride. When I mentioned that to Rob Issem with the Virginia Endurance Series, he encouraged us to do the whole route. Caleb and I eventually decided to do the whole Pave route-166 miles in one day. We picked September 30.

The RockStar challenge has 3 courses-MountainBike, Gravel and Pave. I will not explain it all, but the Pave is the shortest and easiest by far. See the Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/rockstarvirginia

They have a “Grand Depart” day in April, in which several cyclists start at the same time and do the route that they choose to do, but you can also do the route any time you want. There are lodging and camping recommendations, restaurants and store stops, plus highlights of the route noted. We did this on our own.

This is the Pave route with the water and food stops listed link: RockStar Pave route with water, stores and points of interest 166 miles and over 10,000 feet climb

The short of it is that we planned to ride 166 miles point to point from downtown Harrisonburg VA to downtown Roanoke VA on back country roads and gravel roads, through Mountains, Farmlands, National Forests and a State Park. The idea of doing it in one push/one day appealed to us more than a bike packing trip/overnight stay. Everyone has different preferences. Clifton Forge area is a great place to stay overnight, plus there are other great options.

Research and preparation: The logistics of a point-to-point/one way route like this is a major pain. You either get someone to drive up and drop you off at the start and pick you up at the finish OR you drive yourself up and go back to retrieve the car later. I do not think a train or bus was an option here. I went back and forth on on the logistics. I give a lot of credit to Caleb for preparation. Many times on adventures with other people/groups, I mostly lead the way and do the preparations and planning. Caleb did a lot on this one. Among other things, Caleb put waypoints in the route so that the bike computer and our watches would tell us where our stops were (water, food store stops). Caleb also secured a bike computer to rent from Cardinal Bike Shop in Roanoke. Kudos to him.

My wife, Maria graciously agreed to drive us to Harrisonburg Friday evening-THANKS Maria!. We got hotel rooms and Maria dropped us off at Black Sheep Coffee in downtown Harrisonburg at 6am Saturday morning (Blacksheep was surprisingly kind of hard to find). Note on the hotel-there were great options near the start, in downtown Harrisonburg on Wednesday, but by Friday they were all gone. We had to stay 20 minutes South in Staunton.

We were off and riding, navigating the many turns in downtown Harrisonburg in the dark, shortly after 6am. There are 18 turns in the first 5 miles..it is shocking. Some of this was in the dark but we went down Harrisonburg Greenways and other short roads until it opened up into Farmland and backcountry.

Caleb packed light and totally relied on the stores/water stops. He only used his bike jersey pockets and the bottle cages/bottles, which worked really well. I attached a rear rack on my bike to carry food and other supplies (back up lights, etc). Everyone has different preferences, but I thought what Caleb did was the way to go. Rely on the store/water stops and carry as little as you can get away with.

Quote from the Endurance Series: PAVE – “The Pave route is stunning and it stays mostly in the valleys alongside the ridge lines that the Trail and Gravel routes use. A road bike with 28c or larger tires is the recommended steed. (Approx: 85% Country Backroads, 15% bikeable Gravel and Dirt Roads)”

I enjoy gravel riding but I was totally in a paved mindset and trying to make sure we had the pace to finish in one day. Roughly 15% of the route is gravel. Gravel is slower and I did not have a great tire set up for the gravel parts. I did fine with it and had no issues. Caleb had a good gravel tire set up and moved much better on the gravel than I did. Every time we hit gravel, he was probably holding his breath that I did not have an issue. I had 32 road tires on my bike and they did well. My recommendation is to have nothing smaller than that. I think Caleb had 40 gravel/knobby tires. My advice is to be prepared for it with the right set up and enjoy it.

We went through a lot of beautiful farm country-barns, pastures, etc. We went through a lot of National Forest. We went through Hone Quarry Recreation Area, where a few of us had run a 40 mile trail race, earlier this year. We went by The Wild Oak Trail that is a 28 mile trail loop and race event, that I did a couple years ago. We rode by Elkhorn Lake and Braley Pond, which I used to visit many years ago when we lived in Staunton. I fly fished the river behind Elkhorn Lake pretty regularly back then.We rode from the North side to the South side of Douthat State Park. This was Caleb’s first time in that Park.

The ONE snafu- we scouted out and knew all of the store and water stops ahead of time, but we missed a store around mile 115 that was on route 220. 220 is a busy highway that we were only on for a very short distance. We were focused on our side of the road and totally missed the store stop on the other side of the highway. We were 33 miles past it, when we figured it out. The next store stop was another 17 miles. Now we were out of water. I had a filter with me. We stopped and tried it, but it was not working. I failed to soak it before the adventure. Caleb drank from the creek unfiltered and I opted to tough it out.

We rode by Andy Layne trailhead, which is one of the main parts of the Miserious course/event that I created. We rode by McAfee Knob parking lot/trailhead and where the AT crosses route 311. We rode by Parkway Brewing, which we visit a lot. We rode through Salem and onto the Roanoke Greenway toward Mill Mountain.

The end of the route goes up the old road on Mill Mountain and then downtown to the finish at a Roanoke iconic/famous restaurant-The Texas Tavern. The old road going up Mill Mountain is very steep and is tough to do on fresh legs. We had this hanging over our head the whole ride..will we be able to bike up it with 160 mile legs? It was tough and slow, but we did it pretty easily. Caleb was faster than me going up it, not that it was a race. We were proud and happy with ourselves to be done with that climb and basically done with the whole route. We congratulated each other at the Star on top of Mill Mountain. Now all we had to do was 4 or so miles down the mountain and into town to get to the official finish at Texas Tavern. The route took us through Elmwood Park amphitheater and the downtown Market, which was interesting and nice.

In the meanwhile, Maria was following our progress on the Strava Beacon link. She and Brayden Meadows met at Texas Tavern and waited for us to finish. I cannot tell you how much I appreciated their support.

Finally we get to the Texas Tavern and finished! It took around 16 hours. 6am to 10pm. All 4 of us had food at Texas Tavern in celebration. Caleb and I had agreed beforehand that we would get a Cheesy Western ( hamburger with fried egg).

This was a fantastic adventure. We were blessed with perfect weather-it stayed between 60 and 70 the entire time, with no rain or wind. The whole thing went extremely smooth other than the missed store stop that I mentioned earlier.

Major kudos to the Virginia Endurance Series, Paul Workman and Rob Issem for putting this epic route together and promoting it. Our names are on the RockStar Hall of Fame- RS HOF

Lastly, people ask if or how much my but hurt during this, due to being in the saddle for so long. Not at all. I think everyone is different on that aspect and I am just lucky. My toes did get numb and did not get normal until sometime the next day.

My Strava link