I knew I was in trouble when Joe started tinkering with his bike computer’s cadence pick-up just as the Chain Reaction Thursday night ride crowd was starting to roll out. We quickly caught the slowest riders on the short warm-up section of the ride, but we were so far behind the main group, which doesn’t usually split further until three or four miles in, there was really no chance of us catching them. At one of the turns we caught up to four riders who had stopped to fix one guy’s flat, and figured we’d hang on with them to catch back up to the group. Wrong! They were poking along at about 26 miles per hour on a false flat, much faster than I can maintain for any distance.
Now that I was good and winded, with a nice burning sensation in my thigh and calf muscles, from trying to keep up with people much faster than me, I entered the “long slog home” mental state. Not a good place to be 10 miles in to a 30 mile ride! There’s a little extra hill you can do in Appling, but we skipped it today, hoping that would get us back in front of a group we could ride with.
We rode about another 10 miles by ourselves before we were passed by the fastest group. As they went by, I had a nanosecond to fantasize that I was going to catch on to the back of this group and coast home, but they were clearly going too fast for me. A few minutes later, another group passed by at a pace we could handle, so we caught on to that one instead.
Of course there were a still a few hills to endure before the hurt (the good hurt mind you) could stop. On one of those hills, Joe discovered he needs to ride more than once a week, as he dropped off the pace like he was jumping out of an airplane without a parachute. At that point I was doing my time at the front of the little group. I only realized he had gone when I finished my pull, drifted out of the line to the back, and noticed he wasn’t there anymore, in fact he was back far enough I couldn’t see him anymore. We were close enough to the end and there were enough riders behind us now I just due to the short-cut that I just kept hanging on.
I want to do a 165 mile weekend in October, so while these short, fast rides are fun, I need to start putting in some distance on the weekends. I think I’ll ride from home up to the park for the saturday morning rides; that’ll add about 18 miles to whatever I do with the Chain Reaction group.