Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Group Ride Recap


I broke one of my shoes last fall. It was replaced under warranty, but I still wanted to use them, since I like to use fixed cleats on the track and floating cleats on the road. A zip-tie solved the problem, in the most ghetto way imaginable.

The weather was perfect for the ride last night. We had 8 guys: Ted, Charlie, Mike, some guy, another guy, Mark, another guy, and me.

I wanted to wear my new Highroad cycling cap, but it was a bit too warm for that. I did, however, wear my knee warmers. My wonky knee has been feeling pretty good, but I wanted to keep it covered just to be sure. It felt good through the whole ride.

We rode some roads that I haven't ridden in several years, so that was a nice change of scenery. We ended up at just over 2 hours at an average speed of around 33kph. Not too slow, not too fast.

All the cables have stretched on my new bike, so the shifting was getting a bit jumpy during the ride. Lots of big THUNKs when I would stomp on the pedals and the chain would skip gears. I'll be dropping that off at the shop today for tweaking. Aside from that, the bike was great. I like it more and more every time I ride it.

We had a couple good sprints for Stop Ahead sings (and Ted managed to sprint for an intersection sign and a Trucks Hauling sign - FAIL). The first one was pretty early in the day, and it was a pretty long sprint. I forgot how long it takes me to recover from that shit. I was hurting for the next 15 minutes.

On the way back into town we ramped up the pace a bit and I was able to hang on with no problems, so my fitness must be getting a bit better. I actually felt strong throughout the whole ride. Of course, I spent very little time on the front, so I was probably fresher than those other suckers who dragged me around the countryside.

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