youcoming

So you know as the season goes on your fitness starts to increase and hopefully some weight starts to come off and rides become a thing of pure joy even if painful at times? Well I had two rides over the weekend that to date are the best ones of the year. I started off the season in a funk, I was depressed and had put a lot of weight on and was scaring the crap out of 250# well I have managed to get down to 210# with a long way to go yet but really starting to feel good.
The first ride was with a couple of buddies, one has just started riding for the most part, he did start last year but an injury prevented him from doing a lot but this year he is determined to increase his riding the bad part here is he's like 135# soaking wet, little bugger. The other guy is a guy I admire a lot, he has MS but continues to ride as hard an often as he can. His biggest limitation is he struggles to recover after hard efforts and on days off and as he gets older the recovery required gets longer but he keeps bringing all he can. For those of you who think Ontario is flat, well sure we have no mountains but it sure isn't flat. Yes we have some nice stretches of flat ground and some cool long low grade decents but we have some steep risers that really peak the HR, some roads are like doing interval training the hills are spaced just so and living by Lake Ontario we always have a wind of some kind. Anyway here is the GPS map for the ride above.
https://connect.garmin.com/activity/174686263
The second ride was not as long and was basically the same route just changed up a little but the riders were the highlight. My son, brother in law and my nephew along with my friend with MS, also had a rider join in with us along the way. Other than Bill and I it was the first time this year for the other riders to head out this way and it's one of my favorite rides anyway but the company sure helped. The best thing with having the two 14 year olds out is they like to test one another and their old men out especially on the hills. My nephew is a strong rider and is kinda like me, he will turn into a big engine, my son is also strong but he excels at climbing but is also very explosive in a sprint. There is one hill on this route that everyone always tries to push themselves to see what they have. Well as we are leading up to the hill my friend takes an early dig trying to lure the boys out, it worked! My nephew jumped with him, then my brother in law went my son and I hung back as it's a long hill and hits 12% in places, finally my boy couldn't take it and half way up he makes his move, stays in his 50 up front but I noticed he was in his 19 on the back and no way he was going to stay on top of that. I knew he would catch and pass the other guys and I thought about letting him go but it was time he saw the old man could be explosive on climbs too, to catch him I also had to stay in the big ring and away I went. I've done this hill many times and know I can climb it the whole way in my 53-21 if I'm feeling real good, well I guess I was i finally caught the boy and passed him doing about 23kph and managed to keep it above 20 the whole way but did have to finish in my 53-23. Oh man it's great to push yourself to the limit, that's why I love this sport so much, plus the awesome decent on the other side. The rest of the ride was just as fun, we all took turns burning up the hills then regroup at the bottom and have a good laugh. Did some flat ground speed work teaching the boys how and when to choose certain gearing and also how to corner at speed. Only bad thing was after we made a pit stop in a small town my nephew started getting stomach cramps and required my sister coming to pick them up. That really sucked but he learned one very important rule same as his Dad, don't try different nutrition on a long ride. His Dad swears by cyclomax and after two swills of it my nephew was ready to throw up. After that it was just three of us as the other rider turned for home after our stop. We went home along Lake Ontario which is always really cool but right now there is a large hatch of some kind of insect which made it pretty interesting to ride. About 10k after our stop things started to slow down as my son was reaching his limit and his longest distance of the year but we still had fun and ended up with just over 116km which ended up being his longest ride of all time!
https://connect.garmin.com/activity/175486107

goldfinch

Nice report, thanks!

Brando_T.

interesting reading.

We had such beautiful weather in S. Ontario this past weekend and I was stuck with family stuff.

funrover 

Thanks for the report!