What a great day today! I think I got a bit of color from all that sun.
I road from Mt Washington to Oregon Ridge (16.1 miles) and did the club ride (45 miles, I messed up on a couple of turns.) I was barley hanging on to the lead pack (and NoRacer who was near the front) for the first 6 miles when I finally lost sight of them. To understand the next bit I should explain my set up; I have an Xtracycle with too much junk in the panniers mainly for those odd emergencies that come up while touring, which really slows me down on the up hills but ~50% of the time I can make this up on the down hill. Now if you are thinking why don’t I leave all that junk at home the reason is two fold; one, it makes it harder on me when I do go touring and two, I experience a weird phenomena similar to muscle atrophy that astronauts experience and after a couple of weeks of going lighter I am back to riding the pace I would be doing with the weight, so now I ride almost all the time with the weight and slowly I am getting a bit faster even with the weight especially when I try and chase people like NoRacer. Anyway back to the story, we had a large turn out of 24 riders and about 20 were in the lead pack and they were riding in a fairly tight formation of 2-3 abreast. So on the down hills when I would normally leap frog a group like this I would have had to cross the double yellow line and not have any room to merge back in case of on oncoming car, so I had to hit the brakes and stay in the rear. But after I lost sight of the group I should be back to normal, right? Wrong, the wind started to pick up and I was getting some serious cross wind buffeting which made it really hard to keep control of my bike over 30mph, so I essentially lost my gravity assisted down hill speed advantage on this ride. But I do think next time I ride with NoRacer when he is not doing a recovery ride, I’m dropping the weight.
(Aren’t you glad you asked?
)
My stats:
Mileage: 68.1 (met a friend in Timonium and got a lift back home.)
Average speed on the club ride 13.1mph and 12.2 over all (I like riding easy and looking at the scenery when riding solo.)
Total ascent: 4999ft
Tomorrow I think I’m doing the “Pancake ride” (with weight.)