I had been looking forward to this ride all last week. I had only commuted on my bike 2 days because I was working really long hours and I was really feeling the bike jones. The perfect fix was a mid-winter ride with my local cycling group, 30-mile loop, at an easy 18-20 mph with coffee and camaraderie afterwards.
(aside) The rides at this time of year are typically 10 to 15 riders, in the summer they swell to 40+_ riders and both the distances and cruising speeds increase. This is a fairly fast and aggressive group, if you can’t keep up you get dropped and have to catch up for coffee at the end of the ride. Right now you should be thinking, ‘Did he post this to the SS/fixie forum by mistake. Will an administrator please move this to the Road Forum?’ Bear with me.

During the summer months I take my road bike on the group rides, for the gears (sorry). During the winter I ride my SS/fixie Gunnar, the group is smaller, the rides shorter and the pace more reasonable. The Gunnar is geared low, 42x17, for commuting and off road trail riding, not fast paced, big ring rides. That was the bike I rode today, this was, after all, going to be any easy ride.
On my way to the appointed place I reached for my water bottle and grabbed air, it was sitting on the kitchen counter, right where I left it. I optimistically thought I could race back, get my bottle and make it in time for the start. I was almost 10 min late. (The SSB train conductors in Switzerland would be envious of the group’s on time departure record. There is a clock right across the street from where we meet which keeps us honest.) I had no idea which route the group was riding today so just I struck out on one of the typical loops we ride. I had no real thought of meeting the group until coffee afterwards. After 10 min I caught another rider who also missed the train. We rode together at nice pace until a man waiting on a bus yelled ‘You’re late Charlie Brown. You better hurry up if you’re gonna catch ‘em.’ The group had passed this way, the trail was hot and the chase was on. Bye, easy ride. We rode hard, took turns pulling and 20 min later we caught them, over 25 of them, hmm... …large group. We were greeted with calls of ‘Hey where did you guys come from?’, ‘Did you get enough beauty sleep?’ We slowed down, tucked into the pack and were ready to take it easy for the rest of the ride. Things were finally going according to plan.
Wrong! What I didn’t realize was that this was the first ride after the New Year. This was not going to be the ride I had thought about, riding in pairs and talking with my friends, checking out all the new bike stuff people had gotten for Christmas. The natives were restless. The people who had been forsaking their bikes for the gym or their stationary trainers were out and wearing their New Year’s resolutions on their Lycra sleeves. I don’t know if our catching them did it or if it was just coincidence but things were getting frisky. The pace picked up slowly from 18 to 20 to 22… Riders who were at the back started moving forward in the pack. You could feel the undercurrent of tension in the group.
There is a rider in our group, Greg, he is a very strong rider with an idiosyncratic riding style. Ten or more times on any given ride he sprints off the front, he gets way out there and then loses steam and drops back to the group. Sometimes he just gets totally dropped. During the summer months the new riders in the group chase him, everyone else keeps pace, confident he will yoyo back into the fold. After all we have to conserve energy for the inevitable sprint home. In case you hadn’t noticed, this is not the summer. Greg went… …and everyone followed, then countered. People just kept pushing the pace, attacking and counter attacking, every time Greg did a flier of the front everyone just had to follow. I swear it was like a mid-summer ride without the common sense most people have developed by then. I always tell myself to ride my ride, to keep to the pace I had planned even if it means getting dropped. I never do it, but I tell myself anyway. Today was no different. I was weak, a lemming, I followed… …and lead. The pace was a sustained 25 with sprints to over 30. For 20 miles I spun my legs like a mad man. In a moment of weakness I asked the bicycle gods to give me gears, or just a big ring, they weren’t listening. My heart rate must have been at max for most of the ride.
What a ride! I planted myself into the couch at the coffee shop like the vegetable I was. Coffee never tasted so good. ‘Hey Mark, you looked like you were whipping egg whites out there?’ ‘Did you forget your gears at home?’ I smiled to myself it felt good. I paid for it though, I had that you trained too hard feeling all day long. Took a nice long nap in the afternoon. We got all that snow on Sunday, which was nice, I needed a reason to stay home. Maybe the cycling gods were listening after all.