First off, sorry for not posting this Friday. This is the first time I haven’t posted on a weekday in about four weeks.
This morning, I went for a nice, long ride with some friends at the local university. The team coach (also an English professor) invited me to come ride with the college students, to help teach them about group riding, and just general cycling form and etiquette.
It was really fun, though a bunch of people showed up, and I ended up pushing myself pretty hard. My Surly Long Haul Trucker weighs somewhere around 32 pounds, maybe more. All the other riders were rocking sub-twenty-pound bikes. I had to turn up the power to just keep up with them, much less do anything else. I pulled for a while, but as I expected, I ended up dropping off the back (that’s cycle-ese for “I couldn’t keep up and got left behind”). Even so, I made a personal best record for a ten-mile stretch. At one point, I was averaging 22 MPH, which for me, is huge. I normally can only maintain a 15MPH average, maybe 18 for short bursts.
It was both discouraging, and encouraging. I knew I was going to get dropped, because my bike is just so heavy and bulky. But on the other hand, I didn’t expect to last as long as I did. It was kind of cool, and I ended up going back to the group, riding hard for a while, and getting dropped again- a few times, in fact. But once I rested my legs, I was able to crank it up to 20MPH again for a mile or two at a time.
This ride has basically got me thinking about 2 things:
- I really need to practice pulling harder efforts, and
- I could really use a faster bike when I ride with groups!
