Saturday’s Ride

The plan for Saturday was to meet up with the 10:00 Acacia Park group ride and then my friend Larry and I were going to get some extra miles in. Saturday morning was really windy and Larry and a couple other guys were worried it would be unsafe on the group ride. Instead 4 of us rode down Hwy 115.

There was a brutal headwind and times we were really getting sand blasted. In one particularly bad gust, a piece of gravel hit my lip and it stung for 15 minutes. I used to always ride without sunglasses because I sweat so much. It wouldn’t take long until I couldn’t see through my glasses. I’ve finally found that the Briko Sprinter 3 glasses that you can get at Bike Nashbar have a bit of a gap between the lens and the frame. This seems to help keep sweet from building up. Also the sweat bands that E-Caps/Hammer Nutrition carry have a little rubber strip on the back to get the sweat to run to the sides of the head. It works better than I ever guessed it would. Between the glasses and the sweat bands I’m now able to ride with glasses and Saturday I was really glad.

I’m to the point where I can hold a good, hard pace but if anybody accelerates hard I often get dropped. It’s easy to start thinking I’m not very fit but I have to remind myself that these guys think 3-4 hours is a long ride. They spend a lot more time going hard and attacking. Part way down 115, we saw a group headed back toward town. The guys I was with wanted to ride back with them. By the time traffic cleared they were out of sight. We chased hard and finally I got dropped about the time we caught the group. Once they caught the group, they slowed and I got back on.

Once back in town, Larry and I went and rode several hills. Coming down 26th Street I had dropped Larry in the switchbacks. When I got to Hwy 24, the light was green but I didn’t think Larry could make it so I decided to stop. He thought I was going and sprinted and went through as the light turned red. I tried sprinting from a stop and got into the intersection as cars started going. I was almost across the east bound lanes when my chain snapped and I coasted across the west bound lanes. Once traffic cleared I went back out into the middle of the intersection and retrieved my chain.

After Larry stopped at his house, I went by myself and did a loop through the Black Forest. That of course meant that I got a little more climbing in. I got in 100 miles with 5489 feet of climbing.

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