Big and Fast

Finally feeling almost normal again, I was up early and out the door on my way to Starbucks by 6:05, looking forward to a good Saturday Giro Ride. I had finally given in to the mid-summer heat and squeezed one of those huge blue insulated water bottles we'd received at a recent race into the bottle cage. The sun was still behind some clouds way over on the horizon, and so I started out thinking I'd go for a regular coffee, but by the time I was halfway there I was already dreaming about iced coffee. When I arrived, I was surprised to see so many people already there. Realdo, who is in town for a few days from Mauritius, was already there, and a little while later Kenny rode up with Frank in tow. I looked around at the crowd and all of the carbon fiber wheels and thought, "this is going to be a fast one." Then I looked up at the clear blue sky and thought, ".....and also a hot one!" I was right on both counts.

After the traditional warmup, the big Giro group came over the Casino bridge and down onto Hayne Blvd. where the pace gradually ramped up, finally settling in at a steady 29-30 mph. There was a light tailwind, and so even at that speed one could sit in the draft halfway down the paceline without hardly breaking a sweat. Well, at least without having the sweat pouring down from your face onto your glasses. Once we got onto Chef Highway the pace kicked up yet another notch, but since it remained so smooth, we didn't lose many people despite the steady 28 -31 mph speeds. After the sprint at the turnaround I looked down to see a maximum of 38.1 mph. I wasn't even near the front.

The return trip had a lot of interruptions today. Someone flatted about midway down Chef Highway (I think pretty much everyone stopped and waited). Then there was some sort of issue leading up to the Goodyear Sign sprint that left me asking, "What happened?" I never really found out, but the result was that I didn't get to sprint and things slowed down again for a little while.

When we had been heading out over the Casino bridge earlier in the ride, we could see a film crew working up on top of the other side, so I figured it would be closed, but when we got there everything was open, and I put in a good effort to the top from which it took me a while to recover. I did the same thing going over the Seabrook bridge, but halfway up I noticed something was wrong. By the time I got to the top, my rear tire was as flat as a pancake. I rolled cautiously down and, violating my own flat tire rule*, stopped at a place without shade to change it. It was like changing a tire in a sauna while standing under a heat lamp. The Neuvation rear wheel that I got recently has a slightly deeper rim than any of my other wheels, and I had to fight with my little pump to get enough of a seal to put any air into the tube with a short valve stem. I doubt I managed to get more than 40 psi into it, but that was enough to get me home. A few people had stopped, so at least I didn't have to ride back alone.

* Always stop in the shade to fix a flat!