Off-Season 65 Mile Jam

It may be only January 8 elsewhere, but around here it's 76 F with a low tonight of 60.  I suppose I shouldn't have been too surprised, then, to have found somewhere in excess of 25 riders out at the Lee Road Junior High for the regular Sunday northshore ride this morning.  It has been a very long time since I'd been able to do this ride, and coming off of two weeks of minimal activity, four days of riding, and yesterday's Giro, I didn't really know what to expect -- of myself.  I did know quite well, however, what to expect of this group.  A warm-weather training ride in January with 25 riders?  Yeah, it was definitely going to get fast. Some of the guys like Woody have lately been racking up mileage like grad students at a free buffet. We weren't two miles into the ride before the speed started creeping up and the paceline started thinning out. There were a couple of people on this ride who were apparently getting famous for starting out on training rides at crazy speeds and then cracking later in dramatic fashion.  I decided right away on a simple strategy:  stay out of the wind until we were halfway through the ride.  I have to admit, it was a little bit of a challenge not to go with the flow and attack the first of the hills, but I knew this ride pretty well and there would be plenty of opportunities to inflict muscle damage farther down the road.

We lost just a few people before getting out to Highway 10, a little before the half-way point.  I was surprised by a couple of things. For one, this group was not particularly interested in taking prisoners.  For another, there was considerably less collateral damage than I would have expected, considering the pace.  For all practical purposes, the second half of this ride starts with a long climb up from a little stream.  Way up at the top, around a bend, is a sprint line painted on the road.  Fortunately, only a few went for it, so everything pretty much stayed together.  There are a couple more similar climbs along that road, and both were done pretty hard, but they weren't quite all-out efforts. Each time a few people would lose contact, and then a few of those would catch back on, so by the time we reached the next turn there were only maybe four riders off the back. We took it easy or a couple of miles after the turn so everyone could regroup.  As we rode south on Hwy. 60, I looked over at whoever was next to me and commented,  "this next stretch is going to get fast."  I could see that we were about to get a nice tailwind for the rolling five or six miles after turning west, and although a few riders were starting to fade, most still seemed to have a lot of gas in their tanks.  I was right, and the pressure stayed on all the way to the turn back onto Lee Road.  As we rounded the turn to head back south toward Enon I heard Mignon comment, "Oh...my....God!" 

The group, however, was still not ready to give in, so the pace stayed pretty fast, interrupted only by a little slowdown at Enon where a couple of riders refilled water bottles while the rest of us soft-pedaled.  The last significant little climb on this route is the Watchtower Hill, aka the Firetower Hill.  It's not really such a difficult climb, but since it always seems to come at the end of a long training ride, so it often causes a split in the group.  A few miles after that there's a turn onto Tung Road and then a long flat straight 4-mile run against the wind back to the cars. It was a really good ride - perhaps a little early for me to be jumping into the deep end under the circumstances, but most of us survived pretty well.  I guess these guys must be getting shape already. They're already talking about Rouge-Roubaix. It's time to put down the King Cake and ride.....