The head cold was threatening to become a sinus infection as I packed up the car Friday evening. At least the task at hand was distracting me from the dull ache in the right side of my head. I met Mark, Mignon and Chuck at 6:00, and after a quick stop at Starbucks we hit the road for the drive up to Natchez State Park for the annual NOBC training camp. I suppose it's really about half training camp and half "retreat."
Whatever, I was looking forward to a couple of days of cycling immersion in the country. In addition to my bike and pretty much every item of cycling clothing I owned, I had some cookies, bananas, granola bars, coffee, wine, and various other random items packed into a couple of grocery store bags. The closer we got, the worse the weather became. This was actually a good thing, because as long as the approaching cold front moved through overnight, I knew Saturday morning would be OK. We drove though a few sections with horizontal rain, arriving at the cabins around 10 pm or so just before it started raining again. I had a glass of wine and promptly fell asleep on the couch, that would be doubling as my bed, in the middle of a conversation with Pat and Mark. It rained most of the night, but in the early hours of Saturday the temperature started dropping and the rain stopped.
We had 16 or 17 riders for Saturday's ride. Considering the fact that I'd been sick most of the week and taking into account the cloudy sky and chilly north wind, I dressed extra warmly. I guess it was in the mid-40s when we started around 9 am. The plan was to keep everything together for the first 15 miles or so, and then split in to two groups. After we split, the pace picked up and although I was keeping my pulls rather short, I was feeling surprisingly good. The Natchez Trace is a very deceiving road. The whole thing is so evenly graded that you never really feel the transition from flat to uphill or vice-versa, and although the gradients aren't very steep, they tend to be really long - much longer than one would normally encounter in that area. Anyway, we hit the store at the turnaround for a little while and then headed back, waving to the other group that was trailing us by five or ten minutes.
With a little tailwind for the return trip the pace kept clicking up a notch every five miles or so, and around halfway back our group split on one of those long climbs. I guess we were down to five or so, mostly taking long pulls and keeping the pressure on. By the time we were five or six miles from the road back to the state park we were down to just Robert, Chuck and me. My quads were starting to hurt on the climbs.
I heard my phone ring as I was struggling to hold Chuck's wheel up one of them, and didn't answer it. On the next climb Chuck and Robert started attacking each other and a big gap opened in front of me. As I was contemplating whether to chase or just back off for the remaining few miles, the phone rang again. Bad sign. I sat up and pulled it out, and saw it was Mark calling. He told me that they were going to need extraction because Isaac had broken his carbon steerer and crashed. Fortunately he didn't seem to be hurt badly.
I caught up with the others when they eased up at the turn and we hurried back the last three or four miles to the cabins so I could change shoes and jump into the car, passing the 2nd group as I left the park. I must have driven twenty miles before I finally spotted the group walking along the shoulder. Mignon, Isaac's mother, was carrying his broken bike. So we threw the bike inside and I drove back with Isaac and Mignon. The fork's steerer looked like it had broken about halfway between the stem and the crown. Very odd. Anyway, we were lucky nobody had been seriously hurt.
That evening the Monahan's cooked up a big dinner while coach Bob gave us a presentation on coaching and training principles (lots of charts and graphs of power, heart rate, mileage, etc.). Afterward we watched Chasing Legends once again.
So Sunday morning we had a slightly smaller group on hand for a shorter 20 mile ride down into Natchez for a coffee stop. Isaac borrowed Bob's mountain bike for the ride, which was great since otherwise I'm not sure what he'd have done while we were out riding. There was a pretty good headwind building up by the time we headed out, and the group split pretty quickly leaving six of us to put in a few miles of good training up front. Brooks was taking some really long hard pulls, Robert was pushing the speed up the hills, and I was trying to take short enough pulls to keep from getting dropped. The weather was spectacular and I was finally feeling like I was getting over the head cold. After a long stop at the Natchez Coffee Company, we made a loop down the bluff to the river while I told stories about the old Natchez Classic stage race, most of which were true. Then we headed back onto the trace for a tailwind enhanced ride back to the park. Naturally the same group went off the front right away and we had a good fast ride all the way back. My legs were feeling pretty sore by the time we arrived at the cabins. It was a really fun weekend and I was impressed how fit some of the riders are so early in the season.
No comments:
Post a Comment