A Northshore Ride

Northshore paceline

It's summer down here and hot sweaty rides have been the norm for weeks and weeks. I get back from a morning ride and put my shoes and gloves in front of the box fan in the basement so that they will be more or less dry by the next morning. Some days, the helmet liner is still wet with yesterday's sweat. 

We've been in a routine summer pattern lately, which means it might rain, probably in the afternoon, maybe on you or maybe not. Just yesterday I ran out of the office a little early when I started hearing thunder in the distance. I put on my Assos rain jacket and waterproof cap and quickly discovered that "in the distance" was about four blocks. Within a mile I was in torrential rain, pants and shoes fully soaked, riding through deep puddles and dodging the debris in the Broad Street Overpass bike lane, hoping that my antique brakes would actually function on the way down. Anyway, suffice it to say that the training rides last week were pretty routine. Looking back in my training log, I was a little surprised to find that I hadn't taken a day off the bike since July 5, and hadn't missed two days since June 5. I keep thinking it'll be raining one morning and I'll get a day off, but it just hasn't happened. On the plus side, the two most recent tropical storms/hurricanes in the Gulf haven't been a cause for concern here.

Friendly Friday on the lakefront

So last Saturday Lisa, aka Queen Bee, rounded up a few of us for a 70+ mile northshore ride. I knew it would not involve much sightseeing and so I dug out the race wheels just in case things got out of hand. I think we had about nine or ten when we headed out early in the morning from the Lee Road ballpark. The sky was clear, the wind was light, and it was noticeably cooler and drier than it had been on the other side of the lake. As I'd expected, the pace hovered mostly in the 23-24 mph range, and I made the strategic decision to take only short and infrequent pulls. This group was well-experienced so the pace was smooth and steady, or at least as much so as possible given the terrain. Early in the ride VJ was having difficulty, and after a couple of quick regroupings he was basically left to his own devices somewhere before we got to Pine. 

Sunday's Route

With a group like this and a day like this, there wasn't any drama. Nobody was taking crazy fast pulls, nobody was attacking the climbs, nobody was flatting. Still, I have to chalk it up as a pretty hard ride by my own standards. Somewhere on the way back from Enon we saw Steve who was on his way out doing a solo ride. My early plan to conserve energy worked out well, and I was able to stay with the group without any problems, but it felt like a good hard training ride rather than a nice stroll in the countryside. I did not regret having taken the race wheels, either. 

After the ride I hung around quite a while since VJ had somehow missed us on the way back. Eventually, after everyone else had left, Matt went out to find him, so I headed back across the lake, arriving back home probably before 1:00 thanks to our early 7:15 am start time.