What a nice morning to ride! The heat wave gone, first regular Tuesday/Thursday ride for me in over a week, it felt good to be out on a bike. At the start we had Kevin (pilot), Mark & George, picking up Marcus along the way. Younger Kevin didn’t ride this morning, having had a bit of a rough night (a bunch of seizures keeping him up; thankfully, they didn’t continue through the day).
Mark flew quickly off the front, trying to catch his girlfriend Liz, who had gotten a head start 7 minutes earlier. Why didn’t I think of that? I made no attempt to follow, but stayed with Kevin & Marcus for as long as I could, dropping off the pace just past the park entrance. George, who’d already done the “morning” ride, was taking it easy behind me. Of course, I didn’t know just how easy, so I was always concerned he must be right behind that last corner, ready to accelerate and fly past at any moment.
In the end it was a pretty slow time for me, right about 29 minutes, 1001 VAM (meters climbed/hour, cutting it rather close to that magical 1000 number) and 285 watts. That last number, 285, is a problem. At 29 minutes, that number should be lower; the fact that it’s that high means I’m still carrying too much of Las Vegas with me. That’s 7 watts more output than a ride 2 seconds faster about a year ago. Not good!
Much more not good was arriving with Kevin, Marcus & George at Sky Londa (after descending Skyline from Skeggs) and not seeing Mark or Liz. We waited a few minutes before I told them I’d head back to find them, and then do the last part of the ride in reverse to meet up with them again. Yes, I found them; just a couple hundred meters away in fact. They were right behind us, less that 20 seconds, and ran into a large tree branch in the road. A large tree branch that, less than 20 seconds prior, hadn’t been there or the rest of us might have hit it! Liz got the worst of it, ending up with a separated shoulder. She was in surprisingly-good spirit about it; that’s just the type of person she is.
So watch out for debris on the road. Our recent hot weather has probably weakened a lot of trees, and the roads we enjoy riding on are actually the most-likely to have issues because they don’t get much car traffic (so we’ll be the first to come across the problem).
