The Longest Ride

There was a race yesterday near Middleton that allowed day-of registration.  I seriously considered showing up & entering it, but decided against it since I hadn't done any speed training since the Broome Time Trial.  I also hadn't done any long rides in a while so I figured that I should do that.  Plus I had other business to take care of in Boise - a tire wore out a bit sooner than I'd have liked (~800 miles) so I wanted to take it back & see if I could get a bit of a discount on a replacement.  

So I rode from home to the site of the race - one of the many subdivisions in the area that had begun construction right as the housing market tanked and now grow weeds but have beautifully smooth pavement.  On the way I stopped at a little park to pee and ended up spending twenty minutes or so reading about the Ward Massacre.  Until this point I was ignorant of the fact that the road I rode was originally part of the Oregon Trail; and pretty much right at the spot where I was standing, a small party of emigrants were killed by Shoshone Indians after a trade went south.  Having not grown up in the West, I never learned much Oregon Trail stuff in school; so it was a highlight of the ride, and it was brought about solely by my small bladder.

Got to the race, hung out there for a while, got a small amount of razzing from Tyler for not entering, saw Krisitin Armstrong, ate lunch, and took off for Boise.  I'd never traveled this particular leg of the journey before, so I ended up missing a couple turns and adding a few miles onto the ride.  But I got to Boise and was satisfactorily compensated for my underperforming tire and continued on my way in relatively short order.  By the time I returned home, the ride I'd projected to be 67 miles had turned into a little over 73 miles.  Whew!  And those last six - mostly into the wind - were the least enjoyable of the whole ride.  :)  But that ended up edging out a last year's LeBow ride as the longest ride ever for me. 

Jason Broome Time Trial

Great times.  That was fun.  In fact the more I think about it, the more I realize how enjoyable it was.

Kate & I got to the venue in plenty of time for me to check in & warm up & all that.  A little too early, maybe, actually.  It was windy so I decided to hang out in the van for a while before starting to warm up.  Then I realized that it was getting late so 

I rushed to fit my warm-ups & stretching in.  Didn't get nearly as much time in on the trainer as I wanted, so while I stretched I wasn't as limber as I should have been.   And actually my knees are starting to feel that now.

But I got to the start line on time.  Tyler was the starter and he gave me a nod of encouragement while another dude held my seat while I clipped into my pedals.  Then the fun began.  Had a tailwind and a slight downhill grade on the way out, so I took it a bit easy to save some juice for the trip back up & into the wind.  Still, I gained on the person in front of me and was a hundred or so meters behind him at the turn ("B" on the map linked above) - where he fell.  Ended up being a ~12-year-old BYRDS rider.  The official helped him up & held his bike while he remounted & got going, but he had to rebuild that 10-15MPH of momentum (that he otherwise woulda kept sans crash) going into the wind so he burned a lot of gas there and I overtook him easily shortly after the turn.  I thought about saying something encouraging but couldn't think of anything good and couldn't spare the breath anyway.  I figured he might overtake me again shortly (BYRDS is one of the top youth cycling programs in the country and I've heard there are a couple BYRDS riders going for cycling scholarships to college), but I never saw him again. 

Shortly after that I rounded a bend in the road that put me on that long straightaway heading due north - square into the teeth of the wind and culminating with the largest climb of the ride. Couldn't have been more than 50 feet of elevation gain but from my perspective it looked huge (now that I look, Google Maps says it's more like 90 feet, but still...).  But in my adrenaline-charged state I thought, "Bring it!"  And I kept thinking that for what seemed like an eternity.  Every time I looked up at the hill, it never seemed to be getting any closer.  One rider passed me.   Then he hit the hill and passed the next rider (whom I was gaining on).  Then I finally got to the base of the hill, got my cadence & form in order, attacked it with my glutes (not something you hear everyday), and motored straight up it.

Once atop the hill, I saw a sign for 1km to go, gaged how much gas was left in my tank (simultaneously making two mental notes: one about how glad I was to have learned the conversion between miles & kilometers, and the other about how funny it is that these racers want so badly to be in Europe), chilled at my steady pace for a little while longer, then shifted up a couple gears and hammered for the last 500 - 700 meters.  My final time over the ten miles was 29' 54.??" so I did indeed barely get over the finish averaging above 20MPH.

My average was 20.067MPH as a matter of fact.  And even better was that I was only overtaken by one rider.  And even better than that was that I gained on the two people ahead of me!  I did actually overtake the one guy, but who's gonna count a kid who falls as an overtaken rider.  And even better than all that, it was FUN!  And Kate came to watch me too.  :)

And I'm sure that in subsequent time trials I'll get my logistics & timing down better so I'll be ready when I need to be.