12/13/2010
By: C. Kent, aka (Superman)


If we had Indian summers this would have been one. Beautiful morning with a high expected to be 85 degrees. Not only that we were scheduled to do a requested run with a pretty hard climb about halfway through it. I was looking forward to it but I wasn’t sure how many other riders thought the same.

Wolf was waiting for me as I rode up to Burger King and we talked a bit about jerseys and then joked about who put in for the Gibble climb. I didn’t want to drop a dime on one of the riders so we sort of played 20 questions and it was clear that Rocket, D’Artagnon, Attack Cat or Mark, (Daredevil) weren’t the guilty people so that only left Sea Lion who admitted to the request. This would be his first attempt and Gibble and we were all looking forward to his impressions.

By 8:30 it was clear that we were only going to have the seven of us so we took off down Gilmore. I was just a bit sore from trying to duplicate a jump turn I watched one of the mechanics at the LBS do on my MTB Saturday. I did half of the jump but the second half was the one that took me down. Dirt can be pretty hard all by itself when you aren’t expecting a fall. Still I was feeling pretty good and thought the ride would be a good one.
We quickly rode down Kirby and made the turn onto Cypress but instead of just cruising we more or less rode a moderate double pace line out to Johnson.

What concerns me on days like today is how strong everyone looked. D’Artagnon said he was tired from doing a Triathlon on Sunday. Daredevil said he was tired from riding three days in a row. Wolf was tired from riding with a group from Jaxs over the weekend. Sea Lion was going to save himself for Gibble, or so he said. But if I have learned anything from riding with this group it is not to take any of their protestations at face value. I had a feeling that tired or not the pace might get pushed today and I only had a few blocks to test out my assumptions.
As we rounded the turn west on Domenigoni Attack cat and Wolf took the lead and started us off at a consistent 20+ MPG. We pulled through the first rotation and got to Warren road still within that range. As Attack cat and wolf rotated out of line D’Artagnon started to press the pace and soon had us running hard at 25 MPH. We rolled over the wash at 24 or 25 and D’Artagnon kicked it up another notch. We were still quite a distance from Winchester when I noticed D’Artagnon had us rolling along at 30+ in a pace line. I took my turn and pulled as we passed Winchester and we were back down to 25 before Daredevil took off again taking things back up to close to 28 with Rocket in tow. To my surprise the group had blown up into two parts and to my surprise I was in the first part. We stopped to regroup at Leon and I was still standing on the side of the road as Attack cat made the U turn and headed back towards Winchester. Soon I watched as Rocket, D’Artagnon, Attack Cat and Daredevil seemed to disappear over the curve of the earth as Wolf, sea Lion and I cruised back to Winchester. However we started to pick things up a bit once we got back to Warren and soon were back in sight of the lead group as they started up Gibble. I made a hard run at them but wasn’t able to pull in Daredevil before we reached the top of the hill.

On the way back down the hill and up towards Stetson we lost Rocket as he had work to do. We lost D’Artagnon on Stetson about ½ mile before Lake and we lost Attack cat at Fairview and Florida. Still Wolf, Sea Lion, Daredevil and I had a good visit at Carl’s where we discussed the Palm Springs century in February and some other rides we would like to do early next year. We decided to leave Carl’s before our legs completely locked up and headed back west together.

I have to admit it was a good ride today. Climbing or no climbing we had a chance to test ourselves and still enjoy each other’s company. It is good to ride with people that just enjoy getting out and riding. Nothing complicated just point our bikes in a direction and see how long it takes to get there. A short period of time for bench racing and war stories are we have had a good day. Any day you can get in 40+ miles and still have the energy to talk and laugh is a good day in my book. And I could do both on the ride home today.