Devin Dishes it Out

Keith, Dallas, Craig, Dan, Kobe, Mark, Devin and I met this morning at Cadence. We rode quickly out to Cochrane, I particularly wasn't getting along with the "quickly" part of it, although I did feel better than yesterday. Mark turned around and wished us well on the remainder of the adventure just a little past Cochrane, as we proceeded directly out to Horse Creek road for some hill drag races without a coffee or water bottle fill up stop. Once the hill climb drag racing started I was so far behind I have no idea how they turned out.

Turning south onto Grand Valley road, we met the headwind that had been pushing us along, and it was pretty strong. Our group whittled down, with Craig, Devin, Kobe and Dan in the lead. Keith and I climbed the hill going south together, but he was suffering after some earlier hard efforts, and I ended up being alone in the headwind, so I rode up to Dallas. We traded a few pulls, then he eased up and I joined the other 4 guys up front. We hit the brakes at the Wild Cat Hills road to regroup, then started up the climb - it was pretty calm but just a little breeze of a headwind. I burnt a few matches trying to chase Devin and Craig, which of course didn't work well, but it was a good interval for me. The view from the top is beautiful, and we waited a minute for everyone to regroup again. We coasted down the hill, and when the attacks started I coasted and rode with Keith, he was looking like his legs didn't have much jump left in them. Once the group arrived at highway 1A, Kobe, Dan and Keith rode back to Cochrane instead of riding further west to refuel at the gas station, so for the remainder of the ride it was just Dallas, Devin, Craig and I.

Dallas is an asset plowing eastward into the wind, as is Devin, who seems to have fully recovered from his turbocharger implant surgery this off season. I wasn't really close enough to see any of the hill climbs other than the top of the Cochrane hill on the way home, but I think he nabbed more than a few king of the mountain points today, not to mention doing some serious work pulling into the headwinds on the way home. Very impressive overall. Then to add insult to injury, says Mr. Erfle "I think I'll take a few days off next week to fit in a training block to get in shape."

All in, it was about 5.5 hours for my ride time, and I feel way way worse after today than the mega Water Valley loop two weeks ago. Funny what two weeks of overwork, gaining some flab and fitness atrophy will do to you. On the bright side, I wasn't quite as bad overall as yesterday...