It's intriguing how Calgary weather dictates that the working populace of the city is only entitled to one day of respectable weather each weekend. At least it's one and not zero!
Saturday was another mammoth group ride. This time we started at 9, which is unpleasant in some ways, but once we get going I'm happy to see how much we've ridden by early afternoon. Headed out to Bragg, and rode mostly with Jon/Craig/Devin/Geoff/Ed/Mckee/hope I'm not forgetting anyone. Spirited but not ridiculous pace, until the last kilometer where the Green Jersey battle played out.
After a cafe stop, we headed out to do the loop, then down towards Millarville. Unfortunately, according to discussions later in the day, I missed my dad coming into Bragg and talking to Tim Brezsnyak by less than a minute. Would've been a nice chance encounter.
Bragg to Millarville turned into an all out hammer ride. I nominate Mckee as the "red number" (in the Tour de France, the rider with the red number is the "most aggressive rider" as determined by some judging routine) for his repeated hill blast-offs. I can't contribute much to the mass suffering of a bunch of lean and trim lightweights on the hills, so I do my best to add a little tempo over the top and down the other side so the light in the loafers types can't have too much rest.
Eventually this caught up with me big time as we turned eastbound on 549 toward Millarville. After leading out around the intersection corner, I got dropped like a bad habit on the first hill. This meant chasing back onto the speeding group on the long-ish downhill that followed. My first question to self was "can it be done?" (yes), second question was "do I want to suffer for it?" (sure, it's a hammer ride), and finally "will I pay for this later?" (uhh, probably. But we'll worry about that when the time comes). So I chase away and burn a few of my remaining matches. As I get nearer, I see that in the group rotation, Nutbrown is giving it his all on his two pulls just to make it hard for me. In some circumstances I'd likely find that irritating. Here, I found it amusing. Bikes are our adult playthings, and he's just playing. By the time I catch up, there's not much left in the tank at all, and my legs are hurting. But just for the hell of it, I can't let myself latch onto the back in the draft, I do my best attempt at a blowby just to let everyone know I'm back. I'm sure the gang saw right through the charade as it fizzled within 30 seconds, but it was fun regardless.
We stopped in Millarville for a refuel, then proceeded north. A random decision at a particular corner left me riding with Jon back to Bragg allong Plumbers/Priddis/762, whereas the other guys took a different route. There was a little fate in this decision, as Jon had to babysit me back into Bragg... penance for our chasing game that burned me out a half hour earlier. I tried to eat what I had that was the simplest of calories and fluids, stomach wasn't digesting overly well today, I could feel that the calories I had consumed weren't making it to my legs all that well.
We found Stappler on the way back into Bragg, which was fortunate since we'd lost him earlier. Stopped again at the "neighbourhood dealer" - the Cinnamon Spoon. They've got the product I need on weekends. Saw Devin/Geoff/Ed cruise through Bragg while we were caffienating. We rode back to Calgary slowly, it'd been a big day for all of us.
185km total when all was said an done on my computer. I downloaded the data from my SRM, and through someone's mathematical genius a TSS number was calculated, which is a "Training Stress Score". The higher the number, the harder the ride. This was my hardest ride of the year, and funny thing was, I could have told you that without several thousand dollars of extra bicycle and computer gadgetry.
But was it the hardest ride of the year? I wasn't frozen through and through, trying to hammer home to generate enough body heat to prevent freezing. I had company the whole ride. It was light out the whole time. There wasn't snow and ice on the roads. TSS can't measure winter training!
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