We Were Climbing?

Since the Osprey, I've been doing quite a bit of reflecting on my progress over the past year.  There have been many examples of things that are quite common now that I couldn't have imagined doing a year ago...like riding for over 3 hours at a time.  Now I do that every weekend.

This Sunday Daryl and I met up with his friend Tom in Reston VA.  Daryl has told me many times how nice it is to ride on the W&OD trail, so I was looking forward to the ride.  The morning was COLD and I was wondering if I had enough layers on as we drove down there.  At the last minute before leaving the house, I had thrown my running tights into my bag...just in case.  Well when we arrived in Reston and the temperature had not gone up at all, I decided to put on the tights. 

We were meeting Tom by the fountain in the Town Center.  Daryl and I rode down to the meeting point and I realized that I had forgotten to put my water bottles on my bike!  Oops...so we headed back to the car and intercepted Tom.

Now Daryl had described Tom as an accomplished triathlete and a phenomenal cyclist. I was excited to meet him and maybe pick up a few tips.  But since the air was so cold and we all wanted to get moving to warm up, I decided that chit-chat could wait for later.  So off we went...

I knew almost immediately that this was going to be a fun but challenging ride.  The trail is pretty flat, so it was really good training for my race in FL.  Tom is fast....REALLY fast...he left me in the dust almost from the first pedal stroke.  Luckily there were many road crossings in the first section of our ride so I caught up with him there.  Daryl was somewhere in between Tom and I.  Sometimes he was just as fast as Tom and sometimes he was as slow as I was. 

Now let me clarify...when I say slow, I mean relatively slow compared to the 2 guys I was riding with...we were keeping a pretty good pace the whole time.  So none of us were really slow.

At our first rest stop, Daryl and I decided to take off our jackets.  The sun was warming the air and sitting in the sun, I was warm with my jacket on.  Plus Tom told me that for the next 5 miles we would be doing a steady climb.  So I knew that I would be exerting more effort and thought I didn't need the extra warmth of the jacket.  It only took about a half mile before Daryl and I both changed our minds and put our jackets back on.  BRRR.  The trail was mostly shaded and the air was still chilly.

Tom didn't realize that Daryl and I stopped for the wardrobe change so he kept on going.  Before long, Daryl turned back to me and said "we're almost done with this climb".  I was shocked.  I said "we were climbing?"  He shook his head and laughed at me.  This was a moment of realization for me.  I had been waiting for the climb to start.  A year ago, a 5 mile continual, gradual climb like that would have been very apparent to me.  This time it was barely noticeable. Interesting...

The rest of the ride was pretty uneventful, except for me dropping my chain.  I tried to do the quick fix that John showed me but couldn't.  Luckily Daryl was able to fix it for me so I didn't have to get my hands greasy like I did when I dropped my chain on the solo ride in Betterton.

The most fun we had was when we left the trail and went out on a back country road.  It was a gently curving road, mostly downhill...but gradual downhill so it didn't scare the crap out of me.  I was going 35 MPH at one point! 

All in all we rode 51 miles. Tom had ridden to and from his house, so he did an additional 20 miles.  Wow.  Daryl mentioned that I was struggling with my transitions.  So in about 3 minutes, Tom gave me at least 5 great tips on quicker transitions.  I will share in a later post...