Sunday group rides. A time where you can meet up with riding buddies and do a longer ride to see how your training is going and see where others are at. Group rides are usually supposed to be good paced rides where everyone practices doing pulls, rotations, echelons and other tactics that you can use during a race. All awesome things on paper... but in reality... these rides usually turn into short races..... and by usually I mean always!!!
Here is a little snippet of a magazine article I was reading on how to get back into racing condition....lol I guess it's a known problem everywhere and human cycling nature. Well this Sunday ride was no different. Went out with the elites this week and I knew like always it would be a nice fast paced ride.
On this ride there were attacks, rotations and breakaways all of which we reacted on cue and performed very well. Towards the end of the ride Billy and I started a break away and hit it pretty hard. Another friend Oscar and another rider came along with us and we started pushing hard. At first I felt as the other two were giving up thinking that they were convincing themselves why kill themselves and work so hard thinking that we were going to get swallowed up by the chase group anyways. I took it on myself to motivate the group and told them lets pick it up, I felt good. So I picked up the pace. In a actual race situation the breakaway is supposed to share equal amounts of pulling time, no one cyclist pulls longer than they are supposed to. My goal was to just not get caught so I pulled for around 3 minutes then rotated through the others to do another long pull about a minute later. I was alright with that, I knew the others were in pain, always think its funny when I hear one guy yelling "PULL!!" and in a pain felt voice the reply is "I CAN'T" lol. Well our breakaway worked out. Later I found out that the chase was slowed down by a couple of red lights but hey WE GOT THERE FIRST LOL.... One thing we need to work on is tactics. Later while talking to Segio about why he did not come with us I found out that he did not want to follow us because he as well thought we would be caught anyways. Well thats good but one mistake he made was that he is on our team and he said that he was doing 29 mph pulls in the chase group.... so he actually wanted our team to lose? No... I think he just did not realize what he was doing... But next time we all know if we are stuck in the peleton and our guys are up front riding hard, your job is to slow the group down or just not help at all, let others get tired or not even try to chase... All in all it was an awesome ride. Ended the ride with an awesome breakfast and smack talking like always. I think it's kind of funny how we talk so much trash to our buddies when all we did was act like douches and busted our butts on a training ride lol...
I also noticed that my 2 week old tire is giving birth... Whore!! lol
