What a ride - what a day!
The temperature played a big part in today's ride with the Finchley Racing boys but little was I to know that the hills would play just as big a part until, when about to depart from our meeting place, someone suggested we take an excursion through the Chilterns. Now I've done a ride through these hills before, but that was on an overcast day with very cool weather and I was just out on a solo day trip. Today was supposed to reach 27 degrees and the players looked hungry for some punishment. My previous night's late night drinking session was looking more and more like a bad idea.
The pace was fairly brisk from the start with one or two guys keen to push along at the front. We caught a couple of other riders and some latched on who arrived late and we had about 8-9 guys by the time we went through St Albans. Feeling relatively fresh, I didn't have any problems over the first 40km or so... that's when we started hitting some gradients and things changed a bit.
Werner was impressive, staying at the head of the group as we started the first of the hills and predictably it started breaking up. There were consistently 3-4 guys who couldn't stay with the pace (me among them) whenever the hills got a bit too steep and long, but we'd usually limit any ground lost on the descents. The tempature was soaring to almost unbearable levels by the time we reached our water stop at about 75km covered.
The next 20km the pace was set at a fairly high level and I was eventually dropped rather badly on the last big climb of the day before getting to Barnet... so badly in fact that I came to a t-junction and lost sight of which was they went. As I knew the area, I made a right and headed back toward home - totally cooked. Definitely a ride to remember (or forget depending on which way you look at it!)
View this ride data on Motionbased
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment