Today's ride was the biggest I've seen it so far - 20 guys give or take on what started off as a spectacular day. Werner joined again and all the regulars were there - Dave, Steve, Darren, Patrice among others who's names I still haven't remembered.
The first big 'dig' came after a piss stop at the bottom of the south side of Digswell Hill. Me and a couple others were caught out - my legs just couldn't respond fast enough, but I managed to catch onto the back at the summit, with the decent being a manic 65-70kph scramble to catch another group that had attacked off the front. We pulled it all back together by Codicote and continued for the next 30-min at a conversational pace through Whitwell.
Sadly one of the guys crashed just before reaching Hexton - apart from a bloodied knee he and his bike were OK and we carried on. After getting slightly lost (ended up in a dead-end), the pace was upped considerably and me and Patrice were dropped off the back before reaching Hitchin. We shared the pace into a horrible headwind, trying to catch the much larger bunch, but our efforts went unrewarded. We picked up one guy who had been dropped after Hitchin, but he had obviously blown up big time and he couldn't even latch onto the back.
After about 30km of chasing we finally gave up and took the pace a bit easier, knowing that we wouldn't catch the others. A few kilometers before Potters Bar, we came across Steve, who'd punctured, but he told us to not wait. Shortly after we picked up Werner who had dropped back to pace Steve, so we told him not to wait and the three of us rode back together, with Werner turning off for home at Potters Bar.
Patrice and I stopped for coffee in Whetstone where Dave was waiting (he'd taken a shortcut apparently) with Steve coming in a few minutes later. We chatted about the ride over double shot latte's and then rode back towards London to finish off the day. I'm feeling OK after the ride - my recovery is clearly getting better.
View this ride data at Motionbased
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment