Sunday afternoon club ride

My bike ride for the day wasn't my usual commute, but the Sunday afternoon LBC ride out of the Heine Brothers' on Chenoweth Lane (actually the office building across the street). Jenn wasn't going to ride today, so I took the Bacchetta, figuring on pushing myself harder than I do in my commuting.

I rode out with some fast guys, and was able to stay with them through Cherokee Park--probably because they didn't drop the hammer until they got well down Lexington Road. The stretch between Grinstead Drive and Baxter Avenue usually is the site of a fast pace line. I was feeling pretty good until the first curve, when the front guys wound up the pace a few notches more than I had on tap.

I managed to catch them, mostly a function of a traffic light that caught them just before they hit Jefferson Street. I rode hard for a bit, but was dropped by the time we got to downtown.

As a result, I wound up riding River Road largely by myself. That's okay--I needed to focus on a workout, and did. I kept my cadence up around 95 RPM for the most part, and my speed above 20 MPH for the most part, until turning onto Glenview Avenue for the ascent part of the ride.

My climb up Glenview was slower than I like, and a little more painful than I like, but I soldiered up the hill anyway. I was able to stay in the middle ring, though, which hasn't always been the case on that climb. Once on Lime Kiln, I usually accelerate through a couple more gears than I was able this time, but I still was able to crest over the I-71 bridge at eighteen or nineteen miles an hour.

I finished the ride with an average speed of 18.2 miles an hour, which is a bit off my peak-condition pace. I attribute the shortcoming to the fact that I haven't been doing hill workouts in some years, and my resulting sluggardly climbing. It really is my biggest weakness on the bike. My second largest weakness is a lack of courage on the descents that I blame on a fall I had several years ago. I am not sure how to work on fixing that one, but figure that doing a series of hill repeats on familiar roads would probably help.