Great Ride!

Yesterday was the 25th Anniversary of the Salt Lake City Century.  I got an email early in the week from our friend Shawn saying that he and another friend of ours Jeff were going to do the century and did I want to come with?  I of course jumped at the opportunity to ride with a group and to ride with these to guys.  Last summer we did a couple of rides together in prep for LOTOJA and it was great.  Both Shawn and Jeff are really strong on the bike and riding with them always gives me a good opportunity to push myself a little harder than I normally would. There are almost 2000 riders that wind their way through the farm roads of north Salt Lake and the surrounding communities.  For Salt Lake this is probably the flattest ride that you can do in all of the valley.  None of us had officially signed up for the race this year and opted just to ride rogue and pick up what we needed at convenience stores along the way. 

We started out the ride trying to safely weave our way in and out of the various riders, with 2000 + riders of varying abilities it can get a little interesting.  Eventually we hopped onto a guy that was just given her.  I mean this guy was hauling and the three of us went along for the ride.  Occasionally Jeff and Shawn would look back  and check on me to make sure that I was still with them, but there was no way I was going to lose that sweet draft.  I'm always reminded of some advice that I've gotten from my cycling friends, "you've gotta ride that train for as long as you can and let someone else do the work for you" and that's just what we did! For about 2 hours we averaged just over 40 km per hour (which comes out to be about 50 miles in two hours).  (I will always ride in kmph it just makes more sense to me!)  I won't lie I kept looking at my speedometer while we were riding and thinking holy crap I can't believe we are going this fast! We stayed on him for about another half an hour until a pack of hard core TT (time trial) dudes came whizzing by, at which point our guy started to jump on them.  At first Shawn, Jeff, and I started to react to get onto the group, but the pace was rapidly increasing.  At which point I was realizing I might be able to hang on for 5 maybe 10 minutes, but afterwards I knew I would be toast.  Shawn and Jeff were thinking the same thing so exercising a little caution was better for us all in the long run.  We were able to tone down the pace and worked in with a few other groups. 

As I mentioned above the 3 of us were planning to hit up convenience stores while riding, but this route is so well planned, that you actually don't come across any convenience stores until maybe the last 15 miles of the ride.  YIKES.  We all ran out of water from about mile 70 - 90 and ended up poaching water from one of the aid stations.  Thank goodness we hit up that station because it would have been a brutal brutal ride back had we not.

Overall the weather, the ride, and of course my riding partners made for a fantastic day on the bike.  We all rode really well and really fast.  I haven't been able to get on the bike that much this year (due to our bad weather) and so it was awesome to be able to put in some miles with an awesome group. 

Thanks to Jeff and Shawn for a great day always fun to hit the road with you two!