On Racing

As I write this one of the guys, Nicki Sorensen, on Team Saxo Bank got a stage finish (Thursday, July 16). He was not really expected to achieve any sort of greatness so I am happy for him. That he is Danish makes me very happy. (During The War the Danes were able to save the life, and business, of every Danish Jew. After the war when the Jews of Denmark returned from Sweden, they found their homes untouched and their businesses functioning, that and the Danes invented -discovered- Kringle, the greatest pastry on Earth.) So when I hear of a Danish victory I am very pleased, the fact that I am cheering for Team Saxo Bank well its hard not to be pleased with the day's results.

I went for a club ride Sunday and it was a study in contrast. The ride itself was to a cliff face called Rattle Snake point, it is an 800m run with a 94m rise but at times the grade meter on my GPS said 14%, the idea is you ride what is almost a pancake to Rattle Snake, climb it a bunch of times, then ride home. There were two options, drive to a west end meeting place and take it easy all the way, or ride hard the whole 150km. Being that I am opposed to the burning of fossil fuels when possible, I choose to ride the whole nine yards. (Being that I have ridden 200 miles in one sitting, 150km did not seem like such an ordeal.)

On the ride out the pack was sustaining between 32 and 37km/h which works pretty well for me. I pulled a little, I dropped back, if while dropping back there was a gap I'd fill the gap, otherwise I went to the very back of the line. In short I did exactly what a cyclist ought to do in a pack. Then someone who shall remain nameless decided that we should do 40~42km/h, I let him charge past me, I caught up at a red light. A couple minutes later he pulled the same damn fool stunt on a long country road with no lights, I was uninterested in burning out my legs, I announced that "I cannot sustain this" and dropped off the back end. This was just after our guy had told me to ride at a steady speed. (This all happened a couple days after he told me, in insulting tones on a web site, that I ought to ride with the group, truth is he said more than that, but I was so offended by his language that I only read the first couple lines.)

I rode the last ten or fifteen kilometers alone, which sucked because there was a head wind, but I saved my legs and enjoyed the sounds of birds and wind in the fields. Then I climbed Rattle Snake for the first time this year, it was a lot easier than last year I am pleased to report. (It might have helped a little that my legs were well rested having had a break for intense spinning for a good 20 or 30 minutes.) At the top of Rattle Snake were three guys who had elected to take the easier option of driving to the west end. One of the guys had a chain that was breaking in two places (two pins were half ejected at nearly opposite ends of the chain). The guy with the nearly-broken chain was contemplating calling a taxi from the top of Rattle Snake to take him back to the meeting point where his car was (about 50km away). The four of us decided to try ride back to the meeting place, we could help the fellow with the broken chain by giving him a draft and possibly assisting in road side repair. I suggested we take a slightly modified route that would avoid steeper hills to minimize the torque on the bad chain, we did that. The guys wanted to stop at a coffee shop, normally I don't like to stop mid ride, but the stop gave me a chance to see if I could do anything for the chain - I couldn't. We talked, we rode easy, and it was very pleasant. (There was a tailwind to be sure, but even so, the company you keep on your ride makes the difference, truth is, if I could ride with those guys again, even if it meant driving to New York city first, I'd probably do that.)