On riding with skaters

Yesterday (Wednesday) was overcast and the sky looked ripe and ready to dump at any time. As I had to have the gas line inspected at the house I had to remain home until 7pm. Ultimately I could have joined the Beaches Cycle Club, but I did not know they had a group ride on Wednesdays. So the moral here is, check the website early and check often. As traffic was still bad on Woodbine when I was ready to ride I decided to take the lakeshore trail to avoid city streets, had I been with a group or had traffic not been so bad I probably would have avoided the lakeshore as its just too easy, no hills and too many lights.

As I rode West through the trail towards the Humber river I saw a skater with good form going the opposite direction. Still mindful of my wipeout from about a month ago, I made sure to turn the bike around carefully and then had to pedal hard, it turned out I was chasing Morgan Williams and I had to push myself all the way to Legion Hall Hill to catch up with him. Morgan drafted off me into the wind towards Ontario Place where we maxed out at about 40 km/h and then on the return we maxed out a little faster, perhaps 42 km/h. On the return pass we ran into Jay Brown and both Jay and Morgan drafted off me back to Ontario place again.

We averaged about 35km/h going across the trail from the lighthouse to Ontario Place. Ironically I don’t think either Jay or Morgan planned to skate so hard, but that’s always what happens, no one actually starts hard but someone starts to accelerate and nobody wants to get left behind. If I were coaching skaters from my bike, it occurs to me I would have to setup some sort of alarm on my GPS so if the speed fell outside a very tight range I would know to speed up or slow down.

In other news, tonight Lesley and I are going to go for a bike ride together, and hopefully we will go for a nice picnic out on Port Credit on Saturday. I have also decided that going forward, Tuesdays I will become a regular at the Beaches Cycle Club. Maybe if Lesley ever works late on a Thursday I’ll ride to a TISC practice and skate some laps, but the fact is going around and around in circles really is pretty boring stuff. There is something to be said for a road ride across the city, you get a change of scenery and you get to learn about your home from an angle few of us would otherwise see it from.

One final note, baring an assassination, here is my prediction, 98% chance President Barrack Obama, I give one chance in fifty that Americans get suckered into reelecting that Son-of-a-Bush, George John Walker McBushCain.