Strava stats: http://app.strava.com/rides/925136
It was nice to do a flatter ride after last weekend, but flatter is not always easier. I think the plan for some of us was to hit some of the Strava segments as hard as we could, but that all went to crap with Gary leading us out down CA and onto the bike trail at a pace much higher than expected.
It was nice to see Seon, Hiroshi, David and Jaffe work together after Gary and actually break away for a bit while me, Vince, Shannon and Mitchell lined up behind Gary. The 4 of them seemed to have used up Gary and spit him out the back once they were done...BAM style. Nice!
The rest of us were able to reel them back in before the first bridge, but they were still taking some pulls after and some rather impressive ones I must say. Shannon decided to crank it up a notch though at some point and broke away from all of us for a good stretch of section. Vince and I worked together be able to get up to him by the 2nd bridge and ultimately arrive at the light on Harvard with him. We were all able to regroup there before the light turned green.
Once on Harvard, the pace picked up a lot, and I'm not quite sure where I was at in the pack. I know I took a pull before the bike trail, but Shannon did most of the work up front. For that, I owe him the KOM (not really a hill but...) for the "Harvard Charge" segment: http://app.strava.com/segments/680721. Okay, who's the wiseguy who named that? HA HA.
We kept the pace up going towards Portola and eventually strung the group out a bit. Once we got on the Lower Up segment, Shannon started to charge and all I could do was sit on his wheel (Noah-style) and try and shoot by at the end. Shannon got me by a tick, but unfortunately, we were 1 mph shy of the KOM holder...me. :) It was damn windy on the way up though.
On the way back, we did have Vince, Shannon, Mitchell and David with us to take turns going down the bike trail. We were moving pretty fast, but we did get held up by a truck sweeper at one point where we had to check up right before the trail leading back to Harvard.
Harvard was tough against the wind, but we kept taking turns trying to keep the pace up. Vince, Shannon and I rotated as much as we can, and Mitchell took some good pulls too where the last one was as we got on the trail by University. Shannon decided to light it up here though and had us probably finishing at almost 30 mph while Vince and I just hung on. So much for saving it for CA.
Coincidentally, who do we see at the bottom but Verm, the current KOM holder for CA. He looked like he was going for a run, but it wouldn't surprise me that he was out there spying on us to make sure no one takes away his record. He even jokingly said take it easy going up CA...or was it a joke?
When the light turned green, we could see that the light ahead of us was red but turned green. According to Strava when I did the comparison between my effort today with Steve's, he had gotten a 5 second gap on me on the bottom section and increased it to 11 seconds after the light. I started hauling ass after the light getting by Vince and just going for it. Based on my efforts, I just missed taking the KOM away from Verm by 1 second. I had closed the 10 seconds on him on the climb, but it just wasn't enough. Verm will get to keep his KOM...for now. Next time, buddy.
Beautiful day today except for the winds here and there. Shannon, you did all the work today, so you deserve the KOM on Harvard charge. Ask Noah to flag me...I'm sure he will.
Thanks for the workout, gents!
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