Lunch Ride - Loaded Pack and My Hidden Agenda

Strava:  http://app.strava.com/rides/8599709

You know that feeling you get when you ride a roller coaster climbing up a long track to prepare you for fast steep drop with a lot of twists and turns?  Yeah, that pretty much sums up how I felt when I saw who came out for today's ride.  We had a good sized group with Shannon, Todd, Galen, Gary, Adrian, Vin, Hiroshi, Jaffe, and Mitchell making it out for the ride.  If Vince, PV and Noah came out, I think I would have had to change my shorts before pedaling out.  To boot, it was pretty warm and fairly windy to make my anxiety even worse.  The funny thing is you can see and for some, hear the worry they felt seeing how loaded the ride was.

S-Gary started us off in his true form and led us out at a less than ideal (too fast) warm-up pace with everyone managing their anxiety behind him.  Others started to make their way up front to help eventually, and even on Anteater, there were some who I had to get around just to get up to the next guy to draft behind.  HA HA.

Once we crossed the light on Bonita Canyon, the pace picked up pretty fast with Galen starting to gap the others as we ascended up the first hill.  When I saw the gap, I figured I may as well actually start working now and closed the gap and subsequently took a pull near the top.  A few had held on up and over the hill, but by the time we got on Sunnyhill, it was just Galen, Shannon, Todd, Mitchell, Adrian and me.

The rotations on Turtle Rock was your typical organized chaos where people just pulled randomly while some didn't.  HA HA.  I took some pulls when I could, but near the bottom, Adrian started to break off causing Galen to give chase.  Now I'm not sure what Adrian was thinking at this point given that the last time he did something like this (sprinting with Galen on Culver to Campus just before we head up to Turtle Rock), it didn't really work out too well for him where he dropped pretty early on.  Wouldn't you know it, the same thing happened again today.  I guess history really does repeat itself.

Once we got past Campus and started going up, Shannon and I made our way past them and had a pretty good pace heading over to Starcrest.  Rather than sitting in Shannon's draft, I did something even less intelligent and tried to ride abreast and hold his pace.  Dumb.  Eventually, I ended up dropping a little bit behind him as we made our way onto Starcrest.

Now as we got on Starcrest, Shannon kept ahead of me but I maintained a good pace behind him.  At one point, Todd started to make his way past me, but I was able to spin up a little bit more and stay ahead of him.  This increased pace also allowed me to get by Shannon, so what these guys didn't know was that I was trying to do my best on Starcrest with a hidden motive:  I wanted to PR this hill for Eddie's (one of the guys on our team) dad who passed away last Saturday.  Eddie's dad had a work ethic like no other, and this ethic definitely carried on to Eddie, so in my mind I was not going to stop pushing until the hill was done.  It's funny how something like this can motivate me, but it worked:  I beat my best time by 4 seconds.  This was for you, Mr. Manny Narvaez.  RIP.

Back to our scheduled program:  of course, Todd got by me at the very end but like I told him in the locker room, I'd never hear the end of it if I didn't "let him."  HA HA...just kidding!

Shannon was just behind me, so the three of us kept going and made our way down Ridgeline back onto Turtle Rock together.  Todd was just a little bit ahead of us, but Shannon closed in on him eventually with me in tow.  We all worked together as we made our way back to Sunnyhill and the North side of Shady heading to Bonita Canyon.  The pace was harsh throughout, so there was no sprint to the bike trail as would be the norm.  Thank God!  We got stopped at the light on Bonita canyon and were followed shortly by Galen and Mitchell.  Oh great...NPC was going to hurt too.

The 5 of us made our way to NPC and fortunately got the green light just as we were coming up on it.  Galen started up the hill first followed by Todd, Shannon and Mitchell, but as he started to gap a little, I found my way up to his wheel and was pretty content to just ride behind him for the rest of the hill.  What?  I ain't dumb.  Now you can say I was blocking, but anyone else could have gotten up front as well and no one did.  HA HA.  When it flattened out a little, I decided to go ahead and get up front but this was probably not the best idea.  Once everyone started to pass me, I didn't latch on right away.  I also crossed the street separately from them, but found myself waaaaay off the back after rendering it futile to even try...especially with Shannon up front by that point.

I was pretty much on my own at that point, but I did see Mitchell drop off where I thought I could catch him for some company.  However, he ended up skipping the horseshoe, and I almost skipped but decided I'd go on it on my own.  At this point, both my calves started going into seizure mode so I struggled just to make it around that damn thing (17 mph average pretty much sums it up).

Even on San Joaquin going down the hill, my calves were still locking up but I pressed on.  I did end up skipping Spyglass though as I figured I'd just rest, regroup with the others and try to blow myself up on McArthur again...which is exactly what I did.  Todd and Shannon got by at the end but I tried to hang on for a good run on Bison.  I took off at one point for a sprint, but Shannon reeled me in before California.  Todd jokingly wanted to sprint some more on California, but my calves were done.

Great ride today, gents!   Tomorrow morning should be equally painful.  I hope you can make it.