Team Lunch Ride #12 with Bonus at the End

Strava:  https://app.strava.com/activities/254110078

Attendees:  Shannon, Seon and Gary

We had a smaller group of guys come out today compared to Tuesday, but it was a great group of guys nonetheless.   I say this because these guys are coming out with greater consistency, and I'm digging being able to ride in a group again vs. individually.

Here are some of the highlights for today's ride:

• It was F'ing hot, but everyone conformed to the black jersey Thursday nonetheless.  
• Seon is definitely picking up his game and improving all the time.   He's starting to push up more and just working harder out there, and it's showing.  Good job!
• I can't say enough about Gary's character.  Gary always impresses me when he pushes up like he does.  He loves to give it all, recover, and then do it again.  He's the epitome of interval training, and we all know how painful intervals are, right?  He and Seon teamed up on PCH even and made a pretty good run after NPC.  
• Shannon was kind enough to not blow us away too badly, but he definitely had moments of where we all just had to say "see ya!"   He allowed for us to regroup with him though, but then you wonder if that's a good thing or not given only more punishment can be doled out.  HA HA.  J/K.  It was a good thing.  One last thing was I had a chance to lead him out for the Bison sprint, albeit my lead out came after blowing myself up on Bonita Canyon.   1158W max with 735W average for 21 seconds equals ouch!

Now here's the bonus part I wanted to write about:  What is the 2015 version of Team Broadcom Cycling?  

When we originated, we started out as a smallish crew of cycling enthusiasts that really liked to push the pace (as we knew it then).  Then we got a little more people, got a little more organized, and started challenging ourselves (through lunch rides, events and hill challenges).  We then pushed ourselves even further at that point and started entering races, although we knew nothing about strategy initially.  HA HA.  Then, life got in the way.  The disparity in performance between racers and non-racers grew and this made for less than ideal "team" outings.  People were racing 1-2 at a time, lunch rides thinned out, and most importantly, the beerfests have dwindled down a lot.   Too much if you ask me.  

After talking to Shannon at lunch today, I started to really ask myself, who are we and what does it mean today to wear a Broadcom jersey?  I definitely don't think it means the same as it used to.  Another point of clarity was how it makes perfect sense that those who are still very active competitively may seek out to find other team rides to participate in for better training and fundamentally, more consistency.  And if it came down to racing, the BAM in us should want to win and winning solo or with only one other helping is not very likely.  I get it.

I think we need to reevaluate who we are and what we do.  Personally, I know I contributed to a lot of the different directions we went, especially last year, but I'm not going to dwell on the past.   My question to all would be "Who do we want to be in 2015?"  Let's not kid ourselves either.  If we're not going to race as a team, let's not even pretend that that's who we are.  That's not to say racers shouldn't be a part of us, or worse, not ride with us, but I think it's perfectly fine if they don the jersey of other teams who actually do come out and race in numbers.  That's a no-brainer.  We should still want them to win.  

I'm of the opinion that we need to focus on just coming out together again like we did in the past.  It's not an exclusive group of elite climbers, masterful time trialists, etc.  Let's just share our love for cycling together like we used to do.  Okay, so there are going to be people with their own agendas for training during lunch, which is perfectly fine.  If you race, train hard.  If you don't, train however you want.  If you want, don't train at all.  However, the last thing you'll want to do is not share the company of the great guys that I've gotten to know and love over the years.  While we may not have exchanged blood, we've definitely sweat on each other enough to form that familial bond.   This is what my vision of what the 2015 version of Team Broadcom should be.   This is what wearing the kit should represent.  Nothing more.  Nothing less.