Friday Ride Report With Pictures

(click on the images to see the whole thing)

Today was awesome. You can see the route in the post below, but I rode out to St. John's, crossed the bridge, and went up Germantown Road again, which is steep and does not like you. It's pretty, but still, it wants you dead. There were cars to deal with today, but it's such a curvy road they are going pretty slow as it is and tended to give me pretty wide clearance when they passed me.

Of course, a sea turtle could have passed me on Germantown cuz it's steep and I'm a sloooooow climber. Dumb show off sea turtles, who needs em?

A couple miles of climbing, then the ancient closed down burger joint at Skyline Drive. I went right and followed Skyline to McAnamee and started to descend. There were no cars, which was nice. McAnamee is far more stretched out than Germantown so you descend for a lot longer. This was an out and back route so it did occur to me as I was flying down the hill wooping it up and smiling that I'd pay for all this fun when I had to come back up, but whatyagonnado?

At the bottom is Hwy 30, so I turned around and headed back up. Right at the foot of the hill it's so steep I almost had to walk. The road had patches of loose gravel and I'd hit one and my back wheel would spin out because I was pushing so hard and had most of my weight over the bars. I managed to get past that patch without walking but did start up a mantra on my breathes which was "ohmygod" SUCK AIR "ohmygod" SUCKAIR "whatthefuck?" SUCKAIR "ohmygod."

Maybe not what the wise man or woman who invented mantras intended, but I got up that hill didn't I? IN YOUR FACE WISE MAN OR WOMAN!

I climbed my way back to Skyline and the rest of the ride was Easy Jefferson. I think the total climb up the hills was between 2000 and 2400 feet. I think that's about the max climbing I'd be doing on sustained hills on the real ride on any given day. Of course my ride today was 30 miles and on the real ride they'll be 60 to 80, but this is why we practice!