This past weekend was a good training weekend. With no time being spent running I took to the bike to put some miles on both the tri bike and road bike. On Saturday I had the chance to ride with CuseTri. See his blog for a couple of pics and more details. And yeah I already took enough heat about my damn white tights...so please hold the comments. It was cold and they were over my bibs so as to keep my bits and pieces nice and not chaffed.
The on Sunday I headed out to the hills of Bristol to meet up with some cycling buddies and do a nice little recovery ride. About 7.5 hours and 100 or so miles later the recovery ride ended. AWESOME! The day began well with a good sized group of us taking off from one of the guys house which is located right next door to the Bristol Mtn. Ski resort. After a couple hours and a few hills we stopped off at the house where a few guys had to duck out due to family responsibilities (Lawrence said he had to take his daughter to dance practice, but I think he was hiding the fact that he instead was the one going to the practice). Another guy named Adam who was riding a bike for the first time in Bristol (and did great!) had to go play golf...at Oak Hill, I felt sooo sorry for him, haha.
So after we left them Crispino, Josh, Mr. Grimm, and myself headed back out. I thought we would you know just be taking it easy...well that quickly changed when we started climbing again. We headed into Chesire (I say these names of places like I know where they are, I do not. I just follow people where they take me, it takes way to much thought to think about where I am going)and then sure enough I remembered the route we were on and it ends with Bopple..freaking Bopple. 19% grade and all...I had to pee and decided to stop before climbing the monster. Good thing I did or else I probably would have had an accident at the one flat section of the hill...you know ride before it gets REALLY steep. So yeah we made it up...were cyclists, we've got legs of steel. Well then..around the 3 hr mark Josh and Crispino peeled off and headed back home. Well I had a decision to make..to call it good with a 3 hr recovery ride that had probably 5-6k ft of climbing, or keep going straight ahead on the road which happened to be West Gannett. If you know the area you know that Gannett is a really nice hill, not to steep but its very long and makes for a good effort. Needless to say I went straight up the hill. I couldn't pass up the chance to keep riding with the other rider in the group, Mr. Grimm. His first name is Erik but he's so many light years ahead of me in respect to umm..biking swimming running, basically any type of athletic event. Seriously, if you look at any of the races around Rochester..he's probably one it at one point or another, and oh by the way he's done Kona not once but twice, for kicks. He did it way back in 1993 and then came back for another round of fun in 2007, talk about an age group difference! We ended up riding for another 3.5-4 hrs. Not exactly sure on the exact times or distances since my garmin died at mile 88 which was before we climbed another hill to get home. I think it was around 102 or thereabouts.
I can't say how cool it was to just ride, ride without data, ride without time limits. It was truly a great opportunity to get to ride with Mr. Grimm, he's done it all and has been places that I would like to get to. You can learn a lot from people like that and I really soaked everything up during the ride. We road on roads i've never heard of and on roads that Erik himself had never been on. Needless to say a check of the map on the Blackberry was necessary.
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