Big night last night. Got to get all tuned up for the summertime hardman classics. How embarrassing is it going to be for me to get my ass dropped at Lost River? Very. Being, you know, old, I have to be careful about mid-season deterioration of fitness. Racing seems to compromise my ability to race well. The chamber doesn't hold that many rounds.
In an effort to address this situation, I rolled promptly from work with the intent of getting in some LT and tempo work before the Goon Ride. The Mass Ave hill in Glen Echo has a great 3' interval that's a good indicator for me (relevant to the recent GJ poll), so I hit that to finish the warmup, then do my 20' roll out MacArthur from the heated bridge to Great Falls and back. It's either die or get killed on that sumufabist most nights. If you stay in the car traffic lanes, you've got some psycho absolutely screaming (and I mean these guys are like dogs in full cry - it's nuts) to "GET IN THE BIKE LANE THAT I GRACIOUSLY BOUGHT FOR YOU WITH MY PERSONAL TAX DOLLARS." You go outbound in the bike lane, God help you with the chunderheads cutting the corners on all their right hand turns, putting the entire passenger side half of their car into the bike lane. And if you yell or wave a plea to them not to kill you, it's like a personal insult. You also have the people who just plain pull over into the bike lane to have a chat (should we be thankful they're doing that instead of talking while driving?), or just go ahead and park there. You can't win for playing.
The Goon itself was fairly tame. We were joined by an out of state visitor in full BAR regalia, that was cool. Couple of tangles that made no sense, one leaving a traffic light. The other one, I don't know what happened. We were going up a rise and there was just a very loud noise of cleats scraping on the ground. Tale of the tape was like 51 miles over 2.5 hours at something like 275w NP. Not bad for a Thursday night.
Very excited for a long weekend. Don't blow your thumb off like a friend of mine from high school did.
5 comments:
I don't get the attraction to training on MacArthur. Since HP was closed I rode out to Old Angler's after work. I feared for my life. When I got home the first thing I did was kiss my wife and son. Training on MacArthur during evening rush should be added to the Summer X Games.
Good to see you yesterday! You forgot to call out Nick's national team jersey! My MABRA jersey is from the 2007 Cat 4 crit. It is usually reserved for trainer workouts when I need that "extra" motivation.
Mark - The remaining pieces of my right leg have a pretty firm grudge against Hains. But yeah, Mac is kind of a show, isn't it?
Pete - You have a closet full of those things, don't you? Was my chicanery in trying to never be the guy that Nick pulled through very obvious? I took one long one and pulled off, looked right, felt the screw turn and man I didn't want that to be the case any more. Sheesh.
Most guys were playing it well. Everyone who wasn't interested in working stayed out of the rotation, and the only time guys weren't pulling through was when the pace would be yanked up to "abnormally fast", usually by Nick. All's you can do is all's you can do!
I am just a lowly racer, but just want to say that the c&o canal is one way to bypass MacArthur. I use a cyclocross bike and 28mm conti 4-season tires. Because of walkers, big groups of riders would not work. Drafting another rider going fast on the c&o is a blast. It is much safer for everyone but the squirrels.
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