Training ride #9


I'll just say this wasn't the best weekend ever. I cancelled my Saturday morning training ride in Palo Alto because rain appeared to be a certainty. My normally three-hour drive to San Francisco on Saturday afternoon took a whopping four and a half hours in the rain and traffic, and my mood was soured. And a promising dinner gone bad left me with the queen mother headache from hell on Saturday night, leaving me to wonder if I'd be OK to do my ride on Sunday morning.

I planned to meet up in San Francisco with fellow ALCer </a></b></a>jamisononfire -- one of the ride leaders for Sunday's scheduled 40-mile ride -- and we were going to ride an extra 12 miles each way to the starting point in Sausalito. But at the appointed meeting time of 8:30, he came walking down Sanchez, dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt. Sure enough, he wasn't going to be riding today, what with moving, lack of sleep, and illness.

So I took off by myself and made it across the bridge in plenty of time. The ride itself was essentially a repeat of the ride I did back on Nov. 27, but it was made slightly more difficult this time because I did a 41-mile ride on Saturday in Fresno before I left -- working on the goal of stringing long-distance days together.

There were about 35 of us (here, doing pre-ride stretching, which I mostly skipped, since I considered my 12-mile ride there an ample warm-up). For some small fun, turns out we hit the Mill Valley bike path just about at high tide, and the inlet was up and over the trail in a couple of places, to a depth of a few inches. With the recent rain, my bike would become a muddy mess by the end of the day.

Up and over Camino Alto again, where there was a mysterious woman in an ALC T-shirt handing out licorice sticks at the summit!

For me, the headline of the day is that the hills didn't overly trouble me. Once again, on each hill this time, I didn't have to stop mid-climb, including both directions of White's Hill along Sir Francis Drake Blvd. I cheated a wee bit, though, because I left the regroup in Fairfax a bit early so I could get an early start up the hill. It's becoming clear that I'm still slower on hills than many of the riders, so this lets me arrive with the group at the next stop.

And today, that next stop was in Lagunitas. Even though I was early, I decided to skip the sit-down table service at the Yellow Door Cafe, and I went instead next door to the deli and general store. Why? Well, back around White's Hill, I noticed that one of the screws on my right toeclip was completely gone, causing my clip to be loose and in danger of falling off. Not good. But I picked up some magical duct tape at the store and made it good as new in minutes. (And I learned a lesson: Carry duct tape. That small roll is staying in my handlebar bag now.)

I left lunch very early -- passed the sweep coming in the opposite direction, stopped by the side of the road seeing to riders who had flats. This got me up and over the backside of White's Hill with just a couple of other riders catching up to me. I also went by the regroup in Fairfax on the return, so I got back to Sausalito in less than four hours, and was the fourth rider to sign back in (fifth, if you count the one rider who didn't do the whole route). From there, a relatively easy trip (if you can ever call the Sausalito hill "relatively easy") back across the bridge into San Francisco, and through the Presidio and Golden Gate Park, back into the Castro, with plenty of time left over to go shopping at Sports Basement and use the ALC 20% off coupon on its last day.

We got an ominous reminder/warning Sunday: Only four months to go until the ride. And yes, while there are lots and lots and lots of other riders who aren't doing 120-mile weekends yet, I'm still not too sure about my ability to hold up for multiple days. I'm become slightly better in the past few months, but I don't see the wholesale improvements that I probably need to make by June. The bottom line: From all the big rides I've done over the past year (100 miles, 7500 feet climbing in one day!), I might be at or very near the upper limit of what my body can do. Can I break through that? That's the big mystery of the next four months.

(Oh, for the final insult of the weekend: Coming back on the Golden Gate Bridge, I stopped when I found a spot where I could safely place my camera while taking a nice self-pic while facing the San Francisco skyline. Good fundraising picture and all, y'know. Well, for some strange reason, the camera's flash decided to go off, completely washing out the picture and making it worse than unusable. And from the nasty shout I got from the other riders in whose faces the flash unexpectedly went off, I wasn't about to attempt a second picture.)

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