and a full turnout! Today the plan was to lead a group of folks who've expressed interest in a 1 day STP, Reach the Beach, any of the club sponsored centuries, or just to improve their bike fitness on a training ride. The plan is to start out slowly and just keep making progress. Today's ride, being the first in our series was planned as a 15 mile ride to be completed in an hour. For some this would be easy, for some it would be very difficult. I had 12 RSVP's for today's ride, and had 13 show up! That's unheard of for most of the events associated with these social bike groups. I was expecting maybe 6 or 7 to show. We had great weather for February. No frost this morning, blue skies, just a very light breeze that for most of our ride was a cross "wind". One rider had a flat, followed by another flat before he ever turned a pedal. (patch let go). I held back with him making sure he got everything going. By the time he'd changed everything around TWICE we had lost 20 minutes. Losing 20 minutes on a 15 mi/1 hour ride is huge. We pedaled pretty hard (20mph+) trying to close the distance but just couldn't do it. We short cutted the last turn saving ourselves 2.4 miles and that was the only way we managed to pedal back into our ending location right at our 1 hour time limit. Everyone else was there, having preceded us by a few minutes, except for two riders who finished a few minutes after us. All in all, it was a good showing for everyone. We will continue to build on this base and as long as the folks stay on task they will be happy with the results by the time the big organized rides of summer get in full swing.
Since I'm now an official member of the Oregon Randonneurs I felt the pressure to "ride to the ride". On the way back home the weather was so nice I took a few extra turns to bring my mileage past the 50 mile mark. Come the end of the year it will be one more tally in the 50+ column!
Tomorrow about a dozen people are planning on joining me on a 54 mile ride in honor of my 54th birthday (which was a couple of days ago). Looks like the weather will continue to be stellar!
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...............Road Bike.....LifeCycle.....Total Miles
Today............52...............0.................52
Jan total.......501.....+.........30.......=.......531
Feb total.......128.....+.........0........=.......128
Year to date....628.....+.........30.......=.......654
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