Saturday, December 6, 2008

Doing some exploring...

Today Ryan, Andrew, and I hooked with with Phil and Frank from Mon County bike club in hopes of exploring some new rides that we had not been on. Frank is apparently the Morgantown area road knowledge master (more so than my GPS, at least).

It was a balmy 20 degrees when we met this morning outside of the courthouse. The ride started promptly at 10, so Ryan and Andrew showed up at 10:08, just to bring some WVU cycling spirit to the ride. Our goal was to climb as much as possible, and descend as little as possible (Why wasn't Jimmy there? Must be cleaning the bike house for tomorrow's guest I suppose?).

Phil also had a great and innovative idea to stay warm! He grabbed one of his girlfriends menstruation pain reliever pads that heat your midsection and wore it for the entire ride.

Anyway, we started on Rt100 to Ft Martin, past the road to Taylortown and kept heading north to Mapletown. After Mapletown we descended into the river valley north of Ft. Martin. I bonked hard around this point and had to accept an ever so delicious, tasty and nutritious Clif bar from Phil. We headed south towards Dillner where we climbed Cemetery Hill Rd. in an attempt to get back to Ft. Martin and head to Taylortown. After a wrong turn back towards the river we swiftly corrected ourselves and re-climbed what we accidentally descended. We got back on course and headed to Taylortown. My gas tank ran empty and I sagged hard. The cold really got to my muscles and I felt super lactic soaked. I actually lost sight of everyone at one point coming down onto RT100 because even with my head cover my face was freezing and couldn't bare the wind of going fast down the descents. I finally met up with everyone on Rt100, where Frank told me to set the pace for everyone. This turned into Phil and I dropping Andrew, Frank, and Ryan. That also led to Frank dubbing me a sandbagger. Sometimes even when you're down and out you can still find some power for a nice run... sorry Phil. It worked out well when Andrew caught Phil and I right after coming under the train bridge and back into the river valley. I then quickly dropped from them as we started getting snowed on and were riding into an extremely fierce headwind.

Eventually Ryan and Frank picked me up and I proceeded to suck wheel all the way home. Ryan fell of hard at the end with lactic soak. We never again saw Phil, Andrew, or my bottle that I put on Phil's bike since I broke my bottle cage.

We ended up climbing 4,000ft total today. It was a hainus, cold, and also expensive ride, seeing as we did around 45 miles, and have to spend $200 more on cranks because we missed a crank auction we weren't aware of. If I knew that I was costing myself about $4.50 in savings per mile on a SRAM crank, I probably would have turned around sooner. Weirdly enough, as crappy as the weather was and as much as we climbed/hurt, I really did have fun today...

Go pedal

GPS:
http://trail.motionbased.com/trail/activity/7250403

-Chad

2 comments:

Ryan said...

Ya, it was a busy morning.

Of all the 4 letter words, I think "Ouch" best describes it. Too much leg compression killed my ability to use my legs much better than the average grandma. And then to come home to find out out the goods I was promised the day before got snaked by a sneaky teammate who was too ___ to ride.

It always feels good to know you ride when water was solid.

Andrew Brautigam said...

Frozen waterbottles = tough guy points. Fun ride today. Glad we got in before it got too stupid outside. Why can't anyone drive in the snow around here?