Weekend riding….
Posted on September 15, 2008
This weekend I had big plans for riding. Jay and I were going to ride the Kitchen Creek loop.
The plan was to ride it easy, but just get some climbing in. He is getting ready for the CROSS season, so this was his last hard workout before the big races.
I picked him up and off we went to east county. Parked in Alpine and headed up the road. Something was in the air today…. I sensed that it was going to be a very long day… maybe there wasn’t enough “air” in the air… don’t know. I could see it in his body language that something wasn’t right.
So we keep riding. I am at a comfortable pace as we hit the climb… Viejas grade is not that big of a climb. The was no wind and we weren’t going fast, so it was very nice. I have been there when the winds pick up and it is very hard to hold 7mph… and this is sitting behind guys that can actually climb, so no excuses that I can go faster cause I can’t climb.
Jay stops talking and the nose starts dripping. I know what he is going through. His mind is telling him to stop, ABORT!!! I mess with him and keep pedaling. We ride up together the whole way. In the end I open up a bit and get a bit of a burn from the effort and take in the effects of the mild altitude. 2 minutes later he shows up and collapses.
5 minutes on the floor and we are good to go again.
Now you know that when you go that deep, there is no recovering, especially after taking 6 weeks of the bike. So every hill or bump after that was a nightmare. The suffering never subsided and once again I kept reminding that we still had a 13 mile climb ahead of us. I am pretty sure that that got into his head and psychologically it demolished him.
After hitting Guatay (yes, that is a town in east county) we decided to cut our losses, turned around and got back to the car safely.
So 31 miles, 2600 feet of climbing (2000 of them in the first 11) and a bit over 2 hours on the bike. WHAT A RIDE.
CAN ANYONE FIGURE OUT WHICH PHOTO WAS TAKEN FIRST?
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