a ride for all the club

 I've reinstated my practice of doing a no-pace ride for the club on the last Sunday of the month. It's a ride that anybody can do if they can do the distance, and  I try to keep the distance manageable. Faster folks go at the pace they like, and I make sure that nobody rides alone. In the past, I've done it out of the Claremont School in Franklin. That route has a few hills that some folks find challenging (for example, climbing out of the D&R Canal right-of-way in both directions).

But I've moved to the other side of the county. And The Excellent Wife (TEW) has a route that's flat, and starts within five miles of my garage door. So we started in Cranbury this time.

There's TEW!

Jeff, above in the orange, brought the lovely De Bernardi pictured below.

I love those gorgeous steel bikes.

I shortened TEW's route to about fifteen miles. That was probably too short; I'll plan to go back to her 22-ish-mile route for the next one. That said, though, the people who came out (many of whom I'd never met) really enjoyed this ride; more than one remarked that this kind of riding was what they wanted to do.

I'll plan to keep doing these until interest drops (probably as the temperatures do!). If you're a club member, maybe you want to come out... or maybe you want to lead one!

wait... how fast?

 

Friend Martin G got that picture of me. What do youse think?

So friend and fellow club member Tom H listed a ride for today that was gonna be flat. I knew some friends would go, so I didn't really pay attention to much else about it, and didn't notice that the distance (just shy of 60 miles) was longer than I've ridden in many months. By the time I caught on, I figured I could do it; I might not be able to keep up with the group, but I'd have the route in my GPS device, so I'd be able to get back on my own if I needed to.

We started in Mansfield Park in Columbus. 

Three or four baseball fields were full with women's teams playing softball, and I saw license plates from out of state. 

Tom was a bit late, so some of us improved upon the time.

Ricky's bike is much more purple than any of my pictures ever capture.

And Laura's Kermit has some excellent features as well.

(I've recently joined a photo club, and I may want to process some of those into something.)

Off we went. From Columbus, we went by the McGuire Air Force Base, and then the Brendan Byrne State forest, where we made a brief stop.

Now, I noticed that my average early on was pretty low... but then the pace picked up, and stayed up. By the time we got to the stop at Nixon's, my Garmin showed an average of 16.7mph.

I love the "Downtown Tabernacle New Jersey" on the door. As far as I can figure, Downtown Tabernacle consists of Nixon's, a frightening dive bar, and the cemetery.

I resolved to go slower on the way back, but I didn't keep to my resolution until the last few miles, and on the ride page, I ended up with an average, for just under 60 miles, of 16.4mph.

Yeah, I don't believe it either.

on knowing your biking limits

 I led my usual Sunday ride today. Some pics at the start:

Jeff P brought a gorgeous old Raleigh, in great shape:

You can see the ride page here. It might be important for the next bit.

For a number of people on the ride, it was more than they could do. Whether the distance or pace was more than they bargained for, or whether they started out at a pace they could not maintain, or for some other reason, they wound up leaving early. All apparently got home safely, which is probably the most important thing.

The ride page shows we were within the advertised range; it was not a simple case of pace-pushing.

Sometimes, we like to challenge ourselves. Sometimes, we like to try doing things that other people do easily (sometimes, these are other people we care about). Sometimes, we like to try our boundaries and test our limits.

But cycling can be a dangerous activity, and it becomes more so if we're exhausted, dehydrated, undernourished. I'm glad the people on the ride got home safely. I hope those who were overtired (or whatever) will have a care to when they test their abilities again.

The most important thing on a club ride is the safety of all the riders.

---

In other news, though, when we got to my planned stop at Sweet Gourmet, they were closed. They are closing Sundays for the summer. 

First the Blawenburg Bistro, now Sweet Gourmet. I am apparently the kiss of death for Sunday openings for my favorite stops.

The gang made do with the local bagel place.

Well, OK. No-pace ride for next week (it's already posted on the club calendar; I hope some of youse come out).

laura's goldilocks ride

 

Friend Laura OLPH, among other club members, has a bike trip to, I think, Nova Scotia scheduled for next month. One of the days of the trip has a demanding hill, the like of which is not to be found in the Hill Slugs' usual riding area... and so to train, Laura has been scheduling club rides with all of the most demanding hills she can find that are not too inconvenient to include.

Good for her, I suppose, but that's not the way this old man (I'm almost 70) wants to ride, so I've been missing from her last umpteen rides. Evidently I'm not the only one; in her listing for today's ride, she wrote:

I talked Tom Hammell into letting me lead this scenic, social ride. Compared to what I've been listing lately, this one will be relatively easy, with approximately 50 feet of elevation gain per mile. 

And in a private communication, she hinted that she was looking to ride with some of Tom's regulars. Well, that was good enough for me; I was one of the first to sign up.

Laura called it a "Goldilocks ride", with the implication that it would be "just right", and it very nearly was. The distance and climb were much more to my liking than her other recent rides, and while the day was hot and a bit muggy, it was nowhere near as awful as recent days have been.

It was, of course, Tom H's route, so there was not just one...

...but two closed roads along the way.

Certain things are dependable; one of them is that there will be a closed road, a bridge out, or a path connecting different parts of the route, on one of Tom's routes. (The roads were, of course, impassable to cars, but posed no difficulty to those of us on bikes.)

We stopped and that Brooklyn Grill in Whitehouse Station, where we ran into (club president) Mike V and his wife Deb.

(Deb at left, Mike with the red-and-white cap under the sign.) They had considered coming out, but then the ride filled, and they didn't want to ask for an indulgence. They did ride with us part of the way back, and turned off when it was convenient to do.

Go see the ride page.

Laura indicates that sanity will return at the end of August. I wait, as the Catholics say, in joyful hope.