2019 Spring Fling

For the Princeton Freewheeler Bike Club All-Paces rides, I like to lead a ride that The Excellent Wife (TEW) can also do; that way I get a bike ride AND a date credit. Early in the spring, TEW wasn't sure she could keep up with a C+ pace, so she asked, "How about a high C?" Meaning, of course, the pace, but I'm never one to allow the easy (if stupid) joke to pass, so I decided to call my ride the Soprano, because we would be reaching for a "high C". Right?

Oh, never mind. It's never funny to anybody but me.

The weather gods didn't seem impressed with my humor, either; all week they were threatening to drown us with various amounts and ferocities of precipitation. But this morning dawned without rain (if very grey), so we drove down to the start at Tall Cedars in Hamilton. All the way, we figured the two of us might be the only people on my ride, and we were figuring what we might do if it started to rain, and when to turn back if it did.

But when we got to Hamilton, there were a number of other rides going out... and nine other people came on the ride, some of whom had ridden with me before and some had not (and I'm not sure which takes more courage: riding with an unknown leader the first time, or coming BACK when you know the depths of which I'm capable).

We did a route I stole inherited from the Ride for McBride (Laura OLPH was kind enough to forward it to me).I had to do it old-school, because I forgot to load the route onto my Garmin, so I used the tried-and-true count-the-mileage-and-follow-the-cuesheet model. There were only a couple of glitches when the cuesheet, automatically generated at the RideWithGPS website, didn't quite match the roads on the ground... but I only added about a half mile to the proceedings.

I had promised an average speed in the range of 12.5-13mph, but we actually brought it in well above 13mph. Everybody kept up, and despite my repeated questions, nobody admitted to leaving lung parts behind (and nobody looked like they were working too hard; one woman was a bit off the back, but she pleaded a new [to her] bike and inexperience riding in groups, and she did fine as the ride went on).

We stopped at Scott's in New Egypt.

...and then brought it the rest of the way home with only minor mishap (a failure-to-disengage-cleat, with the usual sequelae with which all of us who ride with our shoes clipped to the pedals are only too familiar).

Wanna see the ride data?

From there, we went to the feed at the Spring Fling, where yours truly brought home his first jersey for leading over ten rides in a season, as well as a token for having swept on rides. I offered a tire repair clinic, but the requirement that you bring your own tire or wheel seems to have been too stringent; there were no takers. Alas.

And instead of the usual photo album on a commercial site, the pics are uploaded to the Club website. Look for the "Photos and Albums" button on the left button bar.