It was a wonderful weekend for a ride.

Sunday morning I got up to ride out at 7:30 with Chris and Joby to the University District. It was the start of the first official SIR ride of the season, known as the “Big Time Urban Populaire”. We took a route up over Capitol Hill to get some more… uh… training in before the ride. It helped get my legs warmed up for what was to come. 125 riders showed up for the event. Imagine, 125 bearded, chubby men with miles of reflective material. It brought a tear to my eye.

It is a great route for us because it basically strings together loops that we have been doing for a long time now into one cohesive tour of Seattle.

Joby decided early on that he would finish his ride for the day in South Park to attend some out of town company, and Matt was nowhere to be seen at the start of the event. The pack fanned out very quickly on the crushing inclines on the north end. I knew that the ride would be no push over, but I am very impressed at the amount of hills that Eric (ride coordinator) found for us to take. We’ve been training on West Seattle for months and haven’t found roads that tough.

When all was said and done for the day, we logged over 5000 feet of climbing, with grades of up to 20%.

There were a few mechanical issues and control point confusion. The 3 of us were split up for big chunks of the ride, but I guess that is something that I need to get used to. Fighting the head winds around Alki beach was no fun without support. We all caught up to each other on the control point in West Seattle, only to lose each other again right away. Everyone was tightened back up in South Park though, and things were pretty smooth from there.

It certainly wasn’t our fastest 100k, but I am pretty proud of the accomplishment none the less. We added about 20 miles to the route by commuting to the start point and back as well. I am really looking forward to the 200k in a couple of weeks.

Once we got to the finish point at Big Time we were asked if we saw our “cheering squad”. Apparently we had just missed Jane and her friend Michele trying to see if they could catch us on course. They went out for a ride to Ballard and got some Belgian beers and frites (yeah, I’m jealous too). Michele is in town from the east coast for her job and a conference. She also rides for Independent Fabrication… so that makes her pretty awesome in my book. She brought her travel bike with her just to take a spin with Jane around the city. I need a travel bike.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 3rd, 2008 at 9:18 am and is filed under bicycling, sir. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.