Holy soreness.

The ride: Shabbos +1. The attendees: Mr. Miles, Bryan, and Big Puma (aka Mr. Fenster). I new Bryan was going to be feeling his oats since he was running a Trek Madone finally after putzing along on a heavy steel Bianchi for a couple months. Mr. Miles always is a power rider, and then Big Puma shows up who I've heard has been putting everyone in the hurt lockers recently.

Well crap. I hadn't done a long ride in a couple weeks and my whopping 6 mile round trip commute sure isn't much to get fast from. However, I also had a secret weapon. I had been riding a heavy commuter for about 3 weeks and I showed up on my pared down racy Lemond Bike. Ha ha!!

We left the coffee shop and headed straight into the wind. Of course the speed gradually ramped up but we were civilized to each other and traded pulls. However, the ramping up was just too much after a while. Bryan was having fit/saddle issues and I sure wasn't comfortable holding 18 mph into a 15-ish mph headwind. But luckily we were near our Southernmost destiny. So we headed East to do some climbing in Bellevue. Of course the eventual serious climbing wasn't planned, but it's difficult to venture into Bellevue and not think, "I wonder how much that one crazy hill will hurt?" The first climb was a steady grinder to reach Bellevue Blvd. This thing is deceptive since it doesn't seem steep for the first couple of blocks, but then it curves to the left and goes UP. At the top of the climb, Bryan read my mind and said, "Hey, should we go climb some crazy hills?" Why yes sir, I do concur.

So we hit up Fontanelle Hills neighborhood and did a double decker climb on which Randall and I used to do competitive hill attacks. Basically, you hit the bottom of the climb, one guy leads out at a fairly fast clip, then about a third of the way from the top, the 2nd guy comes around and attacks. Whoever get's to the top first is better, er, wins that round. We would do 6 repeats of these. I think I died a little each round. But it was fun!

So our group got to the top of the double decker and promptly fell over. Well not really. Big Puma had a slow leaking flat that was needing a change, so we waited around for that. At this point, we were pretty much out of time so we headed back toward home. Of course the only way to do so was still really hilly, but we made it ok. Mr. Miles let me know in a text later that we "normalized" out to 265 watts for the ride. My guess is that means averaged 265, which seems high, but I don't train with power, so I'm probably way off. It was painful though. Even after an easy spin this morning, my legs are still all toight and sore.

More coffee please!