New Cycle Season!

Well, I'm at it again. I'm going back to Tahoe for another crack at America's Most Beautiful Bike Ride (aka Tahoe Century Bike Ride)! I've signed up for another Team in Training cycle season but this time with a twist. This time I am a volunteer mentor and will be doing my part to shepherd our participants. I've been assigned to the B3 team which is advanced intermediate. We will be riding in the 15-18 mph range.

The season officially started a few weeks ago with the Bike Expo. No riding but the Coaches and the rest of the Mentor team put together a little show and tell for the participants. There were several stations including

Bike Spin demonstraton with pace line signals;
Nutrition
Clothing
Bike Fit

The bike fit is particularly important to new riders. A couple of the local bike shops sent a few volunteers to help out and by the end of the day, everyone's saddle, pedals, shoe cleats, handlebars, etc were in the correct place. Can't ride a hundred miles with your handlebars in the wrong place.

Week Two: We were rained out. This was a big bummer as everyone was so eager to get on the road.

Week Three: We go a lucky break in the weather and took the Team on a spin around Fiesta Island. We took a stab of breaking into groups and did about 20 miles around the Island and practiced, pace line skills and hand signals.

Week Four : Today! We hit the road for 26 miles. The group had swelled in size from 3 the week before up to 9 riders. We had some people move up from the group they tried last week, a couple of guest riders and some new recruits. The first real road day is always a pretty interesting. It is the first time that we all ride together and there is a pretty diverse level of riding experience in the group. The pace lines are always a little loose as people get used to riding in proximity to other riders.

I'm riding with Coach Tom, who is a veteran Coach of more than a dozen cycle programs. He's teaching me a lot and let's me practice my mentoring skills where I try to give people the benefit of my experience and dole out my not so secret riding tips.

The Team did great today. By the end of the day, the pace lines had tightened up and the average speed had dramatically increased. We got up to over 18 MPH on the last leg of the trip. Impressive for a first session with a new group. We rolled into the parking lot in a beautifully tight single-file pace line already looking like a real team on the first day.

Afterwards, a few of us (Jack, Lori and me) did some more riding for "extra credit". I'm planning on riding the GranFondo, a local century next Sunday and haven't had an opportunity to ride long lately due to too much work, foul weather and a bad case of the flu. I needed to do some longer miles today to even have a chance of being ready.

We rode up Soledad Mountain, which is one ugly little climb. At the top, Lori decided to head back and Jack and I continued onwards, mostly up the coast. By the time it was all said and done, we had completed 70 miles of riding to go along with over 4,000 of climbing. I was starting to tire at the end of it, but definitely felt I could have gone the extra 30 to make the "century". That is encouraging news and makes me feel better about next week.

All and all, This was a very positive day for me. It was also very positive for Coach Jack, as this is his longest ride since his nasty crash of last season that put him out of commission for around 6 months. He's got the heart and courage of a lion. Very inspiring.

Signing off...