Last SDBC (San Diego Bicycle Club) ride, for a while.

It's always nice to get compliments.

Over the past few months I've been getting more and more during my SDBC Saturday "B" group rides. It's been a fun few months doing that ride. I know it's not the "A" ride, but I don't care.

I've been having fun being off the front and in the mix on the race around stud loop and in the sprints before stopping at Java Depot.

I really haven't made any friends doing this ride, but I mainly keep to myself, so it's not a huge surprise. I have made a couple of acquaintances, guys that I talk to on the ride because we usually find ourselves in the same spots in the group at certain points in the ride.

I did what I think is my last SDBC ride 3 Saturdays ago. Over the past 2 months I think I've been in the best cycling form of my life. In our little "B" group sprint I was consistently coming in 2nd. I guess I was "getting noticed" a little bit because one day early in the ride one of the "B" ride matriarchs (a lady who races and is probably 5-10 years older than me) asked if I was going to win the sprint for her that day. Is that flirting? Anyway, I didn't win (but came in 2nd). And yes, I had to relay that story to Cezanne. She got a kick out of it.

So, long story short, in my last SDBC ride I lead the group up the climb before stud loop, was in the lead group around stud loop, bridged solo about 1/4 mile up to a lone breakaway on the winding El Camino Del Norte stretch, rested for a minute, then passed the lone breakaway and finished that stretch (which is a mini-race/sprint) in first. Then I was able to win the main sprint before Java Depot with enough room to look back 3 times to see if anyone was close. Finally!

Good times. Now I have to keep it going over the Washington D.C. winter and see what happens next year.



Above is a photo of what it looks like on Saturday around 10:30am outside of Java Depot in Solana Beach. Yeah, bikes occassionally fall over or someone knocks them over.


Cezanne and I have a storage unit since our place is about 450-500 sq ft. One of the big projects before we move was to go through everything in the storage unit and separate it into these groups: (1) give to Goodwill (2) throw away (3) shred and (4) keep.

We found my old P3 flight helmet which Cezanne put on. I couldn't resist taking a pic. I haven't worn that thing in over 5 years. We put the helmet in the "shred" category, but it broke the shredder (hahahaaaaahhaa! funny joke!)

Oh yeah!!!!!!! Look at that aero triathlon bike! :) That's a joke because most of the frame is square, not aero at all! But, I had to set it up to be as aerodynamic as possible, which meant (besides putting the Zipp 404 wheel set on) that I had to be as aero as possible. So I slapped some clip-on TT bars on, put my triathlon saddle on, and adjusted the seatpost up about 1/2 an inch and moved the seat forward from where my normal one usually is.

I'll have another blog post on the Mission Bay Triathlon when we get the full results, but I wanted to post this pic and say that I did a "relay" for this triathlon with Mike Francis doing the 500 meter swim, me doing the 15k bike and Ricardo Roman doing the 5k run. It was a "sprint" triathlon, the shortest they have, but I hate swimming and am not a big fan of running, so relay it was.

It was a ton of fun. We came in 4th out of the Male relays and 36th overall out of about 1500 participants. But to be fair, we did the relay, so we could go all out in our event and not worry about the other 2. We finished in 58:10. The individual results (for each leg) are supposed to be out by Wednesday.

Being the geek that I am I looked at last year's fastest bike time. It was 26:38 and by one of the male relays. The top 2 Elite male finishers did the bike in 27:45 and 27:46 to give them the 2nd and 3rd fastest bike of last year's triathlon. I did the ride this morning in 27:43, so we'll see how good that is.

I wound up averaging 22.3 mph and a 175 bpm heartrate for the ride, which I think is pretty good (especially with no warm-up). I had to ease off after the first third because there was a point about 10 minutes in when I realized that if I kept up the same intensity, I was going to eventually throw up (before the finish line). Nice. So I had to ease off a little.

More details and overall bike ranking to come on Wednesday hopefully.