For my first "real" ride since I came back home, I had a choice between a short lazy cruise with the club, or a ride with another group that I knew would kill me. Guess which one I chose.

I'm not going to get stronger or get my hill legs back by cruising. So I checked it out with a couple of the stronger riders ahead of time and they assured me I'd be welcome.

It didn't help that my front derailleur started acting up again, so that I had to climb the toughest hills of the day in my 39x25. Once we finally reached the first stop sign, another tweak got it shifting properly again, but I'm mystified as to what's causing it. By the time we hit the lunch break with almost 3,000 feet of climbing already under our legs, I was ready to take a somewhat flatter route the rest of the way.

Just after the break, two State Patrol cars passed us, and we soon reached the scene of an accident. A mini-van was mostly upside down against a light pole. One of the other riders overheard a bystander telling the cop, "I yelled at him to stop, but he just took of running." I don't know whether he meant the van driver, or if there was someone else involved - there was a Kawasaki Mule parked by the side of the road as well, maybe it was in the road when the van came around? The ambulance and fire truck were already on scene, but it didn't look like they were doing anything. I sure hope no one was badly hurt.

When I split off five or six miles later, I was joined by one of the riders I'd exchanged emails with (just keeping me company really, but he did say his legs were kind of fried from hill repeats yesterday), and another rider who said he was having IT band twinges and wanted to take it easy. 61 miles, 4400 feet of climbing. It would take about 1,000 Florida miles to get that much elevation gain. So I don't feel too bad about getting my *ss kicked.

I am really bummed because my Garmin corrupted the history file and so I have nothing to show for it in my training logs except for the data summary I could salvage and manually enter into SportTracks. I just re-read the release notes to the firmware update they released last week and it was supposed to correct a problem of corrupt history files.