May 24th Rides

[Triskeliongirl]

Well usually my rides are usually pretty uneventful, but today we had a couple exciting things happen on our club ride.

I've gotten stronger since I got my cervelo, so I decided that today is the day I try ride with a faster peer group. I actually went out 10 minutes early to warm up, since this is one of those rides that starts with a climb, and I always do better if I am warmed up. My idea was to go out at an easy pace on my own, and then hop on the first group that rides by that I could hang with. I knew I couldn't hang with our fastest men, but was hoping to ride with the second string men. So, at a certain point the fast men whoosh by, and no, on a climb there was no point to jump on that train, even though they did have some guys I knew would get dropped soon and I might be able to hang with.

Next, I notice a guy barrel down a descent in the middle of the road (literally at the midline) riding like he is Danielo DeLuco or Paulo Salvodelli on a car free race course. Hello? In the real world we need to share the road with cars, and this isn't a place to be screwing around with motorists since there is already a lot of tension between cyclists and motorists in this part of texas (ride is Helotes to Bourne in the TX Hill Country). I see a truck approaching and I yell 'car back, cyclists move right' but he stays right there, so the truck had to veer almost completely into the lane for oncoming traffic to avoid hitting him, or his bud next to him in the middle of the lane. At the bottom of the hill they stopped to regroup, riding with 3 young fit women and two less fit men. I said to him, hey, that was close, you need to be more careful........and he says, yeh, I know so many b***** out here. I proceeded to explain why in this situation he was in the wrong, but it went on deaf ears.

I then proceed up the next climb (toutant) with the group, and the women start gaining some distance on the guys (the fellow riding in the middle of the road was also quite overweight). One of the women pulls up next to me, and says, those two have been riding like jerks, hop on and lets lose these losers, and we proceeded to really push hard up the climb. Now, I know you guys that race do this all the time, but I never intentionally tried to ride someone off my wheel. BOY WAS THAT FUN!!!

When I got in, I met up with my husband and the rest of the fast men. They did encounter a real scary fellow out there today. A guy in a truck had the nerve to intentionally ride into their peleton, and hit one of their riders. He was OK, but they called the police and somehow managed to keep the driver there until they came. Cops show up, identified themselves as cyclists, and said they were prepared to charge the driver with aggravated assault with a lethal weapon if the guy that was hit was prepared to press charges. He said absolutely, and the guy pleaded no contest (he was almost bragging to the cops about what he did). I think this fellow has no clue how much trouble he is in (I just learned the penalty in texas for this is 8-10 years). We have a lot of problems with guys like this in south texas, but it is very reassuring to see the police starting to take our side, heck they ARE US, but so glad none of my husband's riding buds were hurt either.

So, a bit more excitement than usual in the texas hill country today.