Half-century Star-gazing

Got back from my longest ride ever a couple hours ago: 50 miles. A half-century. Nice.

I went out for an easy training ride with my buddy Dave K., who’ll be riding the Tierra Bella in April with me. I drove up to his place in Sunnyvale and we got ready to head out on a low-key ride up to Palo Alto, then off to Woodside, Canada Road, back through Portola Valley and return to Sunnyvale. Dave was riding his well-maintained LeMond bike, but I noticed something had changed since the last time I saw it: all the “LeMond” stickers were missing. “Yeah, I decided to pull ‘em off ’cause he’s such a whiner.” I thought this was pretty funny as I’d read an article in the Mercury News about LeMond this morning and been debating it with my wife. If everything he says in the story is true, then I think he’s got good reason to complain… but even so it comes off sounding a bit like sour grapes either way.

Dave and I set out on our ride and I was joking about how slow we were going. My heart rate was far below what it is on my normal rides, where I’m trying to get into the LT zone as much as possible. We were just tooling along, very casual, but as this ride would cover 10 miles more than I’d ever done in my life, I wasn’t complaining. It was very civilized. It was a nice day and there were TONS of people out riding. We got up to Stanford and turned onto Sand Hill Road and started climbing our first semi-existent hill. Dave was joking how I was going to drop him like a rock, so I pulled off at an intersection and let him pass me; then in a total goober-moment I bent low over the handlebars like I was time-trialing and zipped right past him. Immediately after this goofball maneuver I was passed by 2 pro cyclists from a US domestic team (Bissel) and then just after that another pro goes by on a time-trial bike that had to have cost ~$10k. :-0

Yeah, the Tour of California was starting tomorrow at Stanford, so naturally all the pro teams were out on their warm-up rides. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to us that we might see some pros during our ride, but boy, did we ever! Moments after these 3 pros rode past us, Team Highroad came down Sand Hill going the other way, joined with Team Jelly Belly. George Hincapie is on the Highroad team, but I didn’t spot him in the pack of 20+ riders. They went by too fast. A little farther up the road we saw some riders from Webcor (a club/team although they’re not listed in the teams racing), and then Saunier Duval.

We got to a stopsign in Woodside and we can see coming up the hill, Team Quick-Step. We wait a couple seconds and Tom Boonen and Paolo Bettini in his World Champion jersey ride right by us. Further down the road we saw Team BMC drafting really close behind their team car. REALLY close. It looked pretty sketchy, but they also looked like they knew what they were doing. After them came the Rock Racing Team. A bit later an Astana rider came TTing down the road and then just a little ways behind him was a group of Astana riders and their team car. They were going slow enough that I waved to them from across the road and shouted, “good luck!” I got a quick glimpse at the driver of the team car and it sure looked like Johan Bruyneel to me. We saw a few other pros here and there during the ride, but MAN. How cool was that!? It was funny as all the other people riding these roads kept looking at each other to see if they were a pro warming up or another weekend rider. I was definitely rubber-necking too. Much more fun than I was expecting!

The time trial is tomorrow. I may head up there to watch some of it. I’ll have to bring my camera along as I hear these blogs are supposed to have pictures in them to keep in interesting.

The ride itself went fine. Nice and easy. Started feeling it in the legs about 43 miles in or so, just a little fatigue, nothing serious. We did 50 miles on the nose with 2200+ feet of climbing, which was a lot more than I thought it would be as most of the climbs were pretty gentle. Nothing over… 6%. 3 hours 2o minutes of cruising, talking about pro cycling, the Death Ride and Star-gazing. Pretty good for my first half-century!