St. Patricks Day Ride

The 2008 St Patty's Day ride from the Trek store in North Raleigh was a good day for me. The pace was pretty fast from the start so my initial impression was that I would be struggling to hang on all day. It was a 100 km ride so I knew that it would only be about three hours of suffering. So my strategy was just to hung on for the first hour and hope that things would mellow. Then I would just sit on for the last two hours and try to survive the run up Six Forks and Durant roads. The route was sort of standard Gyro fare including such favorites as Mt Vernon Church, Olive Chapel, Kemp, and the last climb up Durant. After the first 15 minutes I was feeling pretty good. I decided to go for it and took the first sprint point on Olive Chapel. It was only me and another Gyro and I am not sure how hard he was trying. We skipped the first few rest stops and the pace was a nice steady 19.9 mph for the first hour. The group thinned out a bit and by the last 10 miles or so. We had about 20 people left. We headed back to the Trek Store via Olive Chapel and I started to feel the burn a bit. I was woking on being as efficient as possible. I got near the front on Leesville Rd and it looked like I was going to have to take a pull but we made a left turn and the group reorged putting back in the middle somewhere. We got to Mt. Vernon and I was really dreading the climb up but there was a rest stop at the top and I knew the main group was planning to stop since it was the last one. I made it up the climb saving as much energy as possible and to my dismay there was no reststop there. We pressed on and the group got a little smaller. We made a right on six forks and there were two fairly steep climbs and I managed to stay in contact with the main group which was down to about 12 people by then. I started to move forward on the last climb up Durant and the last section before the store was flat and suited me fine given my weight and height. I got on the front but everyone was glued right to my wheel so I dropped back a bit to save some energy. With about 1 mile to go the speed really kicked up and we were streched out. The run up to the store was coming fast and at about the last 100 meter I kicked up to about 14 on the back and sprinted with everything I had. No one was near me when I cossed the line first. All in all it was a good day and I look forward to doing some more rides with the Gyro's up in North Raleigh.