Five of us (ex or future) TNT-ers met up to ride the Woodside-Portola Valley loop again last Saturday morning. It was a gorgeous day, and everyone was excited to be out, in the sun, and back on bikes. Or at least they seemed to be. I suppose it’s possible that half of them felt like crap and wanted to go back to bed… but no one told me.
We rolled out shortly after 10 and quickly arrived at the first climb. I was feeling really good at the start and attacked the “hill” in my front middle chain ring. I powered to the top only to find that my Garmin was completely failing (not recording cadence or heart rate), and had to stop and spend a couple minutes both waiting for everyone to catch up and trying to fix my gear. As it turns out, we only managed to fix half of the problem… and then I forgot to turn it back on for a couple miles, so my data is utterly borked this week. After a small snafu in which I thought I dropped my chain after the descent (I actually just dropped two rings), the ride continued without much drama.
The rest of the loop wasn’t hugely exciting… at least not in a storytelling kind of way. I started the ride feeling strong, and despite trying to burn off the energy by attacking some baby climbs, was restless for most of the ride ride. I felt fast (and darted ahead of the group a few times), but still had to make a game of chasing Hilton – who was definitely kicking my tail. The group ended up spread out a good bit for most of the ride, meeting up every few miles to refuel, check the route sheet, and chat a bit. Despite a good number of breaks, our overall finish time was about the same as the week before. My average moving time was actually up, although my missing data log doesn’t show it very well.
We all hit the Safeway parking lot just before noon and decided that we’d earned a good brunch reward. With belgian waffles as a requirement (per Julie), we quickly settled on Mike’s Cafe as the location of choice. I think everyone enjoyed the chance to eat food mostly guilt free and attacked the breakfast fare with gusto. I jumped on the belgian waffles bandwagon (plus bacon) and thoroughly enjoyed the food. And the company. But mostly the food… Hey! I worked hard!!
Tail Tales from Cycle Training 
No cadence for the whole ride? You have probably figured this out by now, but I have found that if rear wheel magnet slips out of alignment (or falls off) the separate cadence magnets have no effect.
You are exactly correct! 🙂 I completely spaced when setting up the Garmin and didn’t move my pedal button with the rest of the gear, so all my data so far is missing cadence. DOH!
I got the button on for Sunday’s ride this week… but the sensor was too far away, so I’m STILL lacking the information. Should have it for this week though, since I *finally* figured out the problem (and actually have the tools on hand to fix it).