My early morning feelings of foreboding were not wrong. Although I am fine on the flat and downhills, as soon as we hit a hill, I drop back. Several occasions we lose sight of the group completely. Three or four times the group stops to wait until everyone is caught up and I am clearly quite far behind. Stuart tries to tell me that this is not the case, but I'm pretty sure it is. He also helped me up the hills again, one hand on my back pushing as we both cycled along. I've no idea how he manages this, but I'm very glad that he did.
Fortunately, there are people in the group who make sure we don't miss any key turns for which I am very grateful, but I am also thoroughly dispirited that I am not keeping up. I tell Stuart that this might be my last club ride, we shall see.
Happily, the tea stop was at one of the nicest places we have had chance to visit. A gorgeous tea room on a lovely village green.
It was good to have a pot of tea, homemade cakes and a nice natter. I really enjoy this part of the group ride, but can I improve my riding enough so that I am not holding people up? I don't know.
I felt so bad about being last all the time that Stuart and I decide to ride home by ourselves. The route was fabulous and I was looking forward to riding it at my own pace on the way back. We waved off the rest of the group and then had a second cup of tea.
Stuart's garmin had recorded the route out, so we saved this as a course in his garmin planning to follow it all the way home. This was quite tricky as it thought we should be going A to B, whereas we wanted to ride B to A. We need to find a way to reverse the route to create a new map home. Despite being told to do a u turn most of the way home we did not get lost and we had time to appreciate the beautiful countryside on the way home.
I love this type of riding, but I need to get much fitter, and maybe some more early nights. Now I'm really tired.
No comments:
Post a Comment