Meridian Take-1

Yesterday afternoon marked my return to the oft maligned, bandit training "race" known as Meridian. There are potholes, expansion joints, traffic lights that always seem to change as you approach, suburbanites leaving work, as well as an occasional rider who is nothing less than a threat to themselves and others.

It seems like it takes much longer to get ready to leave the house these days and I feel like I have to time trial my way to group rides in fear of getting there late. I forgot I had to switch brake pads on the new bike because it came with carbon specific pads for the new wheels and I like being able to stop when I have to. I walked the dog, switched pads as quickly as possible, got dressed, and got out the door with about an hour to get from my house to Meridian.

The new bike is great! It is pretty much the same geometry wise as the old bike so far as I can tell, but the carbon layup is slightly different resulting in the low weight previously mentioned and stiffness in all the places where stiffness is good.

I made it down to Meridian in about 45 minutes which left me enough time to dump my stuff in Kendall's car (riding with a messenger bag is cool and all) and notice how much windier it had gotten.

My MO for Meridian is to attack, recover, and repeat. I have no desire to sit in. People are sometimes squirrelly and it is a training ride, might as well get as much out of it as I can. I sat in for lap one and then rolled off the front with Kendall to another pair slightly up the road, nothing doing. I gave it another go on lap three and found myself alone with a pretty good gap but a lot of wind. I kept up the effort, trying to maintain the gap but no blow up in the hopes that somebody would bridge. After a lap or so, I was joined by two more and we got to work. I tried to make my pulls as big as possible for the sake of staying away and because you get out what you put in. By the end we had about a half a lap gap. I tried to dump the others prior to the finish, but that didn't work so much and I didn't have enough left to come around, no intergalactic cycling championship points for me.

Pinkerton and I headed out for some much needed food at Damascus Grill in Littleton with a stop at Stevenson Porsche to visit the Brenner and see what kinds of crazy cars they had sitting around. Even with the onset of darkness towards the end of the ride, it was preferable to sitting on the trainer.