Being busy with building my wood shed, have not a lot of time / energy to ride my bike. Also needed to taper for D2R2 on Saturday.
But I did do the NCC CX training. Legs felt very fatigued still from the big ride the Saturday before. But David and I were able to squeeze 3 loops out of it before calling it a day.
This week was the week of D2R2. Hence Friday Paula and I rode out to Deerfield to the D2R2 start to participate in the pre-party. Saw a bunch friends, had a beer(s) and cheese pasta. Also had a visit to Neil's van at the campsite. We had to rush back home as the sun starts setting earlier.
Saturday morning Mike, John and I rode to the D2R2 start. We were going to do the mystery ride.
Like last year it headed north-west into Vermont. We picked up Jason and Christian at the start. We headed out towards Turners falls. On one of the jeep tracks I had a little mishap when I was looking at my bike computer and got stuck in a rut and lost control. Just a minor knee scrape.
Things got a spicy when the day continued and heated up. It was hot day. So when Christian, John and Jason decided to add some bonus tracks, Mike and I declined and preserve our energy for the official route.
This section of the route was beautiful and we ran into Jeff who was doing a different route. Shortly after we stopped for donuts that a family that loved along the route was handing out.
Even before the lunchstop things got hard (hot) and once we were in Vermont we were low on water. In Withingham we got iced water from a nice family which helped and the short stop allowed us to recover. Soon John, Jason and Christan showed up here too.
With still a decent amount of riding Mike, Christian and I rode together to the lunch stop. At the lunch stop we saw John and Jason again. I ran into bunch of other folks like the Pennsylvanian randonneurs.
I also met Sandy, who is the brains behind D2R2, and chatted for a bit. After lunch Mike decided to ride a shorter route back to the finish. Christian and I rode on and worked hard with the last tough climbs on East rd and Smith.
When we hit Ashfield there was another waterstop. We stopped for some mellon and top of our water bottles. Now in the home stretch, still a few little climbs such as Bullit and Main Poland. But from here it was almost all downhill.
When descending Boyden, a turkey provided some spectacle as instead of just running into the field kept running in from of me and then taking off like a B-52 bomber and after flying ahead of me for a few seconds disappearing into the forest.
We finished in 11 hours and 101 miles and 11.5k feet of climbing. TSS was 335, the hardest ride of the year. Now it was time to socialize, lots of folks and doing different rides. Paula, Sandra and Carolyn did the river ride and had a blast. Beer tasted good and there was plenty of food. There were lots of hot-dogs eaten.
Sunday was a rest day!!! Well I did volunteer to help cleanup the D2R2. We basically had to break down all the fencing and gather the cones that had been setup for the event. After 3 hours we were done, sooner than expected.
This week on Veloviewer
