Saturday, July 24, 2010

ORR Group Bike Ride

Today was my first group ride with OutRival Racing, actually it was ORR's first group ride that I am aware of period. In any case it was also my first group training ride as well. Yes, I have been training this long on my bike just riding solo!

We covered about 28.64 miles in 1:45, for a speed of almost 16.4 mph, which included slowing and waiting for traffic along the route. Today's ride was scheduled to be part of a recovery week for me and this ride worked out well for me. I did ride at a faster speed than I usually go, partly due to our route getting me out of the normal traffic I experience where I go on my own and partly due to the effect of other riders setting a pace that I do not drop down unintentionally. While I was inexperienced in group riding I did enjoy the camaraderie of other riders and look forward to future group training rides. While I was somewhat afraid of being well in the back of the pack, I actually finished closer to the front than the back of the group...so maybe I am a bit better of a rider than I had envisioned myself to be.

In addition, last night was the first get together for the the IM Texas Hometown Athletes Facebook group, meeting at The Goose's Acre in The Woodlands. While I thought I would either skip this or just pop in for a short bit, I hung around for quite awhile talking with many other triathletes who are also registered for IM Texas, some of whom came up from the other side of Houston. So I send out a bit of thanks to Coach Michelle for prodding me to attend.

Next up for me later tonight is a time trial swim workout...

Meanwhile I am 12 weeks out from the Longhorn Triathlon/Ironman 70.3 Austin and 43 weeks out from Ironman Texas with lots of training to be done before each of them.

2 comments:

Amanda said...

I think groups are good way to gauge how you're doing and find others with the same goals. Seems like you had a good ride and hopefully it will help you train and get even better.

Glad you had fun at the meetup too!

Heather and Jeff said...

Great ride Richard! I can't believe you had done all your riding alone to this point! You're going to have an awesome Longhorn this year!!