Great Day for a ride

Wow....another glorious day for a ride here in Tucson. 3.5hr was scheduled for today. We headed out along Spanish Trail for an hour with the support van, where we turned around and headed back towards to Mt Lemmon. Somehow we decided that we'd climb part of Mt Lemmon during the ride today. We got to the base of Mt Lemmon and started to climb. Simon and Kyle were going to climb to around 12 miles, with others turning around earlier. I figured I'd try to hang in as long as possible today. There were 6 of us on the front, until about 5' in, when James decided to pick the pace up, and we lost Kirsten. We kept on climbing, with the pace pretty intense for me. My HR monitor was beeping every so often as the pace picked up (HR over 180) but I was feeling good. When James picked the pace up, I heard Kyle yell "shit", and I was cursing James as well. Soon after that we lost David-James and it was Simon, Kyle, James and myself. James dropped off soon after, and I was praying that Simon and Kyle didn't have any tricks up their sleeves for me. I just concentrated on following a wheel in frotn of me. On we climbed, with Simon and Kyle occasionally getting out of the saddle and dropping a couple gears, and I did everything I could to hang on. David-James caught back up to us, and the van soon came up. Joel (head coach) told David-James and I to climb to just over 7 miles and then to head back to town....which was fine with me. Kyle and Simon continued on to around 11 miles or so.

I ended up climbing the 7 miles today 4.5 minutes faster than on Wed when we went the whole way...hopefully I can carry todays ride into the Mt Lemmon TT on Tuesday, when we go in reverse order based on our climbs from last Wednesday.

A nice hot tub and epsom salt followed the ride, and we are heading to downtown Tucson to sight-see this afternoon, and a team dinner later tonite. I think we might even break out a lil Texas Hold Em tourney tonite!!