Phat Tuesday, Ride 1

First Group Ride of the Year

Ready or not, here we go. I figured I had gotten enough miles under my belt so far this season that I wouldn't be sucking too much wind on fast paced group rides such as this. "Ya gotta start sometime!"

I was doing pretty good. I focused on trying not to push myself too hard and just make sure I had enough energy to stay with the group. I was doing "OK" until about mile 5.

Chain Derailment

At mile 5 my chain derailed. I stopped. Quickly popped the chain back on, and tried to catch up with the group. No such luck.

After about a half mile, the lead group disappears...

Eventually, I saw my neighbor, Ed, in the distance up ahead of me. He had gotten himself a Garmin Edge 305 GPS bike computer. I saw him, but I couldn't close the gap. It turns out that we were both averaging 17.0 mph. You can see how I tried to catch him via MotionBased.com's (soon to be Garmin Connect) Dot Race feature: Me and Ed (NOTE: IE only!). I hope they keep this feature when the switch over is made.

I saw a number of other riders with the same, or similar, device. however, I don't know if they upload their data. It would be cool if they did. At least I think it would be cool...

Finish Behind Some Big Guys

In the last 2 miles of the ride, I linked up with a couple of, how shall I say, "larger framed" and "non skinny" riders. They really powered through the last two miles and it was all I could do to hang onto their wheel. In the last mile we were averaging 21.2 mph! A nice way to finish :-)

Pizza

While sitting in the parking lot after the ride I called and ordered a pizza from Imperial Pizza in Franklin. It was one of the few pizza places in Franklin we haven't tried and they claim to have "New York-style" pizza. It was also on the way home. Well, their pizza wasn't bad, but it wasn't "NY Style" pizza. Why is it so hard to find really good, (or just half-way good), pizza in Massachusetts? Papa Gino's should not be the best tasting pizza around. That's just wrong!

Short Norfolk Loop, Evening Ride

A Quick Evening Ride

After two days of 30 mile rides each, I should probably have rested this evening. but as I was driving home, the weather was too nice and too tempting to pass up. Not to mention that my wife and kids are out of town visiting with my in-laws, leaving me a bachelor until Wednesday.

I decided to just do a quick, 13 mile loop through Norfolk since the sun was still setting a little too early for a longer evening ride. I had done this ride earlier in the month (Short Norfolk Loop, Eventually...), but with much different weather.

Benchmarking...

the cool thing about posting your rides, particularly your benchmark rides, on Motionbased.com (soon to me My Garmin) is that you can run a "Dot Race" and compare rides.

Check it out: Short Norfolk Loop: Dot Race
(NOTE: The necessary plug-in, (Adobe SVG Viewer), works in Internet Explorer only.)

Tomorrow night I will try and join up with the Phat Tuesday ride here in Franklin.

Fairhope Dot Race

I was just reviewing my rides on Motionbased.com and checked to see if anybody else was riding at the same time. It turns out that on Thursday, the FAST RIDE day, another person in the group had a GPS device and was tracking the ride. Now the cool thing about that is anybody can use Motionbased.com's Dot Race feature and see how I fared against the other rider.

The "Dot Race"

Thursday's "Fast Ride" Dot Race. - You can only view this in IE only and you need the Adobe's SVG Player Plugin. More about how Motionbased.com uses this plug-in on their Wiki.

Be sure to check off the "Real Time" check box and click on Race to restart the race and see us riding together. You can also see the two times I got dropped. I think I held up pretty well for the most part ;-)

Cool Stuff...

Animal Farm - 30 Mile GPS Track & Dot Race

I wasn't the only one tracking this past Sunday's ride with a GPS. I found another rider who tracked the 30 mile route and uploaded it to Motionbased.com

• NBW ride Uxbridge - The 30 mile track by a person with a Motionbased UserName of 'jussaume'.

If you bring up both of our tracks you can run a "dot race", (or just 'Click Here' to launch the 'dot race'). You can see that we were right next to each other at one point. It also looks like he had a "Mechanical Issue" just north of downtown Grafton. He stopped for 15 minutes in a spot that had no food services of any kind, so I can only assume it was a "Mechanical" stop.