spokesNspin

Bicycle club rides are  a  good way to improve your riding skills and  socialize with people who have a common interest. 

Rides are classified by difficulty.  “D” rides are the slowest and shortest.  These are very very slow and are mostly about the social aspect.  “C”  rides are a decent pace and have a social aspect.  You have “B” rides and “A”  There are also double letter rides within each category, ”BB” rides or “AA”  for example which are just a little more difficult than the single letter ride.

On most rides of “B” or less it is generally assumed that the group will wait now and then for slower riders.  They might also have a sweeper who stays at the end to ensure everyone is there.  “A” rides are for die hards and have a take no prisoners approach.  You keep up or get dropped.

I generally go on rides anywhere from “C” to “BB”.  It just depends on what I am in the mood for.

A few weeks ago I decided to go on a “C” ride.  It was in D.C. and was with a different group than I normally ride with.  I thought it would interesting to see some new areas.

It was a strange club ride.  The leader will never win Miss Congeniality that is for sure.  She pretty much handed out a cue sheet and left people to themselves.  Cue sheets help but can also be very difficult to follow.  We were in D.C. following roads and bike paths so there were lots of turns.  It was hard to follow.

There were also many difficult hills that were never mentioned in the ride notice.

We were losing people right and left.  Riders would tell the leader that we had lost people and she would just kind of shrug it off.

There was a husband/wife couple riding who bickered for much of the ride. Very unpleasant.  He was basically a jerk and criticized everything about how his wife was riding.

We stopped for lunch at a food co-op.   I went in to fill my water bottle and when I came out the leader had taken the group and left.  Amazing!

I was darn lucky I was able to catch them.  I asked my riding partner why she didn’t say something.  She said she knew that if she got dropped she would never catch up and figured I had a better chance than she did.  Can’t blame her for that.

I did see some new sites which is what I wanted.  Along the way we stopped at Fort Stevens.  They were having a reenactment of a civil war battle that took place there in July 1864.  President Lincoln came out during the battle to observe and came under fire.  It  was supposedly only one of two times that a sitting president has come under direct enemy fire.

Here are some pics from the event.

The military band was using period instruments.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 29th, 2009 at 8:45 am and is filed under Bicycling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.