Today I rode the 2009 Winter Stagecoach Century. You can’t ask for better weather, organization, and volunteers. A big thanks to Shadow Tour and all the good folks who manned the SAG stations.

The weather was phenomenal. A little cool in the morning, probably mid- to upper-50s, but not cold enough to warrant cold-weather gear. A slight headwind going out that wasn’t unbearable but provided a handy tailwind on the way back. No freak wind gusts to blow me off the road.

At 7:00, the team time trials were set loose. The plan was for individuals like me to start at 7:15, but the management was laid back about the rules and said you could start whenever you liked. I decided to wait until exactly 7:15 because I like rules and I like to follow them.

A bit of backstory here: I’ve been fascinated by Arlyn’s cycling blog. He’s currently training for racing, so he has recently focused his blog on his experiences with training. He’s a really good writer and his accounts of his rides are quite thrilling. He really takes you into the experience of the paceline and the psychology and physicality of training with his friends. He hails from North County, so while I don’t ride where he does, I know the geography. He often rides with a team called the Descenders and he mentioned in his blog that he wouldn’t be at this event, but that some guys from the Descenders would. Sure enough, at 7:00, I saw them in their blue jerseys taking off.

So I had this complete pie-in-the-sky goal: I wanted to catch the Descenders. This would be extremely difficult: they had the benefit of a paceline and a 15 minute head start. I would be on my own, except that something odd happened.

At some point early on, I passed a guy in an SDBC jersey. He was in pretty good shape and I knew he wouldn’t stand for being passed. Sure enough, a few minutes later, I had someone on my wheel. I didn’t know that he was SDBC Guy at the time, but he just kind of sat there in my draft for 10 miles or so. Having him in my draft made me want to push just that much harder. As we approached the first real hill of the day, he offered me his wheel. Which I thought was kind of funny, since I don’t need someone’s wheel to go uphill. I thought maybe he just wanted to smoke me on the hill after sucking my draft for so long. But I kept up with him on the hill, and lo and behold, there were the Descenders on the same hill. We both passed the Descenders!

After the hill, I gratefully sat on SDBC Guy’s wheel, enjoying the draft. Another hill came up, and we ended up side by side and had some nice conversation. Which is weird for me because I’m not all that talky, but we were talking about bikes and racing and events like this one, and we both had a lot to say. Near the crest of the hill, I got sporty and pushed hard over the top, then zoomed down the other side of the hill. At this point he was on my wheel again, and this is where we got off course.

There is only one stop sign on the route, where we take a right, followed by an immediate left turn, which I knew we had to take. I started motioning to go left, and he said, “No go straight, we don’t go left.” I said “Are you sure” and he sounded positive. I knew he was wrong, but we ended up going a quarter mile before he realized it too, and we turned around.

This gave the Descenders their chance to take the lead again, but I was hungry now and put down a fairly good pace, and we caught them again just before the 50-mile turnaround. At the turnaround there is a SAG station, at which we all made our first SAG stop, and this is where things got really weird.

I mentioned to one of the Descenders that I felt I knew them through Arlyn’s blog, and they started to joke about how they’re only known through Arlyn. As the conversation went on, I realized that I had stepped over the line from normality to Internet Stalker. It was really weird. I don’t personally know Arlyn except for what he writes, so I feel like I know him but in reality I don’t know him at all. Or the Descenders. The Internet can be a source of huge social awkwardness.

The Descenders offered to let me ride with them as they were taking off, so I wolfed down some energy junk, got on my bike, and pedaled hard to catch them. It was very nice of them to let me in, and I rode with them at the end of their paceline for the 5 or so miles until the SAG station that served lunch. I stopped for lunch, and they and SDBC Guy went on.

It turned out to be a great ride. The Descenders were cool guys and so was SDBC Guy (I never got his name). I killed my usual goal of 6 hours, and even Jim Knight, one of Shadow Tour’s founders, mentioned that I made good time. Total ride time was 5 hours, 25 minutes, and total time including stops was still under 6 hours. I left at 7:15 and finished at 1:11.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 17th, 2009 at 17:12 and is filed under Cycling, Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.