Day 56: Bicycle Place 8:30 A.M. Race-Ride

I have to start this blog off with a shout out to my man Matias Palavecino. Without him I doubt today's riding would have gone anywhere near as well as it did. I called him up last night and asked him if he would be up for riding out from Mt. Vernon Trail to Silver Springs, MD to meet up with the 8:30 ride @ The Bicycle Place, a nice, friendly and supportive shop. He was happy to come with me, and I was even happier that he was willing because I'm not even sure if I ever would have made it to the shop because I had absolutely no idea how to get there. So Matias, thanks for keeping the motivation in me to get out there and do this ride.

Before I get into the details, here is the ride I ended up doing: Bicycle Place 8:30AM Ride + Extra Mileage by darionfleming at Garmin Connect - Details

The 8:30 ride is only like 72 kilometers (45 miles) plus the extra to and from my house and the shop which is about another 30km (18mi) and I definitely wanted to get more than 100 kilometers in on the bike today. So, I did almost another 30km of easy cool down riding where there was a lot of start and stop because I visited a couple places on the way.
My goal was originally to do 150km but to be honest I think my mind was a little ahead of my body, and I think that would have been probably a bit too much to handle, especially at the pace that I was going for over 70km of the ride. So, as the stats from the Garmin say I ended up with almost 130km and about 4 and 1 half hours on the bike.

I ended up winning the Sprint on the 30-man 8:30 ride which was definitely exciting, and I pulled on most of the flat, quick-paced riding that we did. For some reason my legs were not at all with me on the hills today and I got dropped on almost every single one, but they were definitely present on the flat sprints. I'm really happy with the results from the ride, as Ice Cube says, "Today was [definitely] a Good Day."

The Bicycle Place Shop. Take a visit sometime! -- 8313 Grubb Road Silver Spring, MD 20910 (301.588.6160)