Ford Road - easy ride

Very easy L1 ride to warmup for this weekends RaceTheRide Stage Race.

Assuming the weather holds out ... And assuming that my legs hold out.... This will be a fairly hard weekend.

We roll out tomorrow at about 9:00AM for the RR, five laps of 12km and 250m of elevation gain. With about half of the climbing in two longish back-to-back climbs... which should take us Cat 4/5's close to six minutes... If I can stay at the front I'll work. But if I get dropped I'll soft pedal and save my energy for....

Showing up at about 8:00AM on Sunday, for the 22km TT with 250m of elevation gain. I did this in 33:45 on Wednesday in reasonable (aka dry but cool) weather... Forecast is for rain. With luck the rain will hold off till later in the day. If they do the same format as last year us Cat 4/5's will be first off... which may be advantageous if it means we get out before the rain...

Then after drying off and putting dry/warm clothing on (assuming the worst...) we move to downtown Maple Ridge (10 minutes away...) for the Crit at 12:45... It's close enough, I may just go home and grab a cappucino etc...

I didn't do the Crit (or the RR for that matter) last year. But I did go out and watch. It is flat with a few fun turns and one "tricky" bit where it uses a short stretch of pavement that is (I think) a bike path, not a road. Tricky in that you need to get on to it with a bit of a turn, it's narrow (compared to the rest of the course which is a normal urban road..) and then get off it with another turn.

At this point I have no pre-conceived ideas about how well I'll do. The RR course may favour my power profile (six minute climb...) but IFF I hammer that, then ITT will suffer the next day... And who knows *what* will be left for the Crit...

But I guess that's what doing a Stage Race is all about :-)