Herein lies the problem. I have no top end power, and do not train for top end power or speed. I can ride tempo for hours, but sprinting? Not so much. This usually leads to me cramping in races as I get out of my comfort zone early and my golgi receptors start pitching fit about 2 hours later.
Well, to combat this lack of top end training I have taken to the road, and to be real honest it has not sucked as back as I thought it would.
I have had to go through a couple of of differnet groups to find one that I am comfortable with, and it never ceases to make me chuckle when I watch the dynamics of some of these groups. One of the things that really bothered me though was the complete disregard that cyclists here in the Twin Cities have for stop signs, and traffic laws in general. Don't get me wrong, I have been guilty of the ol' rolling stop every once in a while, but this is ridiculous.
I got yelled at by one group (of old people.... that I had been pulling) when I did not just blow through a stop sign. The ironic thing was that before the ride the group leader talked about how another group had gotten pulled over by a sheriffs deputy for running stop signs the week before. I rolled my eyes and bailed on them the first chance I got.
This morning I did a shop ride out of the Omnium Bike shop. The route was pretty tame, but they have a circuit set up at the furthest point on the route, so we had 3 different race simulations......and it was kind of fun. There was only about a dozen of us so everybody was jumping at every move. And it was Fast!
I don't have a ton of road experience to compare it to, but there were several times that 46:11 was just not enough to hang on. Road races in KS were just not that exciting (hey lets ride in a big, flat square for 30 miles!). I can now see why folks might like road racing. I still think that it's lame, but less than I did before.
Maybe I will purge some other stuff to help fund my next bike.
