episode 002 : goons

BTW... no one got that I always have bad facial hair, so when I showed up to the bad facial hair contest cleanly shaved, I was totally being ironic. totally.

I spent the last couple of days in DC for a conference for work. The conference was very good. I learned a lot. Coming off of a good weekend of riding, I was looking forward to riding with Wes, and Hardy on a local group ride lovingly called the goon ride.

Essentially, I got my doors blown off. I will admit, I was a little terrified plowing through traffic through Rockcreek Park. The ride was super fast, and I was sitting in playing it smart. Near the front but not doing any work. Keeping my nose out of the wind. We got to the first big climb, which had a couple of switch backs. I looked around and there was 20 or so folks around me, so I felt pretty good about my chances to get over the top. I was wrong.

Two corners later, I looked and everyone was gone. There was me, some green kit dude, a harley dude, and Hardy. 40 minutes in and I was dropped. Shit, I suck.

Wes waited for us as we put together a nice 3 man rotation at around 25ish to head home. Oh, I got to do the climb up by the Mormon Church, which hurt badly too.
That climb was cool to me because, when I was kid going to visit my grandmother in Bethesda, my brothers and I would have a competition to see who could see the "castle" first. It was a sign that we were almost at Grandma's house. It was pretty awesome to ride by there, brought back some good memories.

Finally, we finished up and we got to hang out with our new teammate Arley for a bit and shoot the shit.

That was fun night, and a way to level out the ego a bit. Wow. I'm really not that fast.

I hope I get another chance to try and finish the goon ride some time.

In the above picture I am pinching Auer's ass.


Thanks to Regan, Savanna and Wes for taking me in for the past couple of days.

respect
fm

MASS Relay pictures stolen from singlespeeder.smugmug.com