Saturdays by Denis Osowski
Dear Freewheelers:
As you all know, RATL is coming up in 5 weeks and thanks to the efforts of Ted Ingraham we will have the opportunity to ride the RATL course in practice for the next few weeks.
Rides will be on Saturday, and if all goes well, every Saturday from this one till the start of RATL.
Ted has secured for us a special use permit to use the park for this purpose. This first week is going to be a tester week to see if the park actually lets us ride there. As some of you know, we have had problems doing this in the past but we go forth undaunted: we are going to try again.
We will meet at 10:00 am at Munroe Falls Metro Park for about 1 to 1½ hours of hard riding on the course. First we'll ride some pacelines for 15 minutes or so of warm up. Then we have an exercise planned that will involve a race scenario where we will start a small group with a 20 second gap or so and then chase them down from the "peleton" with individual riders or pairs of riders who will attempt to bridge across and contribute the breakaway. The idea is that everyone will get a chance to try a different role each scenario. Theoretically we will do this 5 times for 5 laps each. We'll see how that formula works out.
The objectives will be to get some race effort work done, do some close quarters riding, and (re)familiarize ourselves on our home field race course.
It's supposed to be cold so bundle up; this thing goes no matter the temperature. However, if you see white or wet stuff on the ground Saturday morning...well, just hit the snooze button and stay where you are!