Ridin’ for charity

For the last 8 years, I’ve done the MS tour the Vineyard Charity Ride at the southern end of the state, Martha’s Vineyard. (My mom has MS so I do it for her). The last two years were cold (50F) with rain but today was absolutely perfect. It was warm (70F), not a cloud in the sky with a refreshing sea breeze at the shore.

I met up Brian, a 45+ CCB rider. He’s a good rider and we’ve ridden together for the last 4 years. With us as well were a couple of guys from Bike Barn (One who looked like a barn! 5’9″, 275ish with giant tree trunks for legs. Big guy but he could move!) And, there was a tri kid who didn’t like to work often but when he did, he did his part.

We started off strong from the beginning because we didn’t want to weed through the vast field of freds (aren’t we all though?) Our group secured our lead by mile 8 or so and by mile 12 we averaged 21.8mph. We thought that seemed kinda low but we stuck with it. We lost the Bike Barn guys at mile 30. They seemed to do more work than they should have, mostly sprinting for town lines and being waaay off the front from the excitement of being there on such a nice day.

At mile 30, the few hillls on MV are gone and the battle of the wind begins. Brian, tri guy and I took turns but they didn’t much like the wind so I was left to do say, 60% of the work for the next 10 miles. For 10 miles after that, I did 100% of the work. The other guys were tiring slightly.

They gave me the go ahead to break away from them starting about 10 miles out. Then I started passing guys from the 100k route (what?) Turns out a turn marker was blown away in the wind and people made wrong turns that cut off a significant portion of the ride, Then, with about 4 miles left, tri guy comes up behind me drafting a jeep. “Oh, you sneaky bastid!”, I say. “As long as you’re here, lets work together and finish strong.” So, we traded a couple of pulls and ended up being the only two to finish the slightly longer than 100K in under 3hrs. The massage afterward was AWESOME!

Time: 2:59:30
Distance: 102.6km / 63.75mi
Avg Speed: 21.25mph (a new personal record!)

dan