Picnic with a Bike Ride to Make People Hungry

Saturday was a fun road trip to a bike ride and picnic near the Quabbin Reservoir organized by Rapha Gentleman race teammate Todd and his wife, Sue.

Dena, super woman endurance rider, and I headed out of town at 7:30am with bikes and bags of gear. It was oh-so-reminiscent of days of old when the car was packed up [far too early] with teammate or friend to head to a race 1-5 hours away. Fun times & always nice (vs awful during commuting, for example) experience in a car.

My phone and camera ended up being left in my car as I had too much time to get ready. So I doddled and never really focused on the task at hand until we were riding and I realized my mistake.

Everything everyone said about the hills is so true - you go up for 60 miles in rolling fashion (so not steady-state up, but constantly shifting while going up, the road looks flat, yet it's still going up...) Oh yeah, the last 20 zipped by in what felt like 2 minutes as they were all down (thank goodness!) Wait a second, there were hills and a few small mountains, but the guys had a different definition of what these were. I heard many lies told out there. "Just one more little hill coming..." So why was I earnestly wishing for a crank with a little itty bitty cog on it, then? 

Long story short, it was an awesome (HARD) ride, but with stops for food (carrot cake, a fine energy snack) and a jovial bunch of riders, it was a fine day. The ride was one I was really in need of since I hadn't been on a bike for awhile and was starting to wonder if I could do it. Having a day when I could just be one of the bunch and an unknown entity was a level of relaxation I needed. I wanted to ride my bike and feel it fly over the road, not talk about its components. The other riders and I didn't even swap names until we were done with the ride for the most part.

And after the ride, there was chili - vegetarian chili - and an enormous spread of food so tasty, I could understand how this was billed as a picnic that just happened to have a ride prior to it. Very hospitable hosts, a Saturday circumnavigating the Quabbin (which we only got a little glance at during the ride, so it really wasn't the point of anything, just a big obstacle to ride around), good people, food and fun adventure...something that I'm glad to have taken the day to experience.