This weekend marks for the first time in 5 weeks that I did not have a race to attend.  This also means that I was able to ride on our weekly Sunday team ride, something that I have not been able to do since December.  But before I get into my training from the weekend, I have some good news to share.  The Tour of California just announced the race route for this years race in May and one of the stages passes right near our house.  Not only that but the route will go halfway up Mt. Diablo and I will definitely be taking the day off work to watch as it goes by.

This map my be difficult to view, but the race route is in blue and we live right near the green state park near the top of the map.

In an effort to scout the best place to the watch the race, I decided to take a ride up the north side of Mt. Diablo.  Despite the fact that Kelsey and I have been living right near the base of Mt. Diablo for almost two years, I had still never taken the time to climb the North side (I had always gone up the South side).  So I took off on a damp and overcast Saturday morning and joined two friends up the climb.  The pavement was a little bit more choppy on the North side but we soon fell into a nice steady rhythm.  Having never been on this climb before we wanted to keep the pace pretty easy so we kept it at a conversational pace until we got to the junction.  The descent was cold but it was a good 2.5 hour ride.

On Sunday I joined the team for our weekly team ride.  We ended up doing a 50 mile loop with about 2500 feet of climbing.  The team rides always start on Sundays at 8:00AM from a coffee shop in Danville and normally the pace is pretty moderate for the first half hour or until we hit the first climb, at which point it turns into every man for himself.  On these climbs I normally get to judge my fitness level against others and I was very happy with how well I climbed today.  I managed to stay with the lead group on 3 of the 5 climbs and better yet, I felt pretty strong even at the end of the ride.

Ride Route:
http://www.mapmyride.com/ride/united-states/ca/danville/803125626766651047

One other item to mention in this blog post is the new wheels I recently purchased and am going to use in races this year.  I have been going thru some problems with getting the brakes to fit correctly onto the bike and once I get that sorted out I will post about the results.  A picture of my race bike below, minus the brakes (don't worry I didn't actually ride the bike this way):

You may notice a correlation of the blog title and my bike.

I am headed to Montana this week for work but I will be back to training on Thursday with a possible race on Sunday.