A New England Masters Cycling Team

I could dismiss this ride as being pure folly but that would discount the fact that it is based on the Brevet style of racing - a self-supported ride where the participants don't know the route and have to follow cue sheets. The race is against the course, not the other riders.

OK, well I don't like that style. To keep a theme going, for $40 I want the roads marked! It would haven't been so bad had the course been more in line with something like the Litchfield Hills ride, where we were on a given road for miles at a time. This course had us making many turns, sometimes several per mile onto sometimes unmarked goat paths. My favorite - right at telephone pole! The "road", which we missed of course, ended up being what looked like a farmers path around his field. Anyway...

The Hills!! - A good thing gone bad. Again the Brevet style is more of the rider against the course, not against other riders. So, if you want a hard "race", make it with lots of hills. With the exception of the first 5 miles (and a section near a river after I had already bailed) there was NO flat road on the course. I'm not kidding. It was up or it was down. I like hills. I often can be near the front at races when there are hills. But for me this was overkill. Many were long and some were incredibly steep. I'm surprised the more recreational type rider would even come to this event. I'm sure some were out there more than 12 hours.

Bike choice was good. I used my cross bike with narrow speedmax type tires. Worked really well. Only lost traction once on a soft section of a very steep dirt road. I had to get off and walk for a little. No problem I need the training for cyclocross. I did need better gearing. 38/27 worked but something smaller would have been better. We hooked up with a guy on a cross bike and he had compact cranks. Looked like he was running a 34/27 and he was spinning while I was mashing at 6 rpm.

So as I hinted at earlier, I bailed on the ride at the 50 mile mark. 50 miles!! Your a wimp Wade!! Oh, OK. I should have said the 5 hour mark!! And it was probably closer to 55 miles. 50 on the cue sheet, 5 extra for all our wrong turns and back tracking. Geoff Sullivan had gone down and was bleeding from knee and had no rear brake. I knew he'd be a good guy to propose the bail-out to. When the ride hit a main road - Rte 112 - we kept going south toward Rte 2. It took us 45 minutes to get back. And it wasn't easy. As we headed south into this village I could see only hills around us. I knew we'd have to climb. Sure enough, it was probably 1.5 miles or so, 10%. We saw riders from the 100K version bombing down the hill.

For me, I wouldn't go back. Or if I did, I'd opt for the 100K version. Still probably a 6+ hour ride. In my opinon, it is one of those rides that you say, "Wow, I'm glad I did it, but once is enough!" I didn't even finish and I'm saying that. That's just me though. Give me a good M35 road race over this type of event any day of the week.

I'd love to see a course up there which inlcudes some of the dirt roads but is more balanced with flat roads. A hard course but not an epic course. I'm sure lots of the NCC guys do rides like that all of the time and know more sane courses.

Ted will design such a ride for the team up his way. I know he's got lots of dirt roads around his place.

Wade