Ride with UVa Cycling Club

At 5:50am, my alarm jarred me awake for the UVa ride this morning.

Arriving 3 minutes late foiled my attempt to ride with them Tuesday night. 3 minutes! They were super serious about arriving on time, it turns out, because they needed to make it in time to meet the Charlottesville Racing Club. Yikes. Today, I arrived 10 minutes early, just to make sure I couldn't miss anything.

I felt almost right at home as soon as UVa jersey clad folks rolled up because of the familiar orange & blue color scheme. The guy that called the ride even had an orange and light blue Specialized Tarmac which I admired. And then someone in a Bike and Build jersey of 2009 rolled up, and I knew I had found my place.

The roads are beautiful around here. The hills are grass or woods covered interspersed with Colonial style houses and horse pastures. We also went on some gravel roads on which I slowed up greatly. I didn't quite trust my Swalbe Blizzards, and I didn't feel like wiping everyone out as I bit the dust. They discussed Cyclocross a lot. I guess they have a whole series of races in the area. If only I had a CX bike ... haha.

The pace wasn't too crazy throughout. Apparently, I need to learn how to pace myself going up hills. The first hill, I unwittingly dropped everyone. By the last gravel hill, I was hyperventilating as several other folks had a leisurely conversation about CX tires the entire way up.

The people seem pretty friendly. There was an MD/PhD guy, biology PhD 6th year, Environmental Sciences PhD, and an Electrical Engineer 4th year undergrad. This is like a mish mash of the people on UCVC (Bio/Med folk) and Illini Cycling (Science/Eng), which is pretty amusing. By about halfway through the ride after not having dropped me (yet), they were already asking if I intended to race collegiates. Undecided so far...

The only thing that made the ride challenging for me was that I couldn't get into my big chain ring without dropping my chain, so I was having my own personal spin/cadence fest. In hindsight, I should have simply tightened the limit screw while everyone was stopped for me in stead of wasting my energy on the downhills trying not to lose momentum, but so it goes.