Pace Creep Season

Rockaway Creek at Guinea Hollow and Sawmill, Mountainville, NJ

13 August 2023

I was so slammed with work this week that I missed Wednesday's Premed ride. I canceled at 4:00 p.m. and immediately felt a sense of relief. That lasted about two hours. Then FOMO kicked in.

I got word later that night that the average for the ride was hovering around 16 mph. It's listed as a C+ ride. So was the one the night before that averaged in the mid-16s. On one hand, it's fine if that's what the group wants to do. On the other, if a newcomer (like me with the Premeds this year) signs on expecting a C+ and gets their ass kicked, they're not going to come back and they're not going to trust our listings at all. 

It's pace-creep season. Safe bet the PFW Board will send a message to ride leaders reminding us to keep to the advertized pace or bump our listings up to the next catagory. This message will be argued about and then ignored, as it is every summer. 

Some leaders are fine with having half the ride go off the front. I'm not one of those people. If most of the group is out of sight in front of me for the entire ride, I start to wonder why I'm leading at all. I wonder why those people even bother to sign up. 

Over the years, I've played with my ride descriptions. Back in the pre-online calendar days, I used to write, "Pace-pushers not welcome." Lately I've been listing my rides as B level with "C+ Friendly" in the title. I also add "If you're a B+ rider, please find another group." 

I've never been a true B rider in the hills. I tried listing "B-" rides, but the club president at the time put the kibosh on that. I call them "slow B," "social," and "scenic" instead. When we do come in with a B average, it's because I've either listed a flat ride or gone easy on the elevation gain.

I like to lead small groups because it's less hectic, more social, and the rest stops I choose tend to be small places. I like to be able to keep everyone in sight because I'm responsible for their safety. I never want more than 10 people, which is about as many as I can count while I'm moving. I like 6 or 7. Or maybe less. Sometimes I lead invite-only rides to keep the numbers down and the pace-pushers out.  

On Thursday, I dug out a route I hadn't done since 2018 and asked a handful of Slugs if they'd be interested. I wasn't sure if I was going to list it. When a handful said they were in, I decided to list it with a cap at 7 riders.

I didn't have time at work to put it on the calendar until halfway through Friday. It was full within a couple of hours. Then I got an email from a fast rider who I can usually trust to play by Hill Slug rules. I opened up a slot. It got pounced on by someone else who I ought to have included in my original email in the first place. I opened another slot, and the emailer got it. I was about to leave work when another rider, also who I ought to have emailed in the first place, texted me. I opened registration up again. Now we were at 10. That was it. No more.

When I got home from work, I received another text, this time from a definite fastboy pace-pusher. Sorry. Full up. And another sometime late at night that I didn't see until 6:30 on Saturday morning. Nope. Full. Sorry.

The one person who couldn't make the ride that I wish had been able to was Our Jeff. The reason is that the route contains an ascent that we will need to train on before our trip next summer.

There's no way to get to and from Califon from Hillsborough that doesn't involve pain. Sure, there are roads that stealthily make their way up to Cokesbury without letting you know you've been climbing for half an hour, but then you have to descend into Califon and you have to suffer on the return trip. The route I chose involved pain in both directions. Pain, thy name is Cokesbury.

To get up there, I put the group on Deer Hill. This is a 1.5 mile long, straight road that, on a good day, messes with your mind by looking like it's finished when it's only halfway done. Somewhere in there, the grade is close to 13%. What we encountered was all that plus fresh chip seal. 

I didn't tell anyone what was coming. I ought to have, because, when the lead rider blew the stop sign at Bissel, turned left, and kept on climbing, six people followed. That left me looking in my mirror at the two riders behind me, one of whom did not have the route. I turned without stopping too, but thought the better of it, being more responsible for the folks in back than the folks out front. That, and I was hella out of breath. As soon as the last rider came into view, I crunched along until I found the rest, stopped half a mile up the road at Still Hollow. I scolded them for not waiting at the turn.

"What stop sign?" one of them said. It was a T intersection. I know y'all want to get up the hill, but this is a group ride. I wondered who the instigator was. I thought my regulars knew better than that. 

We got going again, climbing and crunching on the chip seal, finally reaching the top of the ridge. What took us forever to climb up took no time at all to coast down. Hoffmans Crossing Road has beautiful views of the valley on the other side of the Raritan River. Or at least it did, until one homeowner decided that their view was paid for and put up a long, white, plastic privacy fence. 

At the bottom of the hill, we gathered and waited, still missing four people. Eventually, we figured out that they'd gone ahead. When I found them standing halfway down River Road, I said, "When I say 'wait at intersections,' what I mean is that when you get to an intersection, wait. Wait at intersections. We just spent a couple of minutes back there waiting for you."

Back to our group of 10, we slogged up another hill to the Califon General Store.

This has been a regular stop for years. Maybe not anymore though. The first thing I saw when I stepped inside was a glass soda bottle, colored unnaturally blue, with a picture of twice-impeached, thrice-indicted (maybe four times by the time some of you read this), convicted sexual assailant insurrectionist, with a forgettable slogan underneath, something like "true blue patriot." I pointed this out to some of the riders. 

While we were sitting outside, the owner came out to walk his German shepherd, who had been sticking his head out of a car window (there was a portable air conditioner inside). He (the owner, not the dog) got chatting with us. To his credit, he didn't say anything that raised my hackles. He was perfectly nice. I wondered if that bottle inside was meant to be a joke. It's tough to tell. Hunterdon County is, for the most part, deep red. Either way, I figured I'd do some rest stop research for our next trip up here.

The slog out of the valley on Academy Street felt like not much at all compared to the chip-sealed hell we'd gone through. Our reward was nearly 7 miles of descent, starting at Guinea Hollow.

At the intersection with Sawmill, I took my first photos of the day, of Rockaway Creek.

We turned onto Rockaway Road and continued our descent.

There's an old, sprawling house on Rockaway Road. Everyone who's been there knows what I'm talking about. More than a decade ago, the then owners would keep the front yard full of blooming flowers. In the fall there would be pumpkins. We called it the Gingerbread House. Then it went up for sale a few times. The flowers stopped. 

This time, there was a sign out front: "Creek House circa 1760." Everything looked restored. I had to stop for pictures.

All that was missing was the flowers. I took a picture of the creek across the street. 

On Cedar Lane, right before we were about to cross over Route 78, one rider got a flat. Not me this time! Three people stayed back to fix it. The rest of us were a few hundred yards ahead, directly across from a house that was loaded with signs and flags supporting the aforementioned coup-plotter. "MAGA doth protest too much," I said after we got rolling again.

When we got back to Old Highway 28, we had 17 miles to go. I asked if anyone needed water, figuring nobody would. To my surprise, everyone wanted to stop, so we did, at the Whitehouse General Store. It's just a deli now, but it was in the right place at the right time, it had a clean bathroom, and there were seats outside. 

After that, it was more endless rollers. We were getting spread out. The people out front behaved at intersections. Our clothes were sticking to our bodies. At one corner, Pete G lost his balance and toppled over onto the grass. He was fine, but his bike, the same model as mine, went into crash mode*. The rear derailleur, in order to protect itself, would not shift. Pete was in the smallest cogs front and rear. He took off ahead of us, not wanting to stop at all. 

The rest of us muddled along, through Neshanic, across the bridge.

L to R: Jim, Martin, Rickety

We got strung out again immediately. Riverside Road is in a little valley. Above us, to our left, was a field of soybeans. "Does that amount to a hill of beans?" I asked Glenn. I wanted to ask John, who was just enough ahead of me that he wouldn't have heard me if I'd shouted. By the time I caught up, I'd forgotten my fried-brain dad joke anyway.

Pete was in the shade when we got back. We all chatted a little as we packed up, but the sky to the east was gray and thundering. Our average was as I'd advertized: a C+ because of the hills, despite our B pace when we found flat roads. 

This route is one of the most difficult ones I have in my collection. The total ascent is, by Garmin's calculation, 3486 feet, in 54 miles. Almost half of that happens in the middle 11 miles. I'm going to have to do this ride, or something like it, several more times next summer before the Nova Scotia trip, because there's a 40-something mile day in there where we climb two mountains, one with Deer Hill grades, with a total elevation gain that puts today's to shame. 

Despite the heat and hills, my back did better than it has in months. It still hurt at times, but not nearly as badly as it has. The muscle pull is gone. I'm not getting tingles in my leg when I wake up. I'm crediting the PT and the missed weekday rides with giving my body the break it's been needing.

With Nova Scotia a year out and still very much heavily weighing on my mind, I went out for a solo ride today. On that trip, I'll need to be able to ride for two more days after the mountain day. For once, I got 8 hours of sleep after a late-ish night in Philly. That helped a lot. I think, perhaps, sleep helps most of all, and I know I don't get enough of it.

I set out on a recovery ride muffin run to Hopewell. The only rule about this ride is that I have to go 10 miles per muffin. If I want to bring 2 muffins home, I have to ride at least 20 miles. I didn't look at my pace. There were a couple of hills and a stiff wind. I knew that Jim was out on a 60-something charity ride today, somehow, after yesterday's mess. I'm not that strong. I'm merely an impostor. 

While drinking an iced coffee at Boro Bean, I got a text from another ride leader. He'd been the victim of pace creep, ditched by five intersections. He gave them a good talking to after chasing them down at 22 mph. I extended my sympathies and frustration. To his credit, his ride came in only 0.1 mph over the listed pace range. 

I did my 26 miles, making it home in one piece with two muffins. My back still doesn't hurt. This is a good sign. 

(*This is a thing that Di2 does to prevent a bent cage from destroying everything in its path. Pete, Jack H, and I all have the same Cannondale Synapse with Di2 12-speed, a new groupset that has, as a perk, an easy way to get out of crash mode. All that needs to be done is to turn the cranks while shifting up and down and up and down until the derailleur motor reconnects. Pete hadn't tried shifting more than once, so he din't get out of crash mode until he had his bike on the stand at home and had scoured the internet for a solution. Older Di2 derailleurs in crash mode require a dance between the derailleur's mode button being held down until the indicator light is flashing red, crank turning, and panic. This crash mode can be activated by more than a crash. I was warned to be careful putting Janice into my car sideways lest I activate the crash mode. I make sure to move her gently into position, preferably while the shifting system is asleep.)