So-Called Recovery Ride

Frontage Road, West Amwell, NJ

19 May 2019

I posted the ride at 7:00 p.m. When I went to sleep close to midnight there were still no registrants. At 7:00 a.m. there was one, from a rider who, more often than not, is a no-show.

Figuring I'd be riding alone, I didn't put a date on the sign-in sheet and didn't hurry to the Pig. 

There had been rain early in the morning. The air was humid. A tailwind helped me up to Pennington where there were five people waiting for me.

None was a regular, although all but one had been on a Hill Slug ride at least once before. The exception was a skin-and-bones kid, the son of one of the riders, a racer for his college team. Every single one of them ought to have been on a faster ride. That the Cranbury ride had been canceled last night probably had something to do with these guys being in Pennington. 

I knew what I was up against. Even if this group were here to chill, their chill would be my push. I foresaw a good, old-fashioned Spraguing or two.

Three of them were too far ahead to hear me call out the Joe McBride shortcut on Moore's Mill. I would have been plenty happy to keep going, but we waited at Stony Brook like good little suckers. After that, everyone waited for me when they got ahead, which was all of the time.

I only stopped for pictures once, on Frontage Road in West Amwell. The surface is crumbling and, judging from the grass that's starting to grow in some of the cracks, that's the way Frontage Road wants it. 

There was a rare table open at Rojo's.

We got spread out on the climb out of Lambertville. I came up from way behind and led the group up Dinosaur Hill, which threw a few of them because they didn't know the road enough to know what was coming.

From there I turned on Rock Road, my go-to route for when I'm finished with climbing. We got back to the Pig not long after they'd closed. We hung out in the street for a while, and then the four of us who had ridden in rode back down towards Lawrenceville together.

I haven't uploaded the route yet, so I don't know how much climbing we ended up doing. Suffice it to say it was more than I had in mind for a recovery ride, and faster than I'd thought it would be. Only because the group waited for me at the top of every hill did I keep up with them at all. This is the difference between pace-pusher and Hill Slug etiquette; I'm glad everyone today observed the latter.