05-30-07-Old La Honda climb part of Noon Goons ride.gpx-t0

I actually joined the Noon Goons for the first time, starting at the classic meeting area on Old Page Mill Road – but I forgot to start my timer for the ride!! I realized this when I was getting near Old La Honda, which is the climb they do on Wednesdays. So I decided to record just the climb itself – next time I’ll record the entire ride – duh!! The entire ride is about 20 miles and lasts about 1:15 or so and does a total of about 3000 feet of climbing. For the first part of the ride, from Old Page Mill Rd down to Arastadero and onto Alpine Rd, I had absolutely no problem staying with the group – I think they were riding a little easier than usual, since everyone was saving up for the big climb up Old La Honda. When we hit the base of the climb, I had planned out a strategy – I would follow one of the women I thought I could stay with – I had seen her on the ride last week and was slightly ahead of her for the first mile – last week, when I stopped at the first mile on the climb, she was the one that told me to keep going! So this time, I planned on doing just that – but instead of getting in front of her, my plan was to simply stay behind her all the way to the top of the climb. Well, that plan got thrown out pretty quickly, as the entire group surged at the beginning of the climb a lot stronger than last week – and I could see that she was pushing a lot harder than last week, too – I tried to stay near her, but realized I was going way too hard and decided to back off a bit so I could sustain the pace up the entire climb. I saw that got to that first mile a little slower than last week (the time last week was just 6:05 – a record by 50 seconds!) – my time at mile 1.0 was about 6:15 – still quite fast – but my heartrate was averaging about 167 bpm!!! I knew I was going to blow if I didn’t back off, so I eased up a bit. My time at the half-way mark was still really good – 11:15, which meant if I could keep that pace, I had a chance for a new PB that would end up in the 22:xx range!!! I was excited by the prospect, but also realized I had done a lot of damage by starting out so hard on the climb – it’s always a better strategy for a climb to start a little easier and then finish strong – just like you would on a time trial. Well, my fast start had a severe affect on the second half, as my body started to involuntarily slow down (i.e., I was basically blowing up!) – when I got to the 2.0-mile mark, my time was still a very respectable 14:20, but I could also tell that the next 1.3 miles were going to be a lot slower than usual (which they were!) – at mile 2.3, I had slowed up considerably, and my time was 16:40 – so if I could just push myself at a 7:00 clip for that last mile, I’d have a new PB – but alas, this was not to be! Instead, I did that last mile in more than 8 minutes – 8:17, to be precise – and ended up with a time about 1 minute slower than my current PB of 23:43. And, my heartrate actually averaged a whopping 163 bpm – even after I tried to ease it up for that last half of the climb!! Bottom line – you don’t always get your best time just because your heartrate average is the highest it’s ever been. In fact, this was a clear case where my much higher heartrate average actually worked against me – and ended up resulting in a much higher time that my current PB effort, where my heartrate average was only 155 bpm!! So, for next week, I really must try to focus on doing the climb more like my current PB – easier in the beginning and saving something for the last half of the climb!! After I got to the top of the climb and stopped my timer, I joined 3 other guys and we time-trialed by ourselves to the start/finish area near Old Page Mill Rd and Page Mill Rd. One of the guys was named Jeff and we had a very pleasant conversation for much of the training ride – nice guy! So, even though I got flicked off the back pretty quickly on the climb, I was proud of the fact that I did the entire Wednesday Noon Goons ride – wooooohoooooo!!!!!