GVL WBL #2 - Are your legs open yet?
WHAT’S UP ALL MY JIVEL WIBELERS!! I hope you all had an amazing weekend full of bikes and only bikes. The greater upstate area was blessed with some gorgeous weather and even better friends to ride with! The GVL WBL kicked off again this weekend with some slightly toasty (almost let your arms see the sun toasty) temperatures and an even better route. We had some bikelists (see what we did there) join us from Greenville to places afar including Charlotte, NC, and Jacksonville, FL. PLUS (you may or may not have noticed) we had some Olympic royalty join the speedy peloton - Ricky Flynn!!
We heard you all talk about how smooth last week’s ride was and we hope that this one wasn’t any different!
The crew this weekend headed more north towards the NC border for a daunting sprint up Callahan Mtn. The ride out was for the most part significantly quicker than last week thanks to the bigger roads and smoother pavement (May or may not be because of the tailwind too idk) Going out the backside of Travelers Rest and quickly onto everyone’s favorite roads with no lines and little traffic made it all awesome as well. The group rolled quicker than 20mph for the first 25-30 miles easily and made our way to the KOM/QOM of the day ~enter dramatic music~ THE CALLAHAN CRUSHER. (I know, scary right??) The hill was steep and relentless for about a mile which really isn’t that long, but with the ratio of Swamp Rabbit Cafe cookies to riding ratio being pretty out of wack, (off season amiright??!) 1 mile of climbing felt like a DRAG. Some however were capable of pulling away up the climb due to a swift and furious attack from the tall and THICCC boy that is Brian Hill, splitting the group and making the hill an every-man-for-himself situation. Over the top of the first steep pitch Brian had dropped himself, Mr. Prince (remember the kid who showed up late last week?) had found his legs, Will (aka baby Brian Hill), and Artem Shmidt were all still in contention for the win. These 3 made a name for themselves in the 2nd half of the climb while everyone else cried out in pain further down the mtn. The end result for the climb was Mr. Prince won, baby brian was 2nd, and Artem (who dropped his chain half way up the climb) got 3rd. On the ladies side of things, Marni Sumbal put on ANOTHER impressive performance to take the win as well dropping her closest rivals by more than 21 seconds! 2nd place was Cate Milne (the sprinter who can climb), and Mollie Brewer (who puts the RAD in coloRADo) if you didn’t already know! This week, we also added two additional category competitions for the uphill race - a Masters and Juniors category (which we’ll refer to as MOM and JOM respectively). Taking the MOM was Karel Sumbal with a killer time of 4 minutes and 22 seconds - landing him on the top ten board for the Strava segment. AND future star Will the Wolfe (Baby Brian Hill) scoring the JOM with a time that lands him 4th on the overall leader board!
After the KOM/ QOM the group took a few minutes to collect themselves before rolling on for the final 30 miles. The rest of the ride (as planned) was very anticlimactic as Brian Hill and Andrew Crater pulled the Choo-Choo train along to keep this ride safe and fun. The conversations were great, and seeing the faces of the Dollar General workers as 80 cyclists stormed in during our stop was even better! PLUS Thank you all again for tagging along as we try and spice up these base training group rides. After next weekend, we look forward to an exciting January of non-stop action! Huge shoutout to all of our sponsors once again for supporting us and keepings not only safe (with the ride leaders vests), but also well fed and enticed to keep coming back again and again.
