Post in which I do the opposite of sandbagging...

...And ride with people clearly faster than me.

I went for a ride this evening with some of the Cat3's from Cambridge, Cary and RMM. The plan was to ride out to Blue Hills and climb the observatory access road. I wont bore you with the details since the ride was pretty uneventful, except for a very Karmic-ly timed flat for Cary, just after he started giving me some sass about riding Tubulars.

But the Hill is a killer. Its nice and long and well wooded, with no car traffic since its a closed service road. If you picture 6 minutes of idyllic climbing then your pretty close, except take out the Idyllic parts because unless your watching it on Versus, in slow motion, Climbing never feels elegant or graceful. There are a couple sections where I was definately maxing out my cassette and still Cary and RMM were gradually getting away.

In fact the only times I beat anyone up the hill are when Mike missed his clip in at the bottom and I got a few seconds lead as we started up.

The point of this post is that getting my butt kicked by a long hill and two cat 3's I think i figured out how to climb. By which i mean, I figured out how I climb. In the lead up to battenkill there are a lot of opinions about tire choice, tubular vs clincher, and gearing. And I decided today that a lot of that is like watching pre-game for the superbowl. People just need to fill time before the big show starts and its easy in biking to over think and over share your overthinking with others when it comes down to gear.

What I figured out today is I need to spin to be able to climb fast. Ive sort of known this from cross, I consistently undergear myself compared to the other cambridge guys. And I placed well at Freddy v Jason with absurdly light 34x14 single speed gearing. Today on the climbing I actually felt best on the last few climbs because i started spinning on the less steep sections, keeping cadence up enough that I could stay in the saddle made a big difference in how fast i got up the hill. On the steep sections when i ran out of bigger cogs i just dont have the power to spend. So im very excited about the 11x28 cassette that came in the mail last week.

So thats what works for me, but im 130 lbs with only 3 months of serious training going for me. So dont take my advice on anything unless you are a secret twin or something.

Maybe there is hope for me as a climber yet?