Friday Morning Ride

Tonight I have no prepared blog post. Rather than writing my regularly scheduled Thursday piece this evening, I instead opted to do some sorely needed maintenance on my bicycle before tomorrow morning's ride. These things happen. At least tomorrow morning my bicycle won't squeak like a hamster cage as I'm lapping around the mini climbs of South Camel.

Friday Morning Ride is not one that I do regularly, not like Tuesday and Thursday mornings' Hour of Power ride. Thursday evenings have a way of slipping away from me, and too often I end up staying up too late to wake up early enough to put in enough time on the bike to make the whole ordeal worthwhile. But when I do do FMR, it has always been well worth it.

The ride is a reminder that I am fortunate to live in a good spot. Just over five miles from my apartment are the five mini climbs of South Camel. These are steep climbs of about 200ft each, and they twist up, down, and around the ritzy houses built into the slopes of Camelback Mountain. These climbs are perfect for interval training, and they're less than a twenty-minute ride from my home.

The FMR starts (and finishes) farther south in Tempe and makes its way to Camel. There, the group treats each little climb like a stage, with the first rider to the top overtly the winner. After regrouping with the stragglers, the group races down the just finished climb and up the next, and so on through the circuit of all five climbs—except during winter, when the group truncates the ride to only the first four. Five climbs, five winners.

When I do FMR, I like to go out a little early, ride the circuit alone, and then join the group. Now that I ride often with a heart-rate monitor, I know quantitatively what I long since have known qualitatively: riding with others brings out my best performance. Sometimes my efforts in the group end up being the hardest efforts I make all week—minutes long sessions of all-out strength and suffering. Though I haven't managed it often, it's a thrill beyond words to reach those final meters of a climb ahead of every other rider in the group and to enjoy a moment on top of the world—even if my world entails only a little mountain in the middle of a big city.