Marty Co-Dominates Tucson's Shootout Ride

11/30/2013

Kick-off for the Buckeye game was 10:00am, too early to do much but wanted to kill some time so drove to the top of the multi mile climb out of Tucson for the Shootout ride. Maybe Marty would be able to hang with the Cat 1 and 2's who populate this popular ride. Hmmmm, these three were out in front and later learned that's former Olympian and Tour de France cyclist, Gord Fraser leading this group of three.....

....then came two others with a large group in pursuit.....

.....there's Marty. towards the back on the outside. There was some regrouping and then Gord leapt from the pack and only Marty was able to bridge across and the two made their escape. Marty describes the break as Gord taking pulls at 32-35mph then Marty would pull at 28-29, then Gord would take over and they stayed away for 20+ miles back to 4th Street and the finish. Impressive considering the quality of the chasers. Gord last rode with Health Net in 2006 and has many stage wins on the professional circuit.

1 Comment

Marty

12/1/2013 11:12:19 am

I looked at my Strava GPS data. For the first 17 miles that we worked together we averaged 29.65 mph and that includes stopping for stop signs. Gord likes to ride fast but he also likes to stop at stop signs, some that I would have rolled right through, we also would stop at red lights as we came into town. Even when it was clear that we could roll through with no traffic. It was probably near that 17 mile point, I remember having the thought that whoever this guy is, he might just burn me off his wheel drafting him on the flats. I had only brought two gels and they were gone, it was only supposed to be a 60 mile group ride. How hard could that be? I thought about easing up on my pulls, but even maxed out my pulls were already slower than his. So I pulled hard and fortunately we hit some lights in town and I was able to recover enough and we even rode side by side and talked near the end.

Marty Co-Dominates Tucson's Shootout Ride

Leave a Reply.

Author

Categories

Archives