Riding with Todd...

Thursday, September 13, 2012

I’d received a call from Todd Miller, my companion on my 1,100 mile bike trek following my senior year of high school.  He was passing through town and had his carbon-fiber, high tech racing bike with him and wanted to go out for a ride.  If only John hadn’t crashed ‘The Rocket’, I could have borrowed it and had a chance of staying with him.  He rides and races extensively, channeling all that energy he once used to fly fighter jets for the Navy into cycling.  He’s as intense a person as I’ve ever known, and I’ve had the pleasure of knowing some folks who were pretty tightly wrapped.

He arrived in my driveway, unloaded his bike…his front wheel had it’s own storage bag in the back of the vehicle…pumped the tires up, strapped on a heart rate monitor, and was ready to go.  I thought of asking him to provide a urine sample to be sure I wouldn’t be working against any unfair practices, but then I remembered it was me who did the cheating to win…not him.

We headed out for the Waite Hill course and I was cruising at 22 mph with him breezing merrily along behind me.  When we reached the first climb, he simply sped past me and quickly became a speck on the horizon.  He trains in the Virginian hills and specifically looks for races that have numerous hills.  He’s doing a 100-mile race next weekend with 8,000 feet of elevation change.  Bascially…he eats them for breakfast.  I caught him a couple of hundred yards past the top and he didn’t seem to be breathing heavily.
“You…ass…hole…” I gasped when I pulled along side him.

“What?  Hey…I had to get in some hard hill work,” he said.

Recapturing my breath, I asked him how hard he’d gotten his heart rate.

“It was in the red zone…over 150,” he said, which made me feel a little better.  At least he’d been pushing to get up the hill.

The rest of the ride was a chance to catch up and talk bike riding.  Big Red and I could handle his speed in the flats, but his conditioning and a bike 8 pounds lighter and with pure racing wheels (the most important improvement for speed to a bike is the rotating weight) were much more than we could handle on the climbs.  In my next life, I’ll be owing one of those sweet machines.  I made him a smoothie when we returned and we sat and talked about my Tour Ohio adventure for next summer.  I again alerted him to the fact that it would not be a race and I was only having him along if he could grasp the concept of ‘recreational riding.’  He promised he could, but he had that killer glint in his eye.

Bike Duration: One hour and 40 minutes.
Training Heart Rate: 125 bpm.
Calories burned during workout: 1400.