Another fun ride...

Yesterday was a good workout. A REALLY good workout.

When I was riding with friends last week, I decided to ride with one of them again. Every summer, the Bonneville Bike and Touring Club has an event called the ULCER. Yes, the ULCER. It's a stoopid acronym for Utah Lake Century Epic Ride.

In past years, it's actually gone around Utah Lake. This year, for various reasons from traffic to bad roads the entire course stayed south and east of Utah Lake. So we decided that this year, it should have been called the UCCER, the Utah County Century Epic Ride. Of course, we forgot to tell that to the Bonneville Bike and Touring Club.

It was a REALLY fun ride. A couple friends of the friend I rode with work at Altiris, so I was able to get to know a couple of my new colleagues during the ride.

For a little while, I thought that I was going to run into trouble. About 25 miles into the ride, I got into a group that was moving at a really fast clip - around 25 miles an hour. I stuck with them for about a half hour, then the tops of my calves started feeling like they wanted to cramp up. So I dropped off the back of the group and made it the rest of the way to the next stop where I met up again with the group I was riding with. A couple had stayed with the fast group, and a couple had slipped back before I did.

After that, we stayed with a slower group until the halfway point. But after the halfway point, I got my second wind. My friend, his brother, and I were able to maintain 20-21 miles per hour for the next leg of the trip, and I "pulled" nearly half of the time. The leg after that was going extremely well too. We were continuing to maintain a speed around 20 miles per hour, despite a slight headwind.

Until...

We were making a left turn. I had dropped to the back of our group of three after pulling for about 5 miles. As I accelerated out of the turn, I heard a popping noise, then my back wheel sounded suddenly different.

I had broken a spoke. My back wheel was no longer true. It was rubbing against my brake pads where the spoke had broken.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!

75.5 miles into the ULCER, I had a mechanical failure. Where was my team car with the spare wheel? Oh yeah. I'm not ON a team.

I limped another five miles to the lunch rest stop in Springville and had the bike shop guy look at it, but he didn't have the right tools to true my wheel, so my day was over. I called my wife and then ate lunch while I waited for her to come and pick me up.

But it was a FUN ride nonetheless. I was feeling strong and riding very well. I'll get my wheel fixed and my next century will be even better!