I hadn’t done this GDB weekly ride since last year, and the route is quite a bit different. It’s still a fun ride with not a lot of climbing and no killer hills, so it seemed like the right ride for me today, since I’m just a little over a week after thyroid surgery.

Paul, I, and the rest rolled out right at 8:00 am and started the mostly downhill ride out to DFW Airport. As usual, we missed some traffic lights, and regrouped a few times, but we rode a fairly brisk pace.

After stopping at the Shell station where the airport loop starts, we were joined by Robert and Brian. It was great to see you again, Robert, and nice meeting you, Brian. I aired it out a bit on the loop, but the first part of the loop was uphill and almost directly into the wind, and was definitely tough. The other part that was really tough was just after the turnaround at the control tower. This was also uphill, and even more directly against the wind.

The trip back after the loop is always tough, since it’s 18 miles of mostly gradual elevation gain which seems to suit the uprights in the group better than me, and I’m usually blown up from a faster pace around the loop, but I felt pretty strong today, and Paul set a pretty reasonable pace for the small group we ended up with here, so I was able to hold up my end of the conversation for the most part, although my incision is so close to my vocal chords, I was getting a bit hoarse at the end. Paul and I joined Terrie and a bunch of the other riders for lunch afterwards, and the barbeque and ice tea went down very well.

The GDB folks are always friendly, and this is always a fun ride. I need to do it more often, and we need more ‘bents on it!

I notice some strange data on my gps software map, so I think the ride data needs some correcting. I’ll post it later.

Edit: I didn’t have any luck with Motionbased correcting the ride data like it usually does, but doing it on my own, it looks like I ended up with 56.0 miles and a 16.4 mph average. This is the first time I’ve seen that kind of error from the Edge 305.