B+P at Progress Coffee Ride
Posted on October 26, 2007 by Andrew
By: Richard
Sunday was one of those weird B&P rides. It included a crash, a fire, a very close call, and a dead body.
I haven’t been on a Progress Coffee ride in a while. With as few miles as I am able to put in, keeping up on a Progress Ride can be a bit of a challenge. On the last one I rode, I was pleased to discover that the Progress rides have grown in popularity. This is a good and a bad thing. The good thing is I can stay in just about any large peloton if it’s not too hilly. The bad thing is the larger groups always have some inexperienced riders that make things edgy if not dangerous.
I would guess we had between 25 and 30 riders Sunday including the usual suspects and probably ten or more I have never laid eyes on. It was a beautiful clear Fall day with a blustery Southeast wind. We had just turned onto Pleasant Valley to cross Longhorn dam when the trouble started. It seems like you always hear the sound first, that snapping metallic grinding sound of sharp edges hitting the asphalt. Matt Beeter and two guys had gone down on an oil slick that covered most of the outside lane. They might as well have been on a sheet of ice. Like a video game, two water bottles skittered across the road and disappeared into an inconveniently placed storm drain. Score!
Fortunately they were unhurt. We quickly regrouped and carried on. Not two minutes later as we turned off Pleasant Valley for the cut through to Wickersham and an enormous fire came into view. No fire trucks, no people. But there were flames shooting up 30 or 40 feet in the air from what appeared to be an apartment building. We were obviously the first on the scene as smoke was just starting to gather over the flames. As we got closer it became apparent the fire was not in an apartment building but in one of those construction dumpsters, the enormous ones that are set out in a parking lot for remodeling. An architect friend later told me spontaneous combustion from solvent soaked rags were a common culprit in these types of fires.
We went on. As we pedalled into the Southeast wind there was a collective sense this was not an ordinary ride. Two strange things had happened within blocks. What was next?
We have to weave around our old route to Cedar Creek with the construction of 130 cutting a massive swathe through the landscape South of town. The pace started to heat up as we climbed some new hills that were not on the old route. I noticed the guy next to me had completely covered his bike with black electrical tape. So what is that a stealth bike? A ninja bike? He seemed like a nice enough kid but I couldn’t really make of his explanation of why he had done this. It was something about protecting the bike. He told me it was a steel Cervelo and I explained if any water condensed in gaps beneath the tape it would rust the frame. He explained that he didn’t ride the bike in the rain. Hello?
I was the only B&P rider at the beginning of this ride. Andrew was in Taos and maybe everyone else had ridden the century in Round Rock on Saturday? And Beto had been involved in a Pure Austin gym event at the quarry over the weekend. Mr. “G” was here but is still riding in his standard Sachs kit. He’ll probably don his B&P kit 25 years from now as a retro gesture… and he’ll look exactly the same as he does now… sleek and ornery.
As we neared the run in to Cedar Creek the pace started to heat up as it always does. It was my good fortune that there were enough guys in the front rotation where I could hide at the back for a while out of the wind. I think Eckert, Matt, Fred, Sam Childs, Don Hutchison, and one or two other motors I didn’t know were keeping the speed but it was smooth without any attacking off the front. The speed can go up to 28 or 29 MPH in this section even into a stiff wind. Suddenly I heard a sickening sound, the sound I always imagined a parachute makes as it pops out of it’s’ folds. The zipping sound of two tire side walls rubbing against one another. I looked up in time to see Matt Beeter’s bike wobble as though he were fighting for control of it. But nobody fell.
The specter of a high speed crash pumped some adrenaline into my system and I pulled through to the front on two rotations. I noticed the young guy with the taped up Cervelo hanging at the front but to the left side of the pace line. We were riding at at least 26MPH and he had to be struggling to stay out there on his own. I knew then he was the cause of the overlapping wheel episode. He disappeared in the next minute. I felt great as we approached the sprint and tried to take a flyer. I barely came up to Gregg Eckert’s wheel and he gave me this look that said, “in your dreams Whittington” and I punched out of the back within a hundred yards of last bend. In the parking lot of the Cedar Creek store I found the Cervelo guy and suggested he ride at the back until he learned how a pace line worked. He took it pretty well.
At the store Stu Stafford and Buffy showed up out of nowhere. Stu told me he got a late start and had been chasing, only to discover he had been ahead of us the whole time. Stu was in his B&P kit. Matt Beeter told me he wasn’t part of the tire touching incident but one of the guys that popped out of it had hit his shoulder. Thank goodness Matt didn’t go down. I was on this same ride 6 or 10 years ago when Rick Kent took Matt down in a sharp turn. Rick was riding on his tri bars… not a good idea in a group. Back then Matt had just spent a year or more recovering from a serious car wreck and was the last person you would want to knock down on a ride.
As we left Cedar Creek for the Lytton Springs leg of the ride about a dozen riders peeled off for the shorter Elroy version which cuts off about eight or nine miles. I felt well enough but I was tired and had a ton of stuff to do in the afternoon. I decided to go on the shorter route so I could be semi-functional for the rest of the day. I thought the pace would slacken a bit in the new group with all the weenies that couldn’t hack the 63 mile loop.
With the SE tailwind we were flying. It was hard but fun. Until just past Elroy. We came over a rise and could see a couple of DPS cruisers and other vehicles. The DPS bubble lights were spinning. At first it looked like a wreck but as we got closer you could see all the cars were undamaged. There was no ambulance. As we came abreast of the two officers about 25 feet down the sloping shoulder of the road one of them pulled up the corner of a black sheet of plastic revealing the corpse of a middle aged man. He was a bloody pulp. What else could happen on this ride?
Fortunately the rest of the day was without incident. We had averaged 18MPH until the store stop and increased that to 19.2 by the time I rolled into my driveway. It was a pretty quick ride for an old man.
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