Saturday to Balbo 52 Miles 142 PR's (video on Monday)

 52 miles at 17.4 average speed with the group today. SART north to Lakeview then through Santa Ana rd, Jamboree, Mtn to Sea trail to Balboa. I'm not even exactly sure where I was, I was just riding trying to keep up in the hills seeing there were a bunch of hammer heads that showed up for the ride. I knew it was going to be a fast one for me ha ha ha!

But did well and once on SART heading back to the train station, we really picked it up. I have to say, there are some terrible guys out there that have no idea what team work is about. One guy sucked wheel for miles then shot around getting about 50 yards ahead.  Let him hang out knowing he'd fade but why not help rather than show off......that you can't keep a pace ha ha ha!? Make more sense to stay in the group and help. But after fading, he got back in line. Only to be dropped. Another guy, I was 3rd in line doing about 21 when the lead guy pulled off. The next guy sat up and looked confused as if he never heard of taking a turn at the front. When he realized he had no choice, he sprinted off raising the pace by about 3 -4 MPH. Wow, I kept pace and figured why should I try to close the gap? Let the guy go and later he was back in line too. Some people just don't get it though.

After a bit, a couple guys shot off the front and pulled away some. It was Mike at the front and soon after dropped back as if to wait for me. I had been behind a guy that was doing well but got tired. I took the front and tried to get him on my wheel but he said, well thought he said that he was done and to go ahead. Later told me he tried to say it but didn't have enough air in his lungs to get it out ha ha ha! But I really didn't want to drop him after helping at the front. By this time, we had a gap on the riders behind us, who were the fools that shot around and faded.

I found myself out on my own. Doing about 20.5 IIRC trying to stay ahead of the guys with the lousy tactics. I looked back at one point and saw a group of the 3 gaining on me. They got about 30 yards behind me but I gave it my all trying to stay away.  I didn't want them on my wheel but if they did catch me, I surely would have taken their wheels ha ha ha! I was planning to be the weenie then!

But after about 2 miles, I looked and they were falling behind, yeah buddy! One guy leaving behind a group of 3 that though they were the sheot! I saw Mike fall back off the faster group of 4, maybe. I saw him up ahead and thought if I could catch him, the dudes behind me would certainly be toast knowing Mike would help me out.  He did and they chumps fell pretty far back. I had asked Mike why he dropped back, tired or did he see me coming up? He said he saw me and that being at the front of the group ahead of me, he was doing all the work and he knew they too would sprint around when they got the chance. That is what I thought. It really is not worth it trying to work with guys that don't seem to get it. My average speed bridge to bridge north on Strava was 21.4 so that was decent for the final section of the ride.

Some of the guys up there, I had not seen on the entire ride. Though they were ahead on that section, Strava had one of them at 16.0 average speed. So pretty much just pushing on the final section of the ride and sucking on the rest ha ha ha! Looking at the average speeds on Strava, there were a couple of guys I expected to be fast. But the rest, I had a better average. 4 or 5 riders skipped the lunch section riding through town and went back to SART via PCH instead of hitting Balboa. Having 300 ft more climbing, one guy had the same average speed and the other guys I thought would be faster were a couple points behind me. So that was nice!

I guess doing all these miles is bringing my fitness back up and it feels good! 

The video

Some pics from the people and I'll have a video on Monday. Few of my stills from the clips as well for now.

BTW, finally figured it out! Since I use front and rear GoPro recorders, it's usually a pain in the but to watch them all and try to organize them in chronological order. This takes me an hour to do even before I can get started on creating a video. I have to watch them all, then delete the clips I don't want to use. Then trying to figure out where to put each clip where. I have to watch then a few times trying to squeeze them in order.

But I finally got it! I set the time on each recorder trying to be exact. So now, I watch and delete unwanted clips. Then I go and rename each clip in military time according to the time it was taken. So 9 am is 0900. I get about 25 clips so if I rename them all this way, they auto go in order. I do this for the rear recorder, then repeat for the front recorder, or vice versa.

So all clips are renamed then I send them to documents and all are placed in order.  So for example, the order might go like 09015, 0923, 1015, then afternoon, 2:05 pm is 1405, continuing on  up the clock from there might read 1425, 1502,1520 and so on.

So I send them all to documents and all placed in order. SO then I go back in documents and change the file names to 01, 02 ,03 on up to 25. Now everything is in order and I saved about an hour trying to watch every clip and figure out which goes where!

A video takes about 4 hours to create so no it's down to about 3 hours. SO this step saves me a lot of time and then I can put them in the editor and start ha ha ha!

I can see why many cyclists record but never produce. It can be a lot of work!