Little Red Riding Hood 2012

Four years in a row now. Four times! I've ridden the full 100-mile century ride at Cache Valley's Little Red Riding Hood Century Ride event. Three of them have been with Teri! The past two years, she and I have ended up on our own most of the time and finishing somewhere around 7 hours of ride time. This time, we finished just a little over 6 hours of ride time. The difference? We drafted off my teammate, Kendra, and a few of my other friends. Drafting is really quite crazy because those in the back of the pack don't have to pedal all that much to keep up with everyone. The slipstream of the riders ahead of you suck you in and pull you! So our full pack of friends consisted of me, Kendra, Teri, Kari, Jenn, and Emma. Jenn and Emma decided to do the ride just the day before. Kendra and I know Jenn from mountain biking, and Emma lives by Jenn but is the daughter of Teri's neighbor, Jean. It was quite comical when we were loading up our bikes Saturday morning with the intention of meeting Jenn and her friend (who I didn't realize was Emma - who I did know was Jean's daughter) at the start. Jenn and Emma started to leave before us, but drove by Teri's house and noticed us. We had a great laugh when we realized they had been next door the whole night before when we were coordinating the meet-up.

At mile 25

Jenn and Kendra were the entertainment of the ride for sure. Them and their booby/booty shots for the cameras were driving me nuts! If you were to look at Jenn's Facebook photos, you would see that most of her photos are of her doing her booby pose. Good grief. The girl has no propriety! Ha ha! In fact, she tried to do the pose for our lunch photo, but I put one hand on her stomach and one on the back of her neck/head and pulled and pushed my hands to prevent it. Ha ha! The pose wouldn't have been quite so embarrassing if we didn't have men taking all of our pictures for us.

At the lunch stop

Me in the process of preventing Jenn's infamous "booby" pose.

Overall the ride went really well. Kendra pulled our draft for the entire 100 miles. Before lunch, which was at mile 50, we averaged 17.5 miles per hour. After lunch we weren't quite as fast since Kari bonked pretty bad, but she was a trooper and rode through her bonk. We had a little stretch of head-wind that didn't help her bonk, so Kendra, Teri and I created a geese-V around her to keep her riding but she could still only hold 10 miles per hour. Once she had a chance to the use the potty and eat some food, she looked a lot better for the last 15 miles but she was still very tired. Even with the slower riding after lunch, we averaged 16 miles per hour for the entire ride. Teri and I were quite delighted that neither of us bonked this year. Although, Teri did have some mechanical issues for the first 25 miles until a mechanic at the first stop we stopped at fixed it.

At the finish line. (Emma was MIA)

Me and Kari