Serving notice

New Teammate and I out on long training ride from Greenlake this morning catch up with OAD & his gang of 5 leaving from north end of Lake WA. It's a fairly gentlemanly pace heading up north & east riding with a tailwind up to who knows where?

Trading pulls 2 by 2 when it's our turn to get to the front my teamie ups it a notch or two! Though still with a tailwind it's now a fast tempo workout especially for me but I'm not losing face this early in the ride. At the top end we're into SE Everett and turn eastward along the Snohomish (or Skykomish or somewhere far from homeish) River with a strong right crosswind. I'm off my teamies left and immediately redline my HR. Deciding discretion is the better part of valor I let my guy do his thing while I valiantly drop back to observe the damage.

We're now a group in a single file paceline, no chit chat, everyone's pretty much hanging on for dear life. We spot a guy w/bike on our the side of the road so OAD & I slow slightly to see if this fellow needed assistance - BIG mistake. Fellow declined our offer and the 25-30 meter gap that opened seemed to take a lot more energy to close than it should've. Just as we were catching back on a split in the group developed while teamie is blissfully dunking his cookies in milk & whistling up a tune while checking his Blackberry for messages & is plugging along unaware of the carnage that's taking place behind him. 3 of us manage to hold his wheel to the next T intersection as the other 4 drag in a few hours later. OK to be fair it was only a few minutes & the one big guy did have his jacket zipped open to catch all the air like a parachute - but it was still an awe inspiring display of raw power - somewhere in the 1000 watt range - which it seemed as if he could hold for hours on end I'm sure. And true while just about everybody else was riding their rain bikes w/fenders and/or with uninspiring Armadillo tires (which have trouble getting out of their own way) to my teamies light weight race vehicle - I'm not sure if we'd been riding ninja motorcycles it would've made any difference.

The rest of the ride went pretty much the same - whether going up or down - my teamie was putting the hurt to the rest of the group.

As gracious as OAD is I pretty much doubt we'll be invited to join them next time. I can only hope teamie bought OAD coffee at 4-bucks to try and make amends. And it might be a good idea if Prudog would make nice & forward some product amongst OAD's group so as not to be blacklisted from piggybacking on their team rides.