How to get a "feel good" ride?

Make sure it is a ride long enough to suit you. 150km is just fine. Don’t choose a longer one because you won’t be able to manage it. Ah!! Make it flat. A hilly ride would kill you.

Somehow you have to make sure Ed shows up injured and Denis tired. Don’t try to do this when they are in half form, that would be the best way of making sure you don’t have a “feel good” ride.

Make sure you don’t have a coffee in the morning. Coffee gets you too optimistic and you would do too much work at the beginning of the ride. That would be a “feel good” first 30 minutes of the ride followed by an “I’m so silly” ride of five hours and a half.

Of course you have to make sure you get head wind on the way out and tail wind on the way back. That is not easy to get but it is essential to give you the feeling of speed needed at the end of a “feel good” ride. You need that speed and you won’t have the legs so tail wind on the way back is key. 

You also have to convince everyone that riding steady is the best strategy to deal with tiredness, injury and head wind. Riding steady is good. Intensity is bad. Would you be able to remember that?

As you approach the first “climb” (we said this had to be a flat route) make sure someone gets a puncture half way up the “climb”. That would cancel any KOM competition and allow you to pass it “easily”.

Take the opportunity the puncture gives you and dump as much weight as possible. Offer a CO2 canister. That is 16g less. Offer an inner tube, there go another 100gr. Even a gel wrap, they are worth 2grs at the very least.  

If possible, make sure the coffee stop comes a bit late in the ride. Around kilometer 85 would be ideal. Even better if the coffee stop is at the top of a “climb” (I said flaaaat!!). You know it always feels hard after the coffee stop so better to start with a short flat and a downhill.

Now.. At the coffee stop. Order a latte!!!! A big one. You want all the caffeine you can take without needing to stop for a pee every five kilometers. In case of doubt, err in the more caffeine the better side. Without caffeine you won’t get a “feel good” ride. You still have 65km to get home.

That’s all.

I’m not saying making all this happen for a given ride is easy. If you make it happen that’s all you need.

Being tired will hit Denis and being injured will hit Ed. They’ll allow you to take the front. Enjoy it because you are not there very often. Your power numbers will still be useless but the tail wind will give you the speed that you need and the caffeine will make you feel happy and optimistic.

That’s it. That is a “feel good” ride. A ride in which your power numbers don’t matter. A ride in which keeping speed feels easy. A ride you finish happy and optimistic.

Ah, ah, ah. One last thing. 

Make sure you make the last sprint void. After all this effort, you don’t really want to screw a “feel good” ride losing the last sprint to Denis or Ed. And you know it is possible, much to your despair. So, find any excuse and well before the sprint tell everyone we are not sprinting. Pray they buy the excuse.

Can you believe today was a “feel good” ride?

Well it was. It is in Strava https://www.strava.com/activities/6599543557/

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Take care

Javier Arias González