OCBC 40km Challenge Completed!

- February 22, 2009

What a ride. Did my fastest ride ever and completed 40km within a time unimaginable to me before the event.

Mr.Ti, Mr.Alu and me started out from Marine Crescent at 6.15am and headed towards the F1 Pit. It was a good 7km ride just to warm up a little. Many roads leading to there were already closed so it was great to ride with ZERO traffic!

At the F1 Pit building, met up with 3 other guys; Doper (Specialized), Mr.FD (Fondriest) and Mr.T (Trek) all on cool bikes! We started off at 7.30am, the crowd was just amazing a good thing was the start was good for us with absolutely no problems. We stayed in line with Mr.Pina leading followed by Doper and myself with the rest tailing close behind. We caught up with a group early on (Uncle Toby group) which was going very fast at 35km/h!

I managed to follow and led a little and was going quite fast in the draft group. Upon reaching the halfway point (Sailing Club), I saw opportunity to join an even faster 2 man group on Cervelos. I broke away but to my dismay, no one broke with me!! So I decided to follow this fast group which was doing 38-40km/h speed. Well, I managed to tail them quite closely up till the point where they started taking turns doing 40km/h. It was simply too much for me to cope without support from my buddies and finally had to let off after ECP Macs....The Uncle Toby Group soon passed me and I caught up on their tail, with 2-3 riders in front of me and Doper.

But the 2 guys in front started faltering and I could not overtake in time to follow the lead group...arrrgh! At this point my average dropped to 32-33km/h doing solo mostly from Fort road onwards; it was tough! I still had the Uncle Toby group right about 50-100m ahead of me and I simply could not catch up!!

I completed the course in 70mins 06secs (on my speedo), a personal best surely, thanks to the other fast groups!! I was only slightly behind Mr.Alu and Doper (who eventually was the fastest amongst us, overtaking Mr.Alu at the finishing dash). The rest followed couple of minutes later...what a ride. Must admit i had a weird ache at my inner thigh though after the event....but its ok now.

Special Congrats to Doper who finished fastest amongst us and only started cycling 3 months ago!

Here are some pics from my IPhone...