The ride that was

Following Mondays disappointment of a mountain bike ride, I was given permission by MK to join the cycling club again last night for their training session. I am very grateful that she allows me to do this because it means that she has to feed the kids and get them ready for bed and last night it also meant that she was late for a meeting although I did clear up the dinner when I got home to make some sort of amends.
The club ride last night met up with the bike clubs from Roskilde and Holbæk for a pseudo race in an area that I generally use for training. We rode about 40 minutes to get there and then when the other clubs arrived we did 3 laps of a 10km course as a race. My previous experiences of racing on the road have been brief at best, maximum heart rate within 5 minutes and dropped after about 25km. Admittedly I have only done 2 races before and I was not in the greatest shape, but still, that was all I could think about especially as these were not the beginners that I was racing with before. The first lap went well and I actually rode on the front to pull back a few escapees at some point before needing to rest in the group for a while to get my breath back, the second lap was somewhat tortuous and I was then expecting that at some point I would get dropped too. The last lap was fairly hard as well and I was certainly glad that it was the last as I started to drop off the back a bit towards the end, but I did finish with the main bunch I was quite please with myself for that.
It is also nice to realise that there was at least one other guy with a more expensive bike than me who was fatter than me and got dropped on the first lap. That eases the guilt that I have for owning such an amazing bike...

(This is not a picture of mine, I don't have wheels like this yet...)