Monday, April 20, 2009

General Ride Info/Inquiry

Okay, who is getting out there these days and riding?

The weather is getting better, well, except for the 15-20 mph wind gusts experienced on the Monday night Mueller ride tonight (4/20). At least we avoided the rain clouds. The group at Mueller tonight was smaller than expected but the weather was extremely windy with very strong gusts and some rain clouds were looming overhead. Not likely a good mix for higher turnout. The lead pack of 6 to 8 or so riders (Momentum cycles was the majority of the lead pack) pretty much thinned the herd by mile 5. I know this as I was about the last one hanging on at that point. The lead pack pressed ahead wind gusts and all. It was 14-15 mph into the wind and 27 -30+ with the wind. No kidding!

Again, the weather is getting better, well, except for the bit of rain on the Eco Expo ride to Forest Park last Saturday (4/18). That was a soaker on the way down to Forest Park but the sun came out and provided some much needed warmth on the way back. There were actually over a dozen riders that took to the wet streets. Kind of funny watching the drivers take a second look at the intersections as we rode pass the crossing streets. Lone Wolf Coffee Company put out a good breakfast which turned out to be a fairly crucial source of warmth at the onset.

Okay, enough about the weather!

So, back to the original question of who is getting out and riding? Haven't had many riders showing up on Saturdays and suspect this is attributed to many things, not the least of which is the changing weather (oops..enough about the weather already!). Is anyone else doing rides on the weekends yet besides what I have been organizing out in West County? If so, what are your preferred routes? Would you like to offer up these as alternate routes so that we get more participation or at least move the route starts around to be a bit more accommodating?

Another possible option would be to run a Clayton Road or Conway Road corridor to allow riders to join in and drop back off when convenient. We could run that down to Forest Park and/or to the Arch and back if desired.

Also, we have the spectrum of life stages across the group so curious as to desired start times. We can accommodate early AM and late AM riders too. We can ride an early route (6:30 AM or so) as well as looping back to catch a later start time (8:00 AM or so). Just some thoughts to ponder here.

So any thoughts? If no ideas or suggestions at this time, I will just keep running the routes as I have been and/or start trying a Clayton or Conway corridor ride. We can adapt to later suggestions that may come in as rider counts go up (likely proportional to the temperature increase).

Safe riding and stay alert out there!

Mogman

mogman@earthlink.net

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