{"id":175364,"date":"2025-09-28T12:48:10","date_gmt":"2025-09-28T12:48:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/175364\/"},"modified":"2025-09-28T12:48:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-28T12:48:10","slug":"i-get-dropped-on-my-local-group-ride-and-im-ok-with-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/175364\/","title":{"rendered":"I Get Dropped on My Local Group Ride and I\u2019m OK With It"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our articles editor reckons with his new role on the local bicycle ride: guy who tries hard and gets dropped<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

The author’s place in the peloton is now at the back (Photo: Clara Margais\/picture alliance\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n

Published September 28, 2025 04:59AM<\/p>\n

My quadriceps burn like they\u2019ve been dipped in chloric acid and sweat gushes down my nose and splashes onto my bicycle. I huff and puff and grit my teeth.<\/p>\n

The pavement kicks upward and I feel the bite of the climb. I stare at the spinning rear cassette of the bicycle in front of me and try my hardest to ignore the riders on my left and right. My mind begins the agonizing countdown that every cyclist has, at some point, performed: If I continue at this pace, my entire body will explode in ten, nine, eight, seven, six, fiiiiive\u2026<\/p>\n

FOUR-THREE-TWO-ONE!<\/p>\n

And then? Kaboom. My head slumps, my back arches, my pedal stroke becomes an uncoordinated bounce. The other cyclists surge past me as I slide backwards through the group. After a handful of seconds, I\u2019m by myself, still pedaling my bicycle as hard as I can up this steep and awful road somewhere outside of Boulder, Colorado.<\/p>\n

Another thought pops into my head: I woke up at the crack of dawn for this. And then another: This is supposed to be fun. I look up the road. The group chugs higher up the hillside. I\u2019m getting no closer to it, but no farther away. My place in the peloton is back here in no-man\u2019s land.<\/p>\n

One final piece of psychological torture enters my mind:\u00a0Man, it didn\u2019t used to be this way.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Group Ride Junkie<\/p>\n

This past May, I returned to the Wednesday Morning Velo group ride here in Boulder after a three-year hiatus. My leave of absence was due to the usual scheduling conflicts that arise in middle age: parenting, work, attempting to be a somewhat decent spouse, and sleep.<\/p>\n

For those unfamiliar with group rides, a simple primer: Dozens, no\u00a0hundreds, of loosely-organized bicycle rides similar to Wednesday Morning Velo dot the country. Cyclists meet at the same place at the same time on the same day of the week. Everyone knows the route. People go hard and push the pace and try to\u00a0beat each other to an agreed-upon stopping point. It\u2019s like Fight Club, only with way more Lycra.<\/p>\n

\"\"The Wednesday Morning Velo group ride prepares for rollout (Photo: Frederick Dreier)<\/p>\n

Is it a race? Well, no\u2014but kinda sorta yeah? There\u2019s no official finish line or podium or medals. Nothing more than bragging rights and personal satisfaction are at stake. Most of these rides end with a celebratory beer, a coffee, or maybe just a fist bump and a \u201csee you next week.\u201d<\/p>\n

I love these rides, and I became a junkie for them<\/a> decades ago. As a college kid at UC Santa Cruz, I avoided Friday night parties so that I\u2019d be ready for the Harbor Ride on Saturday morning. In my mid-twenties, I\u2019d skip out of work early to make the nightly Bus Stop Ride here in Boulder. I learned about the backroads of San Diego County from the Swamis Ride. And some of my fondest memories of living in New York City in my early thirties involve painful mornings on the Gimbels Ride<\/a> in Westchester County.<\/p>\n

But my love of these rides is also tied to an obvious trend\u2014I was usually one of the strongest riders in the group way back then.<\/p>\n

Alas, that\u2019s not the case anymore. A lot changed during my recent break. Well, nothing changed with group rides, but a lot changed with me. I have entered my mid-forties, added a few pounds, and lost a few points from my VO2 max (the rate at which my body consumes oxygen when exercising). In total, I have gotten slower.<\/p>\n

I learned this fact in humiliating fashion throughout the summer on Wednesday Morning Velo. My perception of myself had not caught up with reality. I got dropped again and again, and spent most Wednesdays fighting to hold on to the group. More often than not, I was the lone weirdo dangling off the back of the group. Not strong enough to stay in the bunch, and too dumb to pack it up and go home.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a longstanding proverb in amateur bike racing: results on the group ride don\u2019t count. That may be true. But every competitive cyclist I know has basked in the personal glory that comes with winning the group ride. It\u2019s a fleeting feeling, but one that is very real.<\/p>\n

From Junkie to Weirdo<\/p>\n

I know what you\u2019re thinking:\u00a0who cares about your results on the group ride? It\u2019s a fair question, and of course, I have an answer. I care! Deeply! Blame it on vanity or my own insecurities\u2014getting dropped sucks. It\u2019s confirmation that my days of glory are over. My place in the pecking order has forever changed.<\/p>\n

Reckoning with one\u2019s athletic mortality, of course, is something that every weekend warrior and elite endurance athlete must, at some point, do. For me, it forced me to reexamine my lifelong affection for group rides, and I spent ample time this summer reflecting on\u00a0this, usually after getting dropped.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d ask myself: Why the hell do I still do these darned rides?\u00a0<\/p>\n

My answer? My affection for group rides isn\u2019t just about being the strongest. It it about the adventure of racing over familiar and unfamiliar roads, of learning the geography of an area by riding across the landscape at top speed. I also love the camaraderie of meeting other cyclists on the ride.<\/p>\n

Throughout my time in group rides, I got to know the people who made up the social fabric of the local cycling scene. Sure, when the pace got really fast, many of these people faded into the background and became the ride\u2019s early flotsam and jetsam. But they were always there, week in, week out.\u00a0 And many of them had been stalwarts on the local ride for decades.<\/p>\n

Some of these characters were especially eccentric, and everyone on the ride knew them by nicknames: Big Ring Bob, Puya, Montgomery, Randy, MoneyGram. They told dirty jokes, belted out songs, and sparked up conversation with everyone. They were the reason people kept showing up.<\/p>\n

No, they weren\u2019t the fastest, but they were the most memorable. I can close my eyes and still picture the 50-year-old weirdos I rode alongside in Santa Cruz 25 years ago. They had a huge impact of my love of cycling, even if I spent most of my efforts trying to drop them.<\/p>\n

After detonating one too many times this summer on the Wednesday Morning Velo ride, it finally dawned on me. I have graduated from the ranks of group ride junkie, to group ride winner, to group ride weirdo. My quirk? Going too hard and getting dropped and then riding just off the back all the way to the top of the hill. It\u2019s the natural progression that we cyclists must take in life.<\/p>\n

And thus, I\u2019m already preparing for the group rides in 2026 and beyond. It\u2019s going to get weird.<\/p>\n

\"AThe author slogs his way up Flagstaff Road one more time. (Photo: Brad Kaminski | Outside)<\/p>\n

Fred Dreier used to be fast but now he\u2019s slow. He\u2019s still processing it.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Our articles editor reckons with his new role on the local bicycle ride: guy who tries hard and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":175365,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[445],"tags":[49,48,635,60566,82,60567,89442,62576,54267],"class_list":{"0":"post-175364","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cycling","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-cycling","11":"tag-parent_category-adventure","12":"tag-sports","13":"tag-tag-biking","14":"tag-tag-cycling","15":"tag-tag-evergreen","16":"tag-type-article"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175364","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=175364"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175364\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/175365"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=175364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=175364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=175364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}