West Mountain Winter Ride

In spin class I heard that there would be a group ride around West Mountain on Saturday. I showed up to join in.

My first mistake was the helmet, or lack thereof. Yeah, I forgot to bring it. For all the other equipment that a brought; toe warmers, arm warmers, windproof hat, ear warming headband, ski socks, garmin gps, premixed cytomax, etc, I still managed to forget the very essential helmet.
So I stopped off to buy a helmet at Walmart. Otherwise I would have commited the egregious violation of riding without a helmet.
Did you ever notice how slow people are when you are in a hurry? The first line at Walmart that I committed to was a bad choice. I like old people, heaven knows that I am evolving into one. But they need to get rid of their checkbooks. It is easier to use a debit or credit card, why do they still slowly pull out the checkbook and create the equivalent of a freeway wreck at the checkstand. Consumer traffic stops and watches the wreck as the dear oldster scrawls the amount and then balances their finances right on the spot.
Ok so I speed out of Walmart and I actually make it only 10 minutes late and people are still there with their bikes. I met some cool people. One of them gave me a knife to remove the huge zipties from my helmet. Then I noticed that some had toe warmers and I made my mistake.
"Do you think you'll need the toe warmers?"
"Yeah, it's a little cold."
"Ok, I'm going to go put mine on..."
So I go off to put the toe warmers on, after I do this I look up... everybody is gone!

Ok, where are they? I know the area, I used to live in Palmyra, which is the first area on the road to West Mountain. I started west down highway 77 having faith that I could maybe catch up. I looked down the road and off in the distance I can barely make out what looked like teeny colorful dots. Look at the graph and you'll see my heart rate was above 160 and sometimes over 170 yet my speed was only 20-22 mph. I slowly was catching up to the peloton that was our group, but I was really working hard, too hard for the start of a long ride. I did finally catch up and you can tell where I caught up too, just from the graph. It's where my speed only dropped slightly but my heart rate dropped dramatically. That was at minute 20.
So I really learned a bit about drafting. Whenever I drafted I gained a lot of efficiency. Although I didn't draft too much, when I did, it was great.
Towards the end of the ride, Bryant and Russ started us on a Rotating Paceline which is described nicely here:
Rotating Paceline
Here is a cool slideshow that describes drafting. Cool Slideshow
My Garmin Edge 305 somehow stopped working when we got to Benjamin, so I didn't get the end of the ride, I'll have to watch that closer. I was too busy doing the paceline to really watch it. The Garmin missed the last 8.2 miles, the total miles should have been 44.8.
My sweet trek 1000
The fastest riders were on Tandems. That was surprizing to me, but it does make sense, the riders were really strong plus they had two engines (two pairs of legs) pushing two tires and one wind resistance. They seemed to be able to hold 24 mph consistently, while the other riders seemed to hold at 20-22 mph.
In conclusion, I really liked the road biking, it was a lot of fun. Although I did have the heaviest, ugliest bike.