The peer pressure effect

So, what happens when you put 65 competitive cyclists together on a saturday morning with no races that weekend?

Rochester is a much more active community than people may realize. There are organized group activities every Saturday or Sunday. Everything from people getting together to train for their first marathon, century ride or triathlon to people getting together to really push it. These are all great options for people depending on what their goals are. On the "really push it front" there are a couple of famous ones in the Rochester area. For runners, there is the oven door run which typically meets at 630am every saturday for long runs that usually involve a lot of hills and a lot of people running faster than they were planning on that day. It's typically a nice easy pace until someone decides it shouldn't be a "nice easy pace" anymore (after about 5 minutes) and everyone takes turns pushing the pace, for the next 10-12 miles.

For cyclists, the competitive group ride is called the "latte ride" and meets up every Saturday at 730am for a 45 mile group ride that turns into an all-out, full-gas hammer fest. It's the same concept, everyone rolls out together at an easy spin and then someone decides to put an end to the friendship festival, at which point competitiveness and what I like to call the "peer pressure effect" takes over. Street sign sprints, hilltop sprints, long strung-out single-file lines going 28mph are all common occurances. No one wants to get dropped from the group and everyone wants everyone else to get dropped. It doesn't take a degree in excercise physiology to realize that it's a tough workout.

Since there were no races close to Rochester this past weekend, most of the local teams were out for the latte ride in full force and it lived up to it's reputation. To put things in perspective, I had a bike race Thursday, 5k running race Friday, and did a 58 mile ride in bristol featuring several steep climbs on Sunday, and the latte ride was by far the hardest workout I did in that four-day stretch. Sometimes you don't need to have a race bib pinned on to push your limits, all it takes is the peer pressure effect. Everyone went harder than they would have on their own and ended up getting a killer workout in all before 10am. While it's always fun to race, sometimes it's also awesome to "not let racing get in the way of training" as a skier I know would say, and get out and mix it up a with your buddies with no agenda.

On a side note, the 5km run mentioned above (Apple Blossom Festival in Williamson, NY) was my first running race since the fall, and first event of any type that took less than an hour, since ski season, so that was sort of a shock to the system. The race went ok for me, I ran a 17:52, so nothing special, but felt ok and managed to finish 3rd overall. The big story of the race was the winner is a new guy that works here at Harris. He played soccer in college, so he's in pretty good shape, but he ran a 17:20 or something. So, he'll be a nice addition to the Harris Corp. Challenge team this year.