I’ve been waffling for days about how to handle bad weather on a Tuesday, even more specifically good weather from Tuesday morning into the afternoon and then bad to awful weather from 4 pm to 7 pm. Except for the afternoon and into the evening today that saw horrendous weather, I’m talking scared-for-my-life awful that had me sheltering in place and calling my wife to come rescue me, that kind of describes what we had to deal with here.
Under every past scenario in all the years we’ve been doing this series, it would have been a ridiculously easy call to cancel this hill climb by 4 pm. However, at that point in time, 10 of us had already done the hill climb. I literally went from feeling the early stirrings of heat stroke when I crossed the Huntington town line and trying to find a stream to immerse myself in, to feeling hypothermic while huddling under the portico of the Hadley Elementary School while lightning hit all around me, firehoses worth of rain being aimed on me from 3 of the 4 sides, temperature at 69 and the wind blowing fully grown cattle across the parking lot.
In the end, there were 13 people that did today’s hill climb. Some of those were under reasonable conditions. I’m sure there were at least 13 more who would have done it if they were borderline crazy and not risk-adverse. I applaud all of you that did not do this at 6 pm tonight. This may not be a popular decision but today’s results will not count in the standings as I don’t want to penalize those who are smarter than me. Think of it as an awesome training ride or something like that.
In the future, if the expected conditions around 5 to 7 pm make the riding unsafe, even if many of us have done the TT or HC, I will record the results but stipulate that they don’t count in the overall series. Sorry to the other 12 of you that did the HC today.
Here are the results (as I’m sure you all care about this):
1. Patrick Ryan; Time: 22:26; 15.49 mph; 0 points
2. Ben Winter; Time: 22:55; 15.16 mph; 0 points
3. Carson Poe; Time: 23:09; 15.01 mph; 0 points
4. Andy MacDonald; Time: 23:18; 14.91 mph; 0 points
5. Zinj Guo; Time: 23:42; 14.66 mph; 0 points
6. Henry van den Broek; Time: 25:17; 13.74 mph; 0 points
7. David Goodwin; Time: 25:53; 13.42 mph; 0 points
8. Madeline Nagy; Time: 27:57; 12.43 mph; 0 points
9. Tim Cary; Time: 28:08; 12.35 mph; 0 points
10. Cindy White; Time: 28:44; 12.09 mph; 0 points
11. Tim Pitkin; Time: 29:11; 11.9 mph; 0 points
12. Henry Wheaton; Time: 30:12; 11.5 mph; 0 points
13. Roger Stawasz; Time: 30:36; 11.35 mph; 0 points
These results are unchanged from last week:
Next Tuesday is the Deerfield Time Trial, which starts and ends on River Road in Deerfield.
