Fred’s Ride is named after a friend of Nick’s, the Hellweek organizer who passed away a couple years ago, and this route was his favorite of Hellweek. It serves as a memorial ride for any cyclists that are no longer with us.

Today involuntarily turned into a short day for me. I made the climb up Eagles Nest Mountain (wow, steep!) and at the bottom of the descent as I was going about 35 miles an hour, my rear tire exploded on me (literally!). The tire itself came off and the tube blew up and wrapped around my cogs numerous times, stopping the wheel. I then skidded on my rim for a while and luckily I was able to stay upright and didn’t wipe it. Pretty lucky on that one! A couple riders and I tried to pull the tube out of the cogset and thought I may be able to put a new tire on and finish the ride, but the wheel was toast. The rim was all cut up and terribly out of true. They went ahead and called the sag-wagon for me which arrived in about an hour. My wheel is at the bike shop in town getting rebuilt right now, so I’ll be back in business for tomorrows ride.

What was left of my tube after the blowout!

Because of the unfortunate problem with my tire, I only got in around 40 miles of the ride today. 8-( You can see the mark “BLOW”, that’s where my tire went on me.

This ride was on track to be about 6,000 feet of vertical climbing. You can see the Eagles Nest climb on here, very steep!

For the part of the ride that I did get in, I put in the fastest pace yet. I averaged 16.1 mph and hit 42 mph max. That’s over a half-mile faster on average than any of my previous days and is the fastest max speed yet. You can see my speed was pretty high right before I blew.

Despite this being my fastest day, my average HR was lower than all the previous days, at 116 bpm.

Tonight is the Hellweek Banquet. I’m going to take my camera so I can get some pictures of people in normal clothes! 😊

Part of the Texas Hellweek 2001 collection.