The Sting: Part II

The bee sting that is. No not me again, Justin this time. What is it about us and bees? Chris you better keep your head on a swivel and keep your eyes open for these little flying torpedoes on our next ride. You're up. The weekend was pretty well occupied for both Justin and myself so we pushed our long brick to this afternoon. This was also going to be my first real ride on the P3 so I was excited to see how it would feel. We were just heading up York Durham, Justin was leading and all of a sudden he starts waving and wants to pull over. He yelled "I've been stung!" and pulled off his helmet. At first I thought he was joking but then I saw the bee fall onto the road and I thought "Stomp the little bugger! Send a message back to the hive!" but before I could move it flew away. A few scratches, some rubbing and Justin was ready to go again. We rode the same route that Chris took us on last week, up to Aurora Rd., across and down Woodbine, back across Bloomington towards home. It's a great medium distance route with few hills that you can get a pretty decent average speed going and by the end we had averaged 30 km/hr even though we really hadn't pushed ourselves. We didn't head straight home, we dropped in at Cyclepath to have my front derailleur checked to see if they could loosen the limit screw that's seized. No luck, it's stuck good and the verdict is I need to replace the whole thing. Either that or be really careful with my shifting. Or never get out of the big ring which I rarely do unless I hit a big hill anyway. So ok boys, no big hills till I get this replaced. I'm pretty sure Justin hopes I never get it replaced eh Justin? We rode home from Cyclepath and switched into our running gear and I leashed up Kona to come with us on the run. I was going to break in my new K-Swiss K-Ona's today too and hoped they felt as good as the first pair I bought because these are the ones I want to wear in Miami. We took a route that went by Cyclepath again because while I was in there earlier I noticed the same tool bag that Chris has and both Justin and I wanted one so we dropped in, bought the last 2 and took off again. We started off averaging more than a 6:00 minute pace and I wanted to finish at better than that for Justin so I kept pulling ahead and trying to get him to push a bit harder. At about 9 km I told Justin that we were close to a 6:00 minute average and we picked it up to about a 5:30 for a couple of km and then 5:15 at the 11 km mark. We got a bit of a rest at a traffic light at 9th Line and then from there we sprinted the last 350 m and finished well below a 6:00 average at 5:45. Essentially, this 12 km run was a test run for what I've laid out for Justin in Miami. Start at 6:30, work to 6:00 for the majority of the run and finish off strong. Granted this was half the distance but I think it showed that it can work.