I put the hurt on him...

But I didn't intend to send him to the hospital!

Ride started out normal enough. I met Mike and then we picked up Doug along the way. Matt joined up shortly thereafter. We rode up north to Cave Creek road in Carefree and then rode down and intended to go to New River.

I had been careful the entire ride of not letting my HR go above level 2. I was going to try and get a century in at race pace. As we came out of the town of Cave Creek a dark haired very thin guy with shaved legs goes flying past. There was no doubt that Doug was going with him and he flew past me in full chase.

What you need to understand is that if you sit behind someone you use less energy. So I figured that even if Doug was going faster as long as I sat in his draft I could stay around level 2. I jumped on his wheel and Mike and Matt came along.

We were flying through the town when our little peleton almost rear ended a pickup truck that was stopped in an intersection letting someone cross. Matt saw it coming and went around the pickup and accelerated the rest of us had to lock up our brakes.

I raced ahead and as the pickup passed me I jumped behind it into its slipstream and caught Matt in a couple seconds. Mike and Doug were working together pretty well behind and dropped the other rider. The road was turning uphill.

As Doug and Mike caught us I jumped out of the saddle and accelerated. I caught them all off guard and got pretty far ahead before they were able to regroup and reel me in. Just as they caught my wheel I launched another attack and broke free. I stayed on it for a while and then backed down and waited for them. This went on for a while.

There are two possibilities when this back and forth starts to happen. One is that the trailing group gets tired of chasing and lets the breakaway go. The other is that because the group never puts themselves into distress by launching an attack, they eventually tire the attacker out. In this case the latter happened. As they caught me again twords the end of the hill Mike watched me closely and as soon as I shifted to a bigger gear he went around me like a rocket calling me a "F---er!" as he went past. I didn't have enough left to chase him so I just jumped on Doug's wheel and caught him at the top. It was a good time but we'd pay for it later.

About an hour later as we were nearing the end of a long gradual downhill into the wind Mike signalled he was having some trouble. I thought it was a flat but when we stopped he said he was having bad chest pains.

We turned and took a different route to get him close to his house and the Matt went with him pretty much all the way home. The last thing he said to Matt was, "If I tell my wife about this, she's going to make me go to the emergency room.

Doug and I continued on and I ended up getting 90 miles in just about 6 hours. Slow but probably what I should expect. Anyway, when I got home I had a text from Mike that his wife made him go to the emergency room. They admitted him and he's got to get a stress test done tomorrow.