First Ride

After three down days during which I felt pretty puny with a lot of head congestion and didn't work out at all, I finally got to try the P1 out on the road.

The ride was a doozy. This week, my wife had the longest scheduled ride in her 70.3 training plan for her first triathlon of that distance at Bayshore in March. The training plan called for a four hour ride and we planned a simple out-n-back ride of rolling hills on U.S. 95 north of the city. The weather forecast looked good and we met up with a few friends who were riding different distances as they trained for different events.

The weatherman lied. Winds were supposed to be low. Instead, we had a strong headwind on the ride out. Going was slow and the winds were strong enough that we were having to work hard on the downhill sections to maintain speed. At the two hour mark, we found a good turnaround spot and began the trek back to town. Winds had died down a little but we still made ridiculously good time and ended up having to add a few extra sections of road to get in the full time. Some of the sections had us going back into the wind which reminded us that while it had died down, it was still pretty strong. We returned home right at the four hour mark with a little over 60 miles showing on the Garmin.

The P1 felt pretty good. The fit felt great when working the uphills and when in aero mode on the down hills. I did notice that I had a tendency to slide forward on the seat when working hard in aero mode on the flats. Braking was very sharp and the bike responded great to turning inputs while in both upright and aero positions. Shifting was smooth. I did run out of gears at 29.5 mph.