Spectating the Nichols RIde

The La Grange Sunday Nichols Ride is by far one of my favorite rides to make.

If I’m lucky, I’m able to make it out about once a month, but three weeks ago, I was unlucky crashing out.

You do this ride enough, you know the danger points.

I was having a pretty good ride at the front when at the final hairpin right before a brief downhill in front of “the wall”, the rider in first position slipped where there is normally some runoff.

While the rider in front avoided this, I was unable to next in line and ended up with the same fate.

My elbow was pretty torn up and I had a few scratches here and there, but my front shifter was done and pretty much the rest of my day too.

This past Sunday, I happened to wake up early despite having a pre-school parents party at our place that featured some college level drinking habits.

With CV Jr. sleeping over at my folks place and my counterpart likely not to wake up in the AM, I felt the urge to checkout the Nichols Ride from a different perspective.

Since my roadbike was already in the shop for the shifter, I extended its residence having Pedalers West ship my rear wheel off for some timely warranty work.

Without a Nichols grade competitive bike, I decided to bring out a few cameras, take some shots and just enjoy this race atmosphere.

I put together this slo-mo video while watching the boring debut of this season’s Bachelor (catching up, but not for long).

There were quite a few people I noticed, including chef Jeff Mahin who made Bicycling Magazine’s cover leading the pack:

I also had another GoPro that was snapping away, but it was in a pretty bad lighting position so all those got thrown away.

Still, I had my mini Canon which does the job of taking occasionally decent shots, so this is what I grabbed: