The plan. Always a plan. And in the past, nearly always executed on the original plan! That ship seems to have sailed; over the past year or two, the plan has seemed to have been altered as often as not, at least for the Sunday rides. Today was another altered plan.

Originally Kevin and I were finally going to do a full Pescadero/Tunitas loop, possibly, hopefully, checking out the missing section of Stage Road, which appears navigable by bike. Getting in the way of that would be any work crews in the area, not letting cyclists traverse the narrow remaining strip of pavement. But for some reason, Kevin didn’t want to go to the coast today, or at least not via Pescadero, which would have added two of his least-favorite climbs, Haskins and Stage Road.

So I let him talk me into something else, while we were casually cruising on Canada Road, en route to the decision point, the base of Old LaHonda. If he was going to come up with an alternative ugly enough, I’d have to consider it. And he did. Redwood Gulch. The nice thing about RWG is that it delays the real pain for a while; 21 miles riding to Peets in Sunnyvale (near our former location), another 5 or 6 to the baser of RWG. Get to spend some quality time with coffee and a fried ham & cheese thing too!

And I wanted to see if RWG was really as bad as it felt the last time. Maybe I was just having a bad day, the last time I rode it and swore never again with a 28 tooth rear cog. Well, today was worse. A lot worse. I couldn’t get anywhere near the steepest part before realizing I was out of gears. Nothing lower left. I had to go into survival mode, no style, just one foot down, then the other, and force my way up. It was my slowest time up RWG ever, if you take out the earlier years when Kevin was really out of shape.

I made it though, hoping the run up 9 would be a lot easier. After all, I always seem to have the advantage on Kevin for that section! But not today. I was hanging on for dear life and getting dropped several times.

All of which gets me thinking I’m going to have to add some morning trainer/Zwift sessions if I want to stop the rate at which I’m slowing down. Three times a week isn’t cutting it. Maybe just an extra hour or so a couple other mornings might make the difference. Never thought I’d get that desperate!