Flogging It

I went out on a 55 mile 3.5 hour hilly ride today. In sections I went as hard as I could. I wasn't on a great day, but my form is coming along so well that I still managed 9 PRs on the Strava. It doesn't appear that the crash on Sunday's cote de Tolosa had any real effect on me beyond a couple days of discomfort and a few lousy nights sleep. I'm pretty confident of doing the District RR Championships the weekend after this.
 The descending is getting scary fast for sure. The other day I clocked 60, and today I clocked a bit over 55mph. It's funny at this time of year it just doesn't feel all that fast - it gets normalized because of the volume of riding. I recently upgraded the Strava to give them some $$. It's such a cool program. I felt a little guilty using it for free. One of the best aspects of the upgrade is I can now sort by my ten year age group (55-65) and for all time records or for this year only. It looks like I'm in the top third to quarter of riders on most of the common routes. On a few of the more obscure off road segments I'm sitting on top of the leaderbaord for my age group, but that's more a function of not many folks getting out on those dirt roads. It looks like I'm about 2-3% slower than the really fast guys my age on climbs, which is where it counts. It will be interesting to see if I can notch it up further or if I'm at a plateau at this point. My only wish is that I could sort for 5 year age groups as I'm 8 years into my 10 year group at this point. Oh well, in another two years I'll be 65 and hopefully DOMINATING that age group. One thing that I learned from watching my father is that the older you get the fewer the competitors.