Beware the Fred

This morning, I set out to ride 62 soothing, relatively flat miles on my bike. I drove down from Knoxville to Chattanooga, then woke up at 6:30 to drive another hour to Cohutta, Ga. Then I (and by "I," I mean my dad) paid $35 which presumably covered a donation to the Cohutta Fire Department, some good-ass post-ride chili and hot dogs, and a woefully misspelled T-shirt that reads "Peddle faster - I hear banjo music!"


The turnout was halved from last year, ostensibly owing to another charity ride -- darn those guilty cancer sympathizers! -- which started in Bradley County and overlapped part of our route. So that meant, mediocre cyclist though I may be, that I found myself at the front of the ride. Not riding too hard, but fast enough to overcome the basic forces of friction, gravity and rolling resistance.


Then the Freds swooped in and swept me up, the guys who ride $3,000 bikes at a whopping three-tenths of a mile per hour faster than me. I generally dislike avid-recreational cyclists as they tend to be exclusionary, elitist, and  laugh-at-their-own-jokes funny, which is to say not terribly humorous.


They also are apparently colorblind.


This year's route was marked in green (100k) and orange (50k). There were some leftover marks in a pleasant, though visibly aged, bluish-green (that's my best Blogger replica) from past rides which I dutifully ignored until I got called back and told to turn around. Again, I rode off the front, confident in my ability to distinguish neon-green spray paint from turquoise, until I reached a road clearly not on the cue sheet. A "local" rider tried to fix the errs of the group, and while we got back on course, we cut 17 miles off the ride. 


That doesn't cut it for me. I went pretty far out of my way to get jerked around by some morons can't differentiate between new and old paint. This spring, I'm 0-for-2 in the "Paid Events In Which I've Been Led Astray" category, and I don't appreciate it. An eagerly anticipated training ride turned into a pedestrian pissing contest because I trusted other people more than myself. 


To which I say, No more! Save your pseudo-upper echelon Chattanooga Bike Club / KnoxVelo lack-of-pace-lines for somebody who gives two spokes about being "part of the club." And definitely don't send me off course, then draft off me for 10 miles without taking pulls, then make some snarky comment at lunch while I'm right behind you about how that Tennessee guy was pushing the pace. Go home -- or do you need a cue sheet and GPS system for that, too?