Bacel Ride for Heart

Bacel Ride for Heart Sunday June 7This was an incredible event.  If you haven’t heard of it before, this ride completely closes down the Gardiner expressway and the Don Valley Parkway to allow more then 13000 riders to ride the route up and down.  I was interested in this even for two reasons.  One was that, this ride was something different and that I’ve never done before – as well not to mention the fact that I had a four hour ride to do and was looking for something fun.The other reason, was that a group that I ride with sometimes out of Young and Sheppard was doing this to support Douglas Stoddard of eload to help promote eload a little.  Not that we were going to be able to change the world promoting eload, however, since a little product was thrown our way, it certainly didn’t hurt.  I wanted to get 4 hours in just spinning away and so I decided to park about 20 min away from the CNE and ride down.  It was cool riding through downtown at 6am – no cars to swerve around and green lights all the way.  I knew the ride home was going to be much different.  We started and rode the route down the Gardiner – the wind was at our back and we had a great draft line going..When we hit the DVP – everything changed.  I didn’t realize that the way up to York Mills was mostly up hill and add in the head wind, things got tough.  The way the route worked was that when you get to York Mills, you turn around and ride south bound back to Bloor and then back to York Mills and back to the CNE to complete the 75 km loop.  I loved doing the loops because you get this ridiculously fast downhill back to Bloor, so there was a nice break before you had to work again.  When I back to Bloor the second time I started getting a little nervous about riding back through downtown again to the car so instead of going back to the CNE, I did another York Mills/Bloor loop.  By now the slower riders were making their way up the DVP and things were getting very busy.  Now, the 3rd time back to Bloor I decided to duck “off” the DVP and cut out the downtown ride.  4hrs and 115 km later I had a great experience…  I would highly recommend this ride to anyone.