The ride starts at Frankenmuth High School. Many riders start riding as soon as they're registered, some stay for the mass start out of town. I'll be charitable and say that about a hundred riders started at 8:00. After following route options of 25, 50, or 100Km, the ride ends with a mini-tour of scenic Frankenmuth. Routes are relatively, but not completely, flat.

Chris, Don, and I wanted to do a relatively fast metric century, with the goal of not getting passed. By any other cyclists, that is. (Point of clarification: it would be OK for us to pass each other, or for cars to pass us.) Wind ran 10-15 mph (est) and of course, there was no cover from the farmers' fields. Not much shade, either. Otherwise, the day was beautiful. It started a bit cool, but warmed nicely. Good thing I applied plenty of sunblock!
 

There they go! The majority of riders seemed to be on hybrids or mountain bikes, with a good sprinkling of road bikes and a very small showing of recumbents. The lowracer gang waited until about 8:10 to start, to give the faster riders a head start.	The first stretch of nice road  was also tailwind! The gang went through most of our high gears on this stretch. There was no point in staying in a tight formation, so we spread out and started passing bikes. Mostly hybrids at this point.
Here, we've turned around and have a headwind. Hard to tell, huh? This is a nice view of Chris' setup. Optima tailbox and a nice trispoke rear wheel. By the headwind stretch, we were passing a few faster riders. The trouble was, with so many riders on fat tires, there just weren't many 'worthy' targets.	I haven't decided on a title for this one yet. I was trying to take an over-the-shoulder shot of the other two, but the camera decided it didn't have the right exposure until after I gave up.
We finally run into a few very minor rollers. Hills eventually got a bit bigger and closer together, but nothing to force us out of our big chainrings.	Here at the third rest stop, they had hot tomato soup. Otherwise, stops were minimally provisioned with cookies, apples and bananas, and drink; in this case, water and orange drink.
A mile or so after the soup stop, we turned and were rewarded with a long flat tailwind stretch again! Shortly after this snapshot, Don got his second wind and took off, leaving Chris and I to chase him for the next ten miles.	When we got back in Frankenmuth, we missed a turn and ended up at the high school graduation, at a park. I snapped this on the way back onto the route. I think this was the Bavarian Inn.

Overall, we had a good training ride. Our average sucked, thanks in part to the slow pace while touring town for the final few miles of the ride. But out on the open road, lowracers ruled; and nobody passed us. We did have a single and a tandem try to hang with us at different points, but they were short-lived attempts, because we were such rotten drafts.

Not surprisingly, the lot was emptying fast when we arrived back at the high school. Most of the riders had done the shorter routes. After checking back in after the ride, we lounged on our bikes for a while before leaving. Mike Senyk showed up on his homebuilt SWB. At Don's prompting, he went back to his van and retrieved his 'small bike.' It was made from one of those clown bikes. Mike reworked the frame, as well as converted the hard rubber tires to pneumatic. Yep, those are 80psi tires on that thing. This took him about a week to build. I like the color! It is a single speed with a coaster brake. The drive wheel is geared up to somewhere around 35 inches. I took it for a spin.  Not exactly the most efficient set of wheels I've been on, but what a hoot to take around the parking lot!