The First Long Ride

So today marks the first of what will end up being 8 long weekend rides that will ultimately build up my endurance so I can handle a 100 mile bike race at the end of May. The route that Ben (my partner in training for this whole ridiculous thing) and I set up yesterday went into the city of Washington DC, and then back out along the wonderfully beautiful Rock Creek Bike Path. It was perfect -- We're going to need to travel north, northwest, and northeast in the coming weeks to accommodate for the amount of mileage we're going to need, but for the first of the long rides (a seemingly easy jaunt), it seemed a great idea to head into the city and see the scenery of our nation's capital.

The idea that seemed so great actually turned into a terrible idea at around 9:30 last night, when I was informed that because of The National Marathon (apparently a big enough deal to be dubbed the marathon of the nation), and the annual Cherry Blossom Festival (one of the biggest annual events of the nation's capital), traveling into DC on bike was borderline suicide. So we ended up doing something that I really hoped we wouldn't have to do in this training, and that is 'wing it'. With a solid understanding of the local roads and an ambitious attitude, we set off in search of 25 miles of road to call our bitch.

Once we actually got on the road and started cruising, it was pretty uneventful, but in a totally good way. Aside from the new arctic weather pattern, which dropped the temperature down to a little bit above freezing, the ride went off without a hitch. We made surprisingly good time -- We pulled off 24.1 miles (actual distance, mapmyride.com didn't take into account a few mistake detours...) in just about 2 1/2 hours, meaning that we averaged 10 miles per hour. Not an ideal speed, but considering we were stopping at red lights, biking on hilly terrain, and not actually gunning for good time, I think we did a great job.