Completion!... And then Laziness (Pt. 2)

Taken right before we headed out on our second leg of the century

Our first 55 miles were marked by unprecedented success, and because of the way the world always tends to balance itself out, the 45 miles following that awesome 55 miles were some of the worst miles I've ever biked. We theorized why the volunteers suggested doing the Berkley loop first... The consensus we came up with was that the Berkley loop must be significantly hillier than the Jefferson loop. Whether or not this was correct, I can't really speak to, because I was too exhausted to notice how bad the hills were.

The final 45 miles (technically 47.9 miles) could be split up into 3 different trips -- There was the difficult start (about 17 miles), the 'worst biking that's ever existed' portion of the trip (the next 17 miles), followed by the 'Dustin & Ben become possessed' portion of the trip, which was the final 14 miles. I'll discuss them all:

Difficult Start -- Immediately following our solid 55 mile start, we were feeling good... Growing tired, but feeling like we were doing great. Over the next 17 miles we (and I say we, but I really mean I... We both struggled at different times, and were strong at others... Overall, though, I'm fairly confident that speaking for both of us in this regard is at least very close to accurate) grew more and more tired. We had biked at least 55 miles in a ride 4 times, and it was nothing new. 72 miles, however, was coming up on our personal bests. That made the 17 mile ride from the 'halfway' point to the first Berkley loop rest stop critical stretch in our ride. It became more and more difficult, and the difficulty was only compounded by the fact that we were biking in a more "urban" (urban is a loose term when talking about Martinsburg), and therefore less interesting, area. We pulled into the rest stop and I noticed for the first time that I was starting to feel exhausted. Not just tired, but that tired feeling way past tired... I had another 30 miles to go.

The Worst Biking That's Ever Existed -- Between the first and second rest stop, I hit the wall. 3 miles past the rest stop I found myself in uncharted territory, and I began to really feel it. We actually had to make a pit stop at Ben's grandparent's house, which just so happened to be on the way... We pulled into the final (!!!) rest stop, and my body was breaking down. I was shaking, couldn't concentrate, and was seriously questioning whether or not I would be able to finish the ride (I was leaning towards not for about 10 minutes). We took a power 20 minutes at the final rest stop... I ate 2 bananas, some oreos, a bunch of that gu stuff, and drank a ton of water. I eventually began feeling ok again, and we finally (reluctantly) got back onto the bikes for the homestretch. If my explanation of this ride ever sounds exaggerated, note that there is nothing about this part that was exaggerated... Ben said he couldn't concentrate and almost ran off the road, I was shaking... This was the point where this went from a long ride to a true endurance race.

Dustin And Ben Become Possessed -- Not a lot to report on this. After I ate and drank, we went into a serious zone and plowed through the last 14 miles. To take a phrase from famous sports writer Bill Simmons, we went into 'F you mode' and just finished it out. We didn't joke, we weren't friendly... We didn't even talk. We put our heads down and just pushed forward. At 3:45, 9 hours after our start, we pulled into the finish line to our adoring fans... Who were just awesome.

Exhausted post-race photo.

Dominos Pizza never tasted so good.

103.5 Miles is more appropriate for a top 40 FM radio station than it is for a bike ride... After doing it, I don't find myself thinking it's any less crazy. I expect that in the future I'll do it again, probably multiple times... But it's still crazy; I still have a hard time wrapping my head around it. I'm glad that I did it, and I'll always be glad that I did it... It sounds cliche, but the knowledge that I can do this gives me the confidence that I can actually do a lot of things that I didn't think I could do before. For now, I plan on just going back to throwing my iPod on and riding to and from work, which is really the reason I started riding in the first place. I plan on changing my concept of 'long rides' to being more like 30 or 40 miles. I fully intend on doing a few of those in the near future. But again, I'm super glad I did this century ride.

Thanks to all those who followed me with this blog -- The support has been great, and greatly appreciated. Having people's support along the way has really made this a lot easier to achieve. Until the next century...

Completion!... And then Laziness (Pt. 1)

How often can you go to sleep at night and be confident that you did more physical work in that past day than you've ever done before? I don't know if I've ever been conscious of that fact, but on Saturday night I fell asleep thinking this exact thought.

On Saturday around 6:15 in the morning, Ben and I arrived at the starting line of the CASA River Century in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. Although the title of my blog may be alliteratively compelling, it's in fact factually inaccurate, since only a small portion of the ride took place in Martinsburg. As we walked up to the starting line, they were giving out coffee and donuts, among other things (who wants to eat a bunch of fried dough before a 100 mile bike race!?!), and this gave us a really good idea as to how strict and serious this whole thing was going to be. When we asked those in charge what time we should start, the answer was 'eh... Whenever you feel like it'. This was pretty nice -- We were clearly marching to the beat of our drum. We decided that 6:45 was a perfect time to get this monster started. We were prepared, dressed appropriately, and not freaking out enough to not do it, so we set out on our way.

The course was split into two loops. There was the Jefferson County loop (55.6 miles), and the Berkley County loop (47.9 miles). We decided (against the suggestions of the volunteers) to knock out the Jefferson County loop first. We both preferred to have the larger loop done first, and considering we had done the Berkley County loop 3 weeks prior to this ride, we thought it would be nice to have an idea of where we were when the going began to get really rough at the end.

I'm sure that adrenaline was at work, or maybe the first 55+ miles of the ride was just a perfect culmination of our 2 1/2 months of training. Either way, we made the best time we'd ever made in those first 55 miles. In a touch under 4 hours, we completed the first loop. That translates out to be just under 14 miles per hour, which for us is fantastic. We were stopping at every stop, but only for 2-5 minutes, maximum. We stopped for maybe 7 minutes at the final rest stop before the halfway mark (around 47 miles) for a bathroom break, and cruised into the 'halfway' mark at about 10:45, to the delight of our screaming fans. The picture to the left shows us at only halfway -- We hadn't accomplished anything new, and we had a lot more to go.

The Final Training Ride/Final Numbers

It's been only a couple of months since we began training, but we've raked up over 325 miles on a bike solely on our long rides. If I include the mileage from my commute to and from work (10 miles each way), the total comes to well over 800 miles. So over the course of the past 8 weeks or so, I've averaged biking 100 miles per week. Obviously that's been pretty backloaded, but for 2 months of my life, I have been biking a century ride per week. This coming Saturday is the century ride, after which I will be somewhere between 900 and 1,000 miles for the entire 2 months. These are pretty wild numbers. Anytime you need to put a comma into a figure measuring distance, you're talking about something pretty crazy.

To put 1,000 miles into perspective for those who read this blog:
•  It's 1,011 miles from Washington DC to Des Moines, IA
•  It's 1,041 miles from Buffalo, NY to Jacksonville, FL
•  It's 948 miles from Salisbury, MD to Madison, WI
•  It's 1,002 miles from Chicago, IL to Denver, CO
•  To travel 1,000 miles by car, you would be looking at about a 17 1/2 hour drive, and that's assuming absolutely no traffic.

Enough with the 'trying to blow your mind while also doing quite a bit of bragging' thing. This weekend Ben and I decided to tackle a route where we travel completely around Sugarloaf Mountain -- a geological marvel, in that it is the only mountain in Maryland. I'm fairly certain that whenever this happens, it's because the mountain in question is a volcano -- But Ben calmly reassured me that he's like 60% sure that it's not a volcano.

At the crack of what not very many would consider dawn (5:00) I woke up and prepared for the 80 mile ride with luckily no incidents similar to last week. We were on the road by about 6:30, and the weather somehow cooperated. The meteorologists were calling for rain all day, and somehow we lucked into about 8 hours of it holding off, which was just miraculous.

Something that we've struggled with over the course of the training has been time... We've generally been averaging 10 miles per hour when all has been said and done, and we've come to the conclusion that a lot of the time lost (we're almost always averaging 12 mph+ while actually riding) is spent looking at directions while stopped. Saturday was the worst we've experienced. What we though were very basic directions turned out being extremely difficult to follow, and we ended up having to call lady friends at 6, 7 and 8 in the morning to google maps us in the right direction. Ultimately, I think our time will be much much stronger next Saturday, when we will be directed where to go at all times.

Our route ended up quite different from our original plan. Minus the getting lost multiple times part, though, it was pretty close to what we were aiming for -- From what I've heard from my friends who have done endurance races (all running, none biking, but I'm assuming the principle is solid), if you can get to 3/4ths of the race distance, you're good to go. We biked 75 miles on Saturday, so let's hope that advice is legit.

So this is it. In 6 days I will be riding 100 miles in the culmination of everything I've trained for over the past few months. I appreciate everyone's support in doing this, as it's one of the most difficult and stressful things I've ever partaken in my lifetime. It's crazy that this is actually going to happen.

Veggie Pt. 2/Swan Song Sandwich

May 9-13 will more than likely conclude my sandwich experiment. While it's been wildly successful for me as a means for eating healthier, it's also been a surprisingly pricey endeavor. Also, although I like to think of myself as an extremely creative individual, the longer I go on with this exercise the harder a time I find myself having with coming up with new sandwich concoctions. I'm sure that moving forward I'll create a bunch more sandwiches from time to time, but I'm sort of tired of expecting myself to come up with something for the entire week. Call me crazy, but I'm actually looking quite forward to a week filled with PB&Js.

With that said, I would like to think that I went out with a bang. When looking back on all the sandwiches I've made, I've come to the conclusion that the vegetarian sub was the far and away winner. Going into this I never would have thought that it was possible to have enjoyed a meatless sandwich that much. But I did, and because of that I decided to try it again.

This week's sandwich is nothing new. People have been making mozzarella and tomato sandwiches forever. I chose to add pesto to my sandwich, and place it in between 2 halves of a toasted whole wheat english muffin. It was a really solid sandwich, and I'll give it a fitting score of 8.5/10.0. The true selling point of this sandwich, and the reason why I would consider it strongly in the future (perhaps more so than any other sandwich I've made in the past 2 months) is the simplicity. I could make this sandwich in the dark after like 25 beers. In the future I fully plan on bringing this back as a go-to sandwich.

My century ride is next weekend, and although there is another week where I should be making an interesting sandwich, things have gotten a little hectic, and I'm going to be missing a few days from work. So this is my sandwich swan song. At least for now. Unless I change my mind. Stay tuned.

May Failures

So many have asked me how my 80 mile ride of the past weekend went. The answer to that isn't even an answer. It's the absence of an answer... The reason there is no answer to the question is because the 80 mile ride didn't happen. The series of events leading up to the ride at 6 am ended up being disastrous, and in many ways the outcome of my morning was a blessing in disguise.

On Friday night I was invited to an Orioles game by a good friend of mine, who was looking to have a bachelor-party-like outing. Although I was going to be waking up at 5 am, who am I to tell a friend that I'm not going to go to something that's important to you, because I have to wake up early tomorrow... So I decided that I was going to just grin and bare it, I'll deal with exhaustion after the ride. After the game (around 10, 10:30ish), the group decided to go out for drinks. Being the great sport that I am, I said 'sounds great, I'll buy the first round'. We ended up getting home at around 12:30 am; Not the worst time in the world for a Friday night, but when considering the 5:00 am wake-up call, this was literally getting into the danger zone for sleep.

Let me explain a little bit about my sleep tendencies. I don't tend to sleep, I just do it. 8 hours plus each night, or else my life is less than ideal. 8+ hours gets me through the day in good condition. 6-8 hours and I live my life, but I'm in a tired state. 4-6 hours, and I don't function well -- I'm too tired to walk around and fulfill my duties as a human. Anything less than 4 hours, and I literally turn into a toddler. I don't listen to anybody, I have no attention span, I walk into stuff, I talk to myself... It's ugly. Less than 4 hours worth of sleep, and I may as well just not go to sleep at all. On Friday night (before 80 miles worth of biking) I went to sleep at around 1:30 or 1:45. We were deep inside the danger zone at 3:15 or 3:30 hours worth of sleep.

On Saturday morning I awoke (relative term under these circumstances) to my alarm at 5:00 am feeling worse than I've felt since college (not an exaggeration). I got up and went through all my routines -- Oatmeal, water, stretching, SportsCenter, etc. After all that I began prepping my bike. I started by pumping my tires... Which went along without a hitch, until the hitch. I broke the valve on my back tire, making riding an impossibility. "So why don't you just go buy a new inner tube, Dustin? Sounds like you didn't really want to go on this ride to begin with" would be what the doubting questioner inside my brain would say. The fact remained that it was 5:20 am on a Saturday morning, and nothing opened until 10:00. I was unfortunately (fortunately) going to have to pass on this week's ride.

Warning to anyone about to read this post -- This is a really long post that doesn't go anywhere, and has an ending that's totally not worth the build up. What? You already read it? Bummer, sorry about that.

Turkey, Dressed Up

Trying to do the more healthy thing nowadays... With my century ride just over 2 weeks away, I've put it in my mind that I need to begin to eat healthier sandwiches. With that in mind, this week I chose to ditch any unhealthy meats (not like I was going too crazy with heavy stuff in recent weeks) and go lean. I went with a straight up turkey sandwich, but with a little flair.

I found the Wegman's Jalapeno Deli Cheese to be a huge success with last week's sandwich, and so I brought it back this week for a second interview... I tossed some sprouts on top of those classic sandwich staples to create a little bit more of a unique sandwich. What separated this creation from other run-of-the-mill turkey sandwiches was I slathered guacamole on both slices of toasted wheat bread, and I ended up with a fairly healthy sandwich which was wildly filling as well.

I've found that since I began making serious sandwiches about 2 months ago that I tend to lean heavily towards some more than others. This is obviously to be expected. What wasn't expected, at least to me, is how heavily I would lean towards sandwiches that were more towards the healthy end. I'm very surprised that instead of the chicken salad sandwich and hawaiian ham sandwich, I've found myself much more pleased with the veggie sub and toasted turkey/sprout/guac club sandwich on wheat. It's definitely been a pleasant surprise -- Maybe my tastes are maturing as I reach the second quarter of my life. Either way, if I was to make a list of the best sandwiches I've made since beginning this exercise, this week's sandwich would fall no further than #2 in the standings. A delicious, (mostly) nutritious, and easy-to-make sandwich, I will give this a good 9.0/10.0.

70 Miles... Take me home, country road...

With the beginning of May rolling around, Ben's and my training is beginning to wind down/intensify (depending on how you look at it). After Saturday's ride, we have two long rides left. We'll be doing an 80 Miler this Saturday, and then we have the century race. That's it. So yea, we've got only two long rides left... But it's 180 miles between those two rides, so how much we have left is really all a matter of perception.

Somewhere along the line, this went from being a casual weekend bike ride activity sort of thing to becoming an intense endurance training regimen. I'm not sure when this happened (I'm guessing it was between 40 and 50 or so miles), but we're both better for it. It was strange -- A few weeks ago, we weren't concerned with nutrition, we were rocking the short sleeve/long sleeve combo, and we were just cruising along not worried about time. In the past few weeks, we started eating every 2 hours during the ride, dressing the part, and becoming conscious of the time that we're making. On Saturday we made incredible time, and I can easily say that it was the most enjoyable grueling experience I've ever had.

We drove to Martinsburg, West Virginia this weekend... Home of our century ride. This proved to be our most daunting challenge thus far for two reasons: 1. It's the furthest we had yet to go, clocking in at a whopping 72 miles, and 2. We were actually biking on a good portion of the actual century ride course (more than half of it, actually). What did we learn? That West Virginia knows how to construct an endurance bike course... All I can say is... Wow. It was beautiful. We were riding by lakes, rivers and creeks. We were riding through forests, alongside farms, and possibly even some meth labs. And it was all amazing. Traffic was as close to minimal as I could envision it being anywhere in the country without the use of time travel. It makes me so excited for the race, now knowing that it's going to be a gorgeous route.

I had some serious brake issues which took about a half hour to fix in the early going... Not to bog you down with details, but it was like calling the cable guy to come fix your cable box and when he gets there he plugs it in for you. I felt like a total moron. We also left 19 minutes later than we would have liked to (6:49 leave time instead of 6:30). Those 2 things considered, we made awesome time for us. Including breaks, our ride clocked in at about 6 hours, which is miles ahead of any time we've made in the past. I attribute it to the traffic issue, mostly.

One last thing -- Sort of depressing, but also sort of great. The beauty of this ride made me realize how shitty our DC Metro area rides have been. Washington DC says that they're biker friendly, but there's just only so much you can do as a big-time city to accomodate for bikers. Going out to the country like that really makes me realize how bad we've got it here as bikers, and how rough our training has been due to our environment. Better to train in the fire, though.