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.
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