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.