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.