What? 100 Miles? No Big Thing

I know that there's been collective breaths being held throughout the world of the internet while waiting for the result of my 100 mile bike ride held exactly 10 days ago. Well, tense internet-world, hold your breath no more, because the following is the answer you've been waiting for:

It was pretty cool, but sort of hard... Yea, overall it was fine.

Whoa, did that just blow your mind? Did I just use totally boring, nondescript words to describe something that's super crazy? Definitely.

The point I'm trying to make here is that the day came, and the day went. We got onto our bikes at about 6:30 in the morning, and then we were on our bikes for a long time, and then it was over. Nobody (me) hit a wall like last year, nobody cried or went crazy, and all in all everyone felt fairly strong the entire ride. This whole thing basically went down without a hitch, and because of it, the story of Dustin, Ben, and Erin's century ride is extremely boring and ultimately doesn't have any twist to it.

We began the ride at exactly 6:38am, and were cruising. Around an hour in, however, Ben got a flat tire. We ended up stopped for about 35 minutes, and were back on the road. This was literally the most crazy thing that happened all day.

We made a plan before the ride that we were going to spend no more and no less than 5 minutes at each rest stop, but we were going to completely blow by the first stop (17 miles in), as it wouldn't be open yet (the rest stops opened up at 8:30, and there was just no need to stop at that rest stop that early on in our journey). This plan opened us up to making the best time we could make early on, when we would be able to go faster, as we wouldn't have the disadvantage of extra mileage working against us. We were completely successful in abiding to this rule, and even decided at the last stop that we were going to ignore it. This resulted in us achieving our goal of under 7.5 hours. It took us 7 hours and 15 minutes in all, which we were all super thrilled with.

We met up with our adoring fans (the fan section grew considerably this year!) at mile 71. If there was a point at which any of us was dragging this year, this was it. I was sucking wind pretty badly at this point, although not to the degree that I was last year at mile 90 (I considered myself to be 'dead' at that point last year... Whenever I look back on it, that's the terminology that I use). I took some ibuprofen, chugged some Gatorade and pounded a banana and some Fig Newtons and we took back off. The next 30 miles were pretty amazing.

In a strange way, I somehow got stronger as we approached 100 miles. Maybe it was the Ibuprofen, maybe it was support, maybe it was a lot of other things, but I could have seriously biked another 50 miles after the 100 that day. I'm not sure how much in agreement Erin & Ben would have been with me on that point, but I did feel amazingly fresh. The whole story basically ends with us finishing the 100 miles and then eating some pizza.

So yea... Second Century -- Demolished.

We'll be gearing back up again towards the end of the summer for the Seagull Century, so stay tuned to the blog for that training stuff -- That'll be interesting for us, since it'll be completely different than the CASA River Century, and it's in my hometown of Salisbury. I plan on mostly continuing the sandwich blogging, too, so keep checking in for that nonsense.