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Weekend Training Ride

As I posted before, I’m riding a 200k brevet in January. I’m also planning a solo camping trip for Thanksgiving weekend which will be about 100 mile round trip. Thanks to marathon training, my saddle time has been limited to commuting lately, but a sore hamstring made me decide to do a long ride instead of a long run this past Sunday.

I wanted to do a longer ride to serve two purposes: Make sure I could do the camping trip in a reasonable about of time, and serve as an indicator to see how my training should go for the brevet.

I decided to do 60 miles with a goal time of 4 hours. I ended up doing it in 4:15, so I’m happy with that. That time includes 3 stops which I didn’t time, but were all between 5-10 minutes.

At the half-way point I was a bit behind my goal time, so I decided to see if I could finish the second half with no stops, I managed to do this and it wasn’t as bad as I expected. It helped that a faster rider caught up with me about 15 miles from home and we chatted for about 15 minutes. I had to maintain a faster pace to keep up with him which helped my time a lot. The kind soul also gave me one of his Gu packets which really helped as I was out of food at that point.

Things I learned:

• My fitness is better than I thought, the longest ride I’ve done before this was a very leisurely 20 miler with some slower riders. Not sure if the running is what has helped, but something has.
• Need. More. Food. I brought a rice crispy treat and a pack up peanut M&M’s. I found 6 fig newtons on a picnic table that had been left behind from the previous days event on the Long Leaf Trace. This was still not quite enough and I could tell I was close to bonking, had it not been for the Gu pack, I dont think my finish would have been nearly as strong.
• I really need to adjust my rear dérailleur, I use one gear in commuting, the hills around town are small enough that I can just climb in the taller gear with no issues. On the trace they are not steep, but are extremely long, and after a couple hours, you really wish you had better gearing.
• The Brooks B-17 would have been worth double the money I paid for it.  The day after, I feel no soreness at all, none.

I’m really happy with how it turned out.  I caught a ride to work this morning not because of fatigue, but because of concern over a squeaking noise I’m hearing on the bike.