Waco Wild West 100 Century Ride 2017
Back for more suffering, Mike invited Debra and me along for a family century ride, 100 miles. I'm not anything of a road cyclist, but was interested in expanding my fitness base to meet this challenge. Debra graciously supported and trained on those long rides too.
training ride in Vermont
After a mere 4 weeks of training, we arrived in Texas. First order of business was to re-size, clean, and inspect our bikes. Thankfully, none of us needed to fly bikes since there were a few spares including a tandem for Debra and me to use.
bike cleaning and re-sizing of the tandem
Ride day!
Notably, we ate at roughly every other rest stop (~22-24mi) and then every rest stop after mile 60. We had a few Cliff Shotblocks in our jersey pockets, but the stops were real food, mainly high in carbs/sugar (cookies, PB&J, gatorade). For hydration, we each carried Camelbaks (1.5-3L) and bike bottles for both pickle juice and gatorade, sometimes picklelade. Additionally, we had an excellent weather window of mid-70s and partly cloudy for a greater part of the ride, minimizing dehydration throughout the day. The toughest section of this ride in particular would probably be the climb at ~mile 80, which was long and consistent with no wind and direct sun exposure for its duration of ~3.5mi.
https://www.strava.com/activities/1219858554
http://www.movescount.com/moves/move180413869
Our training combined with our solid aerobic base and en route nutrition was on point this day. With consideration of these factors, none of our group really felt any significant muscle fatigue. The major complaints were lower back pain from Michael likely due to inflexibility, asymmetric achilles soreness from Debra likely from an ill-fitting sock (very minor), and trapezius muscle aches from myself probably from keeping the tandem steady with lesser ability to shake out when compared to riding alone.
As it goes, we simply can not get enough and onto the next cathartic adventure!
