Road ride with Chirag

Proof that I'm crazy... I just completed a 63 mile bike ride -my longest yet. Wait...that's not the crazy part. The crazy part is that this comes on a day when I was supposed to ride about half this distance according to our training calendar.

Why would I choose to do this? I could blame Chirag - my riding partner for the day - pressuring me into riding longer than I wanted to. He's training for the Solvang Century and is trying to build up his mileage. The story of how I met Chirag is an interesting one, but has nothing to do with Ironman training so I won't go into it... suffice it to say we're probably related in some way.

Anyway, that's not the reason. The real reason is that I'm completely inadequate on the bike when it comes to riding longer distances. My butt starts hurting, my neck and shoulders start to ache, I imagine that my hands are going to fall asleep and slip off my handbars... you get the picture. And while I'm eventually going to be doing a lot more long rides, it's driving me crazy that I constantly feel crummy after getting off my bike. The solution? Miles....lots of them.

So we rode from Chirag's house near Rancho San Antonio up to Sawyer Camp Trail. The day was beautiful (reinforces my earlier thoughts on living in California) and we covered the 31 miles pretty quickly. I was feeling great - really strong. In retrospect, I credit my enormous breakfast at IHOP that morning. The boost from that breakfast started winding down on our way back. By around mile 45, I started feeling restless and knew that my body was starting to tire. The last 10 miles, all I could think about was getting done. Actually, that's not exactly true. I was also wondering how I was possibly going to keep that up for 115 miles in a race.... and then run a marathon. By the time we got back to Chirag's house, any enthusiasm I felt about finishing had pretty much been killed off by my worry about how I would ever do this in an event. It didn't help that on the ride we met a guy pulling his baby in a stroller who told me that the race portion of Vineman (my event) was tough. Or that even with a stroller, he was going the same speed as me. Or that it had taken about 4.5 hours to cover this distance, which meant that I was on target for a 9 hour bike ride at Vineman.

So back to additional proof that I'm crazy.... I complete my longest ride ever and I can't even enjoy the accomplishment.