My First Century (Metric)

I know it's been a while since I posted and many things have happened in that time (a visit from Jill, a product released). I'll get around to posting about those later this week hopefully, but before I do I want to talk about a pretty major milestone for me.

Coming up in June, a number of members of the SpringSource team are going to be entering the Test Valley Tour When I signed up, I noticed that you actually chose the 50km/100km or the 150km versions. I registered for the first which meant that I could chose on the day of how far I really wanted to go. With all of the Sunday rides that I've done, I'd never made it beyond 50km before, so I sort of assumed that would be what I rode.

Rewind to last weekend. Adrian was spending time with his kids, so Rob and I went on our Sunday ride alone and we wanted to head down to Gosport. I was designated as navigator and to put it bluntly, I seriously messed it up. After an hour, we'd gone 13 miles and we're only 5 miles from where we started. Clearly not a good ride. We aborted and slowly made our way home.

Over the last week, Rob and Adrian were in San Francisco (trying to dodge disease). During that time, I tried to redeem myself and do some better cycle route planning. Everyday last week I went on a lunch ride that eventually stretched to a full hour 25km ride including a loop around Hursley Park, IBM's UK research facility.


I felt confident enough that I could now pick the proper road types on a map that I rerouted the previous trip to Gosport and was all ready to try it this weekend. Rob thought he might be able to make the ride today (he got in Saturday afternoon), but when he hadn't called by 11.00 I decided that I was going to go without him. After a bit more putzing around, I finally made it out the door around noon. Now this is important for later, as it means I ate breakfast at 8am and departed without lunch.


I'll say now, that the ride was awesome. It was warm and sunny the whole way and I don't think I really ever broke a full sweat. Hills in the beginning and flat as I approached the coast. Once I got to the coast, I saw hundreds (and not small hundreds, like 500 hundred or more!) sail boats all out on the Solent. This was the first warm weekend this year and you could tell. You could nearly walk from Gosport to the Isle of Wight without getting wet there were so many boats out. At one point traffic stopped because the public boat launch was jammed with 20 trailers of Lasers trying to put in. The beaches were packed and as I rode along the parade (think the boardwalk in Ft. Lauderdale) I even got to flirt with 4 girls wearing bikinis in a car for a while. Needless to say, it was an amazing ride.

My one mistake came as I was nearing the end of my journey. I'd just passed the 60km mark of a 72km planned distance and thought to myself 'What's another 28km, when I've come this far?' I do have to say that I was pretty sure that Rob hadn't done a 100km ride yet and that played into my decision making process. So at my 2nd hour stop I finished the little food that I'd brought with me and downed another swig of water and set out on my way. The final 28km were a nightmare.

I'd finished the one granola bar that I'd brought with me at 60km. I finished my water supply at 75km (hey, I thought I'd only be out for 72km!) but I couldn't quit. As the afternoon wore on, I started getting thirstier and thirstier. Then at about 80km I bonked. But still I kept going. I kept telling myself that I'd hate it if I'd come this far and missed my distance. Clearly though, I wasn't thinking straight through the dehydration and glycogen depletion.

The story does end well though and after a longish detour based on my evening 20km rides from the house and a couple of laps between my house and Sally and Rob's I hit 100km, my first century (metric, as I think it typically means 100 miles). I arrived home at 16.00 having eaten only a granola bar during the preceding 8 hours (I actually had to sit on the stairwell to gather enough coordination to get to my flat).



Now this is pretty important because it shows that even in a bad situation I can do 100km and it means that I'll be doing it at the Test Valley Tour. This was a relatively flat 100km (I think I did 572m of ascent and I'll need about 1000m) but it's a great start for training. All in all this was a great ending to a week that saw me breaking all sorts of personal records. 309.19km total distance, 11:27:55 in the saddle, 2214.9m of ascent, and 12,224 calories burned. Not too shabby I say.



P.S. As I was doing the screenshots and research for this post I noticed that at 12,782.3m of ascent I've climbed the height of Mount Everest (8,848m) nearly one and a half times on my bike! I wonder if I could have actually done the climb on foot ;)