We Did It!!!

Well, we finished our century up in Tahoe on June 3rd. Amazingly enough, compared to some of our training rides, it was actually not that hard. Sure, sitting on a bike seat for 7 hours and 10 minutes, that was hard, but at no point in the ride did I say to myself, "I can't do this."

Here's the route, for those who are curious (and again, if you've got Google Earth you'll really get a feel for this ride). Oh and for those of you who have commented things like "oh my god, how did you climb that much?" the GPS elevation gain shown is pretty inaccurate. Actual climbing for America's Most Beautiful Bike Ride is something like 4400 feet, not anywhere near the 8000+ feet shown via the GPS site.

Here's the last set of training rides leading up to the event: Tomales Bay (70 miles), San Rafael (46 miles) and Black Diamond Mines (41 miles).

There you have it. At 40 years old I completed my first century. I enjoyed it so much I signed up for another one last week. I'll be doing the Marin Century on August 4th. I'll keep posting my training routes and commentary here while I get ready to do that ride.

80%...

Wow. I really didn't realize how much time had gone by since I'd put an update on here. Last time I posted we'd just completed our first 50+ mile team training ride. Since then we've gotten considerably farther along in our training. This past Saturday, for instance, we completed an 84 mile ride in the Livermore Valley.

I'll let that sink in. 84 miles. On a bike. And yes, my ass hurts. That's right. It's 3 days later and my ass still hurts.

Seriously though, the worst bit about this past ride was the sheer quantity of grass pollen blowing around. And I do mean blowing. Sure, we rode 84 miles and did over 4000 feet of climbing and that was hard, but it wouldn't have been half as hard if most of those miles hadn't been logged into a 20 - 25 mile per hour headwind that was carrying the peak of the spring allergy season's grass pollen on it. My ass my be sore but at least that doesn't make me wake up in the middle of the night coughing.

Now, just to give an idea of how nuts I've become with all this, the next day I got on my bike and did another 30 or so miles for recovery. Wind still blowing. Grass pollen still as thick as John Madden's gut. Yessir, I'm certifiable.

Anyway, just to catch you up, here are the routes we've done since the end of March:

Buddy ride from GG Park to Fairfax & back - 57.44 miles, 2859 ft of vertical gain.
Team Ride, Tomales Bay Loop - 60.71 miles, 4523 ft of vertical gain.
Buddy ride, San Ramon to Walnut Creek loop - 32.43 miles, 1686 ft of vertical gain.
Team Ride, Half Moon Bay - 68.28 miles, 7766 ft of vertical gain.
Team Ride, Livermore Valley - 84.01 miles, 6101 ft of vertical gain.

If you've got Google Earth you can use the links on each of these pages to take a virtual tour of each route. If the schedule looks a bit muddled, it is. The week that we did the buddy ride from San Ramon to Walnut Creek we were supposed to climb Mt. Diablo, but it rained that day and the coach leading the ride chose a shorter alternate route that was less hazardous. I also missed a buddy ride in between the Half Moon Bay and Livermore Valley rides because I was sick. Oh, I went on a ride, like a fool, with the Valley Spokesmen locally, and when I got home had a fever of 102 degrees. Not smart. I told you, this cycling stuff has made me loony.

Here's the route I did when I was basically too sick to be out of bed. 48.48 miles with 3868 ft of vertical gain. Altogether, with mid-week rides thrown into the mix, I've ridden around 850 miles in the last 3 months.

No wonder my ass hurts.

Halfway there...

This past weekend our training hit the halfway mark and we rode a little over 50 miles through Danville, Dublin, Livermore and San Ramon. If you want to check out the route follow this link.

I've got a little wristwatch-sized GPS that I wear when I ride and with this gadget I can upload my routes to the Allsport GPS website where they can be viewed by anyone I send a link to. The really nifty thing is if you've got Google Earth on your computer you can actually watch the route from start to finish.

Here's our buddy ride route from March 17th and our training ride out at Point Reyes from March 10th.

Just those three weekend rides amount to around 140 miles of riding. On the buddy ride on March 17th the elevation gain for the ride was over 3800 feet. That's climbing folks. Serious climbing.

I plan to post my routes here for those of you watching in the wings to look over and hopefully be inspired, or at least impressed, by. I won't be posting the routes I ride during the middle of the week (yes, that's right, I do more riding on Sunday and during the middle of the week too) mostly because they're nowhere near as interesting or impressive. The idea here isn't just to catalog what I'm doing and share it with you, it's to motivate those of you who haven't contributed yet to go ahead and do it.

The point of this whole exercise is to raise money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. I'm doing pretty good on that front. I've raised a little over half my goal for this event. But I'm not going to let up. Not one bit.

Company Guy

One of the things that still has me energized about participating in Team In Training is our Honorees. For those of you who don't know how TNT works, each team rides on behalf what are called Patient Honorees - people who are living with blood cancers who may directly benefit from the research that's funded by your donations to each of us riders. At the spring season TNT kick-off rally in February one of the speakers was a gentleman named Roman who is living with CML. His speech really fired me up, and gave me a personal reason to be proud because he talked about how much a product called Gleevec that my employers, Novartis, manufacture has helped him.

The Monday after the rally I wrote in to our employee communications mailbox about my experience and how great it was to hear a positive story about how one of our products was really helping someone. I guess the folks I work for liked what I wrote because I was featured in one of our internal newsletters that just came out today. You can have a look at the article here.

3 weeks in...

This is a big deal. I'm going to ride my bike 100 miles in a single day. I'm going to be doing over 4000 feet of climbing on that day.

My butt is going to hurt.

Look, in all seriousness, what I'm doing is going to be tough, but that's the whole idea. The whole concept behind team in training is to get folks like me off the sofa participating in some very challenging endurance sport because the folks we're trying to help have had to endure even bigger challenges. You get the point.

Last weekend we had our second official training ride out in Pinole. We rode over the infamous Three Bears route. The total mileage was about 24 miles, but the climbing - woof! We did over 2200 feet of climbing, which is about 1/2 of the total climbing on the Tahoe Century we'll be riding. That's half the total climb over 1/4 the distance. Again I say woof.

I'm a rotten climber. Really epically bad at it. My engine just was not made to ascend hills on a bike. Either that or I've just got a lot to learn about doing it properly. I sort of hope it's the latter and that I can get better at this, otherwise I'm going to be hating it big time in June when we get to Tahoe.

I'm a great descender though. I zipped down those descents last Saturday nearly reaching 40 mph, and I didn't feel unstable or like I was pushing it one bit. Maybe I can hire someone to carry me and my bike up hill and I'll just do the descents. Nah.

This weekend is our first buddy ride. Once again it's in my backyard on turf I've ridden before. We'll be doing Calaveras. That's another big mess of climbing, but at least this time it's a climb I've done before. We shall see.