Riding Dirty – The Ride Before The Ride

in ,

I’m a bit tardy in getting around to writing this post. This time I will blame it on needed recovery and wanting to remove this Sunday’s ride from my thoughts. As I mentioned in my previous post I was planning on doing this 12hr slog a week prior but had to postpone due to some lingering issues from the concussion I received during the Matrix Criterium. Or maybe I just procrastinated as long as I could. Publically I’ll go with the concussion excuse.

So Sunday I strapped on the lights and filled many bottles. Rolling out at 5am I had a plan in mind that seemed to make sense. I would do a few hours, meet up with the group ride for some company then ride north for a few hours, another group ride and then back south a few hours and that would be a perfect 12hrs. 5am-5pm…Easy! Everything was going to plan except I began to have second thoughts about the second group ride. It was one I’d never done and on roads foreign to me. Knowing that I’d be 7-8hrs into my day I began to fear getting dropped and lost out in the middle of nowhere. So in a haze I reevaluated the day and whether right or wrong I went south out on roads I was familiar with.

Ultimately what this meant is that I was spending 8 of 12hrs riding solo. Good training for the body but not so much for the mind. Gladly I had let enough peers know what I was doing so that I couldn’t just slip home without enduring their ridicule. It’s not that they wouldn’t have understood but they surely would have leveraged my weakness for a little friendly banter.

The mind goes to many weird places during rides like this and it didn’t help that it was 98degrees. As is to be expected most of the time was spent thinking about the upcoming race and why was I even interested in doing it. Also an equal amount of time was focused upon ways to get out of it…I came away with no answers so on we go.

Because everyone loves numbers the most surprising was that 12hrs away from home equated to exactly 11hrs of actual riding. If you consider the stoplights, nature breaks and fluid resupplies, I guess it makes sense. At the end of the day I was right under 200miles, 6,750ft of elevation in flat Dallas and just about 6,400kjs.

 

Back to criteriums. Silly sport…

Simon