2 Hour Ride

My training plan called for a 2 hour ride. So I scoped out the area to try and find a ride that was roughly 38 miles long. I finally made one that was 37.5 which was perfect.

My plan was to get up at 6am, eat a bagel and be on the road by 7am as I was playing in a charity golf tournament at 10am.

Everything goes according to plan, I eat, put my bottles on my bike and go to top off my bike tires and my front tire is flat. I put air in it and I can hear it coming out. So that takes me 15 minutes (not good at this yet) to change the tire, so now I am quite a bit behind schedule.

I ended up cutting out about 2 miles of the planned route because I was running really late. (I made it just in time to the golf tournament).

The weather for the ride was pretty lousy. It was very wet for the first 20 minutes, then it was totally dry for the next 20 minutes, then it was VERY foggy for the next hour. Like a few hundred feet visibility foggy. I couldn't see the next hill until I was on it. Then it was dry with better visibility again by the time I got close to home.

I had a lot of issues with my glasses. They got wet, then they fogged up and I couldn't keep them clear enough to see very well. I stopped a few times to take them off and wipe them down. I ended up just taking them off for the last 10 miles.

I did not feel like the ride went very well at all. The first hour went good. There are a couple of short but steep hills on that first part and I thought I did those pretty quickly (Strava says a PR on one of them).

When I made the turn back to the south on Arnold road thats where the trouble began. That is a new road to me and it is VERY hilly. It felt entirely uphill without much of a break. My legs were toast by about 3/4 down this road. Part of it was not being able to see the hills until I was actually on them. It was a mental strain.

Then it was just a matter of getting home. The rest of the ride went ok.