Today's ride was all about "Let's try this one again". After a seriously eventful and wet day yesterday, this morning looked like much of the same. Cloudy, no wind and dreary out. For the 75 mile route we started at 7am again, heading out north west of Dekalb. Checkpoint 1 was very well staffed, good food, lots of volunteers helping out and in a good location too. Ryan and I managed to maintain about a 20mph pace on our own for a while so we were pretty happy with that. Past checkpoint 1 came the hills. Nothing too ball busting but a few were quite long. Most of the hills had a pretty good descent leading up to them so if you weren't totally out of it, you could build up some decent speed on the way down to help with the next uphill. At one point, I hit a new max speed on the bike computer. 32.4 mph! I think I actually broke the speed limit on that road at the time too. Checkpoint 2 was fantastic. Awesome amount of room (no bikes parked in the road) tons of volunteers and they mixed the Gatorade right! We stayed there for a little longer than we originally planned and got back on the road around 9:05. Stopped for communion at 9:11 (if you don't know what that means then you need to ride with us on Sunday) and continued on to checkpoint 3 (lunch). About 5 miles prior to checkpoint 3 we got caught up in a pretty large group of riders moving at approximately 22 mph. We decided it was a good idea to try and stick with them for a while and we managed to make it all the way to the lunch stop with them. It's strange going from riding by yourself or with a few others, to riding in a huge group. They literally pull you along. Lunch was much the same as the other stops and we didn't stay there long. After checkpoint 3 was when it got really open and exposed. Thankfully the wind still had not picked up so we made pretty decent time heading to checkpoint 4. From there we turned back south and west and although we were starting to get tired, still managed to keep up a decent pace. We only got passed by much more capable riders and only struggled up a couple of long hills. There is a section of the route that is about 4 long hills after another, then a turn to a hill with a S curve on it. That was probably the hardest climb of the entire day. Made it to checkpoint 5 just as they were starting to shut some things down. They had heard the weather was going to change and didn't want their generator or radio getting wet. We only had about 8-9 miles left so we stayed there just long enough to stretch, refill bottles and hit the road again. The last sections of road were probably the most busy as we were on Glidden and eventually Rt 38. Shortly before turning onto Rt. 38 we picked up a guy that we had ridden with earlier in the day. He was visibly exhausted so we offerred to pull him for a while. (For those that don't know, pulling is when you ride in front of someone and block the wind for them) We got him to Rt. 38 and he dropped back as we continued on to the Convocation Center. I was glad the road to the convo was downhill because I managed to make a decent finish without looking too exhausted. We stopped there for a while, had a burger and some potato salad and headed home.
Total ride time: 6.5 hours.
Mileage covered: 77.23 miles
Total time pedaling: exactly 5 hours
We managed to average about a 15 mph speed the whole day. I'm really happy with that considering I've never done any rides anywhere near this long and we had already done 44 miles the previous day. For now, my wrists are a little sore, as is my bottom, but my legs and arms are doing ok. We'll see how I feel tomorrow.
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