My First Century

I've been a bad blogger lately. No posts in almost two months. Its amazing how easy it is to get out of the habit. Well, I had a fun day yesterday that I figured would be worth writing about. I completed my first century on a bike (100 miles). It was at the 12 hours of Addison Oaks. Its an endurance race that runs for either 6 or 12 hours and can be done individually, or as two or four person teams. The race is all trails, and fairly tight singletrack at that, but its one of my favorite trails around.

I was a little intimidated by this initially. I really had no idea if I would be able to ride for that long, but I wanted to try. Plus it would be a good training exercise for the Lumberjack 100 race I have coming up in June. That race is 100 miles and I figure is going to take me a solid 10 hours to complete. My initial plan with the Addison race yesterday was to just do the 6 hour race. Both Jackie and my friend Lee had been encouraging me to do the full 12 as training. I'm so glad I listened to them. While the whole race was really tough, the worst part was pretty much miles 40 through about 65 or so. I struggled the most there and that's right where I would have finished a 6 hour race. Later in the race I seemed to get a bit of a second wind and stuff stopped hurting as much.

I finished up the last 25-30 miles with my friend Todd, who was doing the 12 solo as well and is also going to be racing Lumberjack. It was great to have someone to ride those final laps with. We did end up calling it a day at about 10 1/2 hours since we were over 100 miles. Part of me wanted to get out for another lap or two, but the other part really enjoyed changing into dry, warm clothes and relaxing. Today I feel pretty good surprisingly. I'm a little sore in spots, but feel better than I had thought I would. It probably wouldn't feel good to get on a bike seat right now though.