jppe

Great route, great roads, terrific support but lousy road markings, weather and overall turnout.

I rode the century but added a few miles due to wrong turns. Sometimes I had to re-climb hills I wasn't supposed to descend.........I wasn't alone though. Very unusual road markings-at least I had not seen these types used before. I don't think I ever figured out if a marking wanted you to make a turn or go straight. I wasn't alone as others had the same issue. Hard to describe what they used. Instead of common "pointed" arrows they used "sticks" with a "wing" coming off to one side of the stick, or half of a pointed arrow in some cases. It also seemed to mean different things at different places. I had a chance to talk with the fella who did the markings at the end of the ride and he was making his case about how they are correct and the official way to mark routes. The ride organizer pointed out how everyone was making wrong turns so maybe he needed to rethink what he had done********** Oh well......

Weather was pretty cool, but if you were dressed for it, it was great. However the wind was steady 15 mph and gusted to how knows what........I was behind one fella with deeper rims and when we came out from some cover to an opening the wind moved his front wheel over so much it scared him.

The feature climb was Pilot Knob State Park which was 2+ miles at 10% average with pitches to 19%. I thought we were doing it late in the ride but as it turned out we did it at about 20 miles so that was nice to do that climb with fresh legs. There were lots of other shorter climbs at 13-15%.

There were only 7-8 of us doing the 100 miler. I didn't finish first or last.........but rode just about solo the entire ride.

I think I did the 100 miles in 6 hr 30 mins. It had about 7600 ft of climbing. Basically a pretty good training ride.