Well today I’m happier. I took everyone’s good advice:
1 – Drank a good bit of water and some coffee before the ride. (Actually no more than I had on Saturday.)
2 – Ate an English muffin with a good helping of peanut butter.
3 – Drank half a bottle of Gatorade while pumping up the tires, then filled the bottle with ice and water and into my second cage it went. Is it less OCP if I have plastic drink containers in my cages instead of a color matched professional bottle? What the heck is OCP anyhow!?
4 – Started out intentionally holding back and just a nice steady ~80 RPM
5 – Paid attention to drinking regularly while under way and paused every half hour to drink up the Gatorade bottle. Yes, I had to refill it at the halfway point of the ride, but that wasn’t a problem since I was just orbiting the neighborhood. Sadly, there aren’t a lot of real scenic rides around this area that are better than the ‘hood.
30 miles in about two hours and at the end I pulled up to the garage feeling like I could have gone quite a bit farther. I know 30 miles is a good warm-up for some here, but that is a pretty good ride for me, and averaging 15 MPH isn’t much to write home about either. One lap of the neighborhood, however, involves eight cul-de-sacs 8 yield/stop signs (which I admittedly treat as guidelines more than rules in the absence of traffic, but I approach them prepared to stop if I can’t clearly see that there is nobody else around.)
Anyway, thank you , the sage advice worked.
