I signed up for
Ride the Ridge, a 50-mile hilly ride in the central Hudson valley. For the weeks leading up to the ride, through the moment I started, I had doubts as to whether I would finish easily or even finish at all.
My commute has only a few hills, none of them very tall, and only one incline is steep. Most of my commute is flat. It's 13 miles each way.
The ride was yesterday (Sunday). As luck had it, I found it to be fairly easy, even with the one very long climb. There were over 100 entrants in the long route that I took. I certainly wasn't the fastest, but neither was I the slowest. And I seemed to be the fastest descender around me, for whatever that's worth.
I kept waiting for the route to be difficult, and it never happened.
Here are my tracks, complete with speed and elevation graphs. They include the 4 miles from my home (in High Falls) to the ride's start. Funny, on my commute, I average 12 mph, and on this ride, I averaged 14 mph. I guess with all that company, I challenged myself without even knowing it. I'm capable of more than I thought.
I thought I was ill prepared because I hardly ever take a long ride these days. (I define a long ride as 30 miles or more.) But I wasn't ill prepared at all!
Given how relatively fresh I felt at the end, I'd say that if I wanted to ride 100 miles in a day, I could do it, but that's not saying it would be easy. I noticed my legs didn't have quite the oomph at the end that they had in the beginning. I'd say my ideal very-long-ride length would be 75 miles.