"This year I bought a road bike off CL and other than a metric century 1 month ago (no problems), I have only rode it ~ 5 or 6 times."

Imagine if you'd just taken up swimming since you were a kid who only dog paddled, and now you're trying to learn to swim for real in a pool, or even off the beach at Sandy Hook. And imagine you've decided to swim a mile in the sea in a month as part of a charity event, but you feel more comfortable dog paddling because you haven't learned to do the crawl well after your first couple of swimming lessons.

So you wonder if you could just ride your bike to help you get in shape for the event and switch to the crawl, which you don't like, after just dog paddling for the month.