Yep.. a good start. Do a dry practice run. Or, perhaps do an actual Friday commute. Get a good early start, do the ride in, then back home... then you can rest the next two days.

Keep in mind that there is also training issue. So, what is difficult now may not be that hard in the future.

This would be especially true for a newbie of one sort or another.

I've always done a fair amount of riding, but was probably doing 1000 to 2000 miles a year for most of my life. I hit a couple of low years, then about 5 years ago, I noticed that I could do the ride from my house to Mom's house (about 16 miles), but it was hard to do that ride, do stuff, then do the return ride.

Then I decided to go car-free. My annual riding has bumped up to about 5000 miles, 6000 miles, and this year probably closer to 8000 miles. Mostly commuting, errands, and utility riding.

So, I will now ride somewhere, maybe 16 miles or so, and do hard manual labor all day, and ride back, and hardly think twice about it. Other than the fact that I'm much happier to ride at 16 MPH than 20 MPH, with 20 MPH for 16 miles being impossible a few years ago, barely possible now, and hopefully more frequent in the future.