Century Season
Has arrived in FL. Nine members of last year's couch to century program made a trip to the Endless Summer Watermelon Ride to support a team member who was injured last year and didn't get to ride with the team last year. I sneaked in a solo century in early June, and have been leading progressively longer rides since mid July (started around 55 miles and ended with a 72 mile ride last weekend). The only thing I was worried about was the weather, because the last 2 weekends have been cool (if that's a thing in FL in August) with temps under 90. The forecast was for a high of 86, and they missed it by a few degrees, it was a blazing hot 91 with zero cloud cover, thankfully the ride organizers had plenty of water, and ice at all the rest stops. The organizers asked people to line up according to ride speed, we were too honest and had to work through a lot of riders on the 30 mile route at 13mph, which cost us a lot of time. We had the course sweep rider catch us at mile 63, which was a little disheartening, but attrition started kicking in shortly after that and the sweep rider had to drop off our group for mechanicals, and then people started loading up in the SAG trucks, but we kept going. Mile 75 had the longest climb of the ride, I wasn't in good shape, and our 1st time century rider blew up, but I knew there was a rest stop at mile 77. We limped in, got cooled down, got fueled back up, and started hitting the sodas (mainlining the caffeine and sugar). Up till this point in the ride I was eating real food, but after this point I hit the gel pretty hard and the gel and soda combo picked up my energy level out of the garbage. At the mile 88 rest stop, we again had the sweep rider right behind us, but it didn't matter how long those last 12 miles took, we were going to finish. We finished with a 15.6 avg speed, we only dropped 1 rider who was planning to do the century (they wound up with 75), we had zero mechanicals, and we had a great time showing our great team spirit. It was also very cool to hear from other riders who recognized our C2C jerseys from last year or from the write ups in the newsletters. It's a good start to the season.