I have decided that riding the Six Gap Century (
https://www.6gap.com/ ) within 6 weeks of my 70th birthday would be a worth goal. I have ridden two other centuries so I am not completely out of my element here. OTOH, that was a couple years ago (I did keep riding) and (unavoidably) I am a couple years older.
I have one major concern here and that is the extent and type of the climbing. My lowest gear is going to be 34 (front) and 29 (rear). So issue
#1 is that, on occasion, I am going to be forced to do some very high torque/low rpm pedaling.
Issue
#2 is in the area that I ride, it is very up and down but the ups never last long and the downs never last long either (just like the flats also never last long). So an extended climb of 25 or more minutes without any kind of break is going to be something of a foreign effort for me. 5 minutes of up is about the max that I encounter on my rides. In principle you can just do a big shift and keep up the effort level on the down side after a climb, but that doesn't seem to work really well to me.
So the best that I can see doing here is the following
1) Do a lot of big gear climbing (at least on the things that we call climbs around here)
2) Do a lot of hill repeats (lots of big gear stuff mixed in)
3) Find areas that allow a constant effort (even gentle uphills would work using the proper gearing), as best as I can
4) This one is a bit off the wall. I have a spinner bike with Garmin Vector pedals that I could use to actually do some 20+ minute, 240 watt (to pick a number) pedaling.
Thoughts/comments on all this? Thanks.
dave