Originally Posted by WalksOn2Wheels

Ok, so some minor details. I finished pretty well, but just wasn't really in a large, competitive group. I got 12th overall, about 16 minutes behind first. A couple of guys got in just under 2 hours. Got second in my age group, which I got beat by something like 10 minutes.

So yeah, it sounds good but it's also only like 60 or so people that did the short route and I'm sure a good chunk of them were just joyriding. But for me, who has not been back on a bike consistently for a long time, to finish strong after only about a month of riding again feels like a big accomplishment.

I should mention that in the past I did these events and blew up big time early on just to crawl through the second half. I think it might have been rjones or laj that might have pointed to the fact that I needed to learn how to fuel on the bike. This was ages ago on an addiction thread. I did work out a system and I credit my ability to maintain the effort to that big change.

But the biggest thing for me was digging deep and still managing to have a really fun ride. I was worried going hard would just sap the fun out of it, bit it was quite the opposite.

Now if I can keep improving power and take off some of this weight, I might just be able to start training for longer rides and try to do well in some 100k events.