Hambone

Funny, I just posted some of this elsewhere...
My wife's cousin is a serious rider and he had been trying to get me to re-start riding for years. I had built a road bike not long after I moved to NYC planning to start riding after grad school but marriage, kids, buying our own house... we all know the story. (I had been an avid mountain biker before and during grad school.) My new bike was in the basement with four years of saw dust on it and the tires still had those little nibs...

Anyway, my cousin said to me this past March, "So, we're doing the Montauk Century this year." He said it with such conviction I replied "Of course..." thinking I had told him at some other point that we would do the ride.

Now I was committed.

So, I broke that road bike out, started half commuting to work. (I would ride in on Monday and take mass transit home that night; then MTA in on Tuesday and ride home that night. Off Wed. then the same on Thurs and Friday.) Did that for a few weeks then added round trip on Wed. Pretty soon I was doing 25-30 miles/day and longer rides on the weekends.

I did a metric as training in April (kind of by accident. It should have been a fifty mile ride but a track fire in Manhattan forced us to ride home and it wound up being 68 miles.) Did the Montauk and have now done the NYC Century too.

My single biggest piece of advice is don't do anything different for the century. Don't eat different, don't wear different clothes, don't ride different, don't eat different, don't drink different, don't eat different, etc. Trust your training and just have fun. Oh, and did I mention don't eat different? Suffice to say, the last half of my ride through the Hamptons and out to Montauk was a never ending quest for porta potties.