I did it!

Fear not, I made it alive through the ride yesterday. The last 20 miles were not what I’d hoped, and the muscle pain last night was pretty much incapacitating, but I’m still glad I did it. I have made a note for next year to do a better job of training, and to stop and stretch more before anything hurts on the route…

We had originally intended to start riding at 7am, but couldn’t drop Walter off at doggie daycare until 7am, so we actually got started closer to 8am. I knew things were going our way though, when we got up and realized that the ratio of water to more breathable less sticky things in the air had dropped incredibly through the night, leaving us with a relatively cool and shady day to ride, free of rain, heat indices in the millions, and other meteorological cycling nightmares.

I started out feeling really good. My legs hadn’t felt quite like themselves since the move (when I lifted more things that anyone should over the course of a week), but they were ready to ride yesterday. I was pretty adamant about sticking to a 13-14 mph pace which I knew I could sustain rather than getting excited and racing through the first 20 miles only to limp along for the last 40. We stopped at our first rest stop for a bathroom break and water/snacks at 13.3 miles and I felt great. We packed some bananas to take use through the next 25 miles before lunch, and went on our way.

I was a little tired by the time we got to lunch and was definitely ready to eat! We were 38.8 miles in and I still felt pretty good.

We had some delicious sandwiches and listened to one of the worst mixes of classic jazz covers, bluesy folk disasters, and other bad things while we ate. The group was well-meaning, and in general I try not to say bad things about other people on my blog, but we were to the point of speculating that they were there to move people out of the lunch site more quickly. In any case, we ate, stretched a bit (not enough, as I would later realize), and went along our merry way.

I realized I hadn’t stretched enough (or that something was more drastically wrong) when I had a weird pain in my right leg. I later figured out that it was a muscle on the inside of my leg that was clearly tight and pulling my knee in an odd direction, but it look me long enough to figure that out that I think I irritated/injured my knee a little bit, and it made riding a little uncomfortable. At that point about 20 miles left and I thought I could push through it. I did, with frequent breaks, but I was exhausted and sore when we got back. We made it in almost exactly 5 hours, maintaining a pretty constant pace throughout the whole ride.

Fast forward a few hours and no amount of cold water, frozen vegetable ice packs, icy hot, and ibuprofen could touch the pain. But sleeping (plus all of the things mentioned above) has improved it a great deal, so I can walk today, though strong use of my quads seems inadvisable… (As an aside, Alicia is fine, which I attribute to her lighter bicycle and inherent cycling abilities... She may also be a robot...)