I rode my last organized ride of the season this morning. It was called the Ride for Reason, a fundraiser for Alzheimer’s research (if you want to contribute to my effort, you can do so at http://act.alz.org/goto/jclausing). It was chilly at the start, but nowhere near as cold as the CHA ride last month. Temp 54-75°F, light wind from the ESE which meant headwind relatively early in the ride. I have to say, the folks at the Trek store didn’t do a very good job marking the roads for this one. If I hadn’t uploaded the route onto my GPS, I’m not sure I would have been able to find the route. I think I can count all the arrows I actually saw on the rode on 1 hand (certainly on both). They were purple and very difficult to see. Having said that, it was a great day for a ride and a relatively nice route. The distance was supposed to be 47 miles because the original ride 25 years ago was 4700 miles, I missed one turn (added less than 0.1) and ended up riding 47.93. See the details here or below.
Category: bicycle
2013 Pedal for Pets
I had registered to ride this one last year since this is for the shelter where Shane & Jen volunteered at the time, but something came up late and I wasn’t able to ride it. This year, it was pretty darn cold at the start (especially considering that we reached 92°F earlier this week). Temp at the start was 45°F and got up to 66°F by the end of the ride. There was a light wind out of the SW. 45.0mi in 2:56:42 (15.28mph).
Tour de Donut 2013
Rode the Tour De Donut Ohio on Saturday. It was perfect weather and a very nice course. This is why I love these organized rides (or, in this case, race), I was able to ride with/draft off some other riders (especially nice when I hit the headwind the last 5 miles). Temp 64-84F, wind from W. 30.71mi in 1:43:38 (17.8mph), my fastest ride of the season. I was 2nd in the recumbent division in raw time (1:54:47 including donut stops, 9:50 behind the winner in the division, scroll clear to bottom of this page) which put me in the top 90 overall out of over 1000, but only ate 3 donuts (5 riders in the division ate 12 or more which knocked an hour off their times), so didn’t finish in the top 3 (I was 4th, scroll down to bottom of this page) in donut-adjusted time in the division. 🙁
Pedal with Pete 2013
And my second organized ride of the season was the Pedal with Pete Cerebral Palsy ride. Despite rain for the first hour, going 0.6 miles further than last year (due to where I parked) and weighing 10 pounds more than last year, I managed to cut 3 minutes off my time. It was a fun ride.
Bike MS Central OH Challenge 2013
Erin and I rode the Bike MS Central OH Challenge a couple of weeks ago. I just found the pix online today, so I’m going to put some of them up here along with a link to the ride info itself. Erin had a mechanical problem just past 15 miles, but still managed to make it to the 2nd rest stop at 30.8 miles before calling Sherry to come get her.
http://ridewithgps.com/trips/1516040
The year in riding
I know I’ve been really bad about posting here. There are things I’ve wanted to write about, but I just haven’t been able to make myself sit down and take the time to actually do it. So, I figured I’d do a brief wrap up of my year in riding. As you can see from the sidebar at left, I’ve done more riding this year than I have in a few years. I had some motivation, Bill (my brother-in-law) started doing triathlons almost 2 years ago and we had talked about doing a half-marathon together in 2011, but due to knee problems, I was never able to really start training for that. As a result, we revised our goal to doing a century in 2012 (my second, first since day 1 of TOSRV in 1997, his first). We (I) decided we’d do the Hancock Horizontal Hundred since this is a very flat century that I’ve wanted to do for more than a decade. I didn’t really get into the training routine until late May, and then in June I started having back problems (see my upcoming Christmas letter for more explanation) and had to switch from the road bike to the recumbent. I never really rode more than twice a week (with 1 or 2 exceptions) and I had breaks at inopportune times (like the Alaska cruise two weeks before the century), but I still managed to ride 830mi in 2012 including 5 organized rides (plus one more that I registered for, but then couldn’t ride). Below are some of the highlights & interesting numbers.
- Tour de Cause “Challenger” course – 41.69mi, 03:16:30, avg = 12.74mph, rainy and lots of hills
- Pedal with Pete – 47.61mi, 03:00:15, avg = 15.85mph
- Lancaster County Covered Bridge Metric Century – 66.46mi, 04:43:12, avg = 14.08mph, very hilly
- HHH – 100.85mi, 06:17:54, avg=16.01mph, really tough headwind section just after lunch, but fortunately found a group to ride with
- Trek Breast Cancer Ride – 42.54mi, 03:00:04, avg = 14.17mph, I had hardly ridden in a month
- Total # of rides = 28
- Total mileage = 830.02mi
- Total time = 56:03:44
- Avg. speed = 14.81mph
- Avg. length of ride = 29.64mi
- Avg. time of ride = 02:00:08
- Rides over 20mi = 20
- Rides over 30mi = 11
- Rides over 01:30:00 = 18
- Rides over 02:00:00 = 8
And another ride in the books
Longest ride of the year, 15.13 miles in 1:04:21. I was loving the “out” part of the ride, I made the turn averaging 16.4 mph, but the head wind on the way back “in” was brutal (final average speed was 14.1mph). Ah, well. I’m not posting the links to runs/rides that start from home though.