102 Reasons to Hate Centuries

So September 15th was the day of the big century. A full summer's worth of training would culminate with my dad and I departing Maywoods Environmental Park in Sheboygan, WI for a 100 mile bike ride. You know it's really funny how 100 miles really doesn't seem like that long a distance when you first sign up for the ride and yet, when the day of the ride finally comes, you find yourself thinking "What fool in his right mind would sign up for a hundred freaking mile bike ride?" My legs sometimes cramp up DRIVING 100 miles. As my dad pointed out during the ride, it's only 15 miles shy of riding from Milwaukee to Green Bay... that's a long ways!

Anyhow, once again we must back it up to get the full story of where I was at coming into the ride. In a word the answer to that question is Hawaii! Yes, my wife and I spent over a week enjoying the beaches and scenery of Kauai and Oahu. A great time! Unfortunately (as I knew would happen) I never got around to renting that bike and taking a ride to "keep my legs fresh" as planned. This meant my last ride was Sept. 2nd, in Minnesota which is a story in itself (let's just say that 30 mile an hour headwinds while riding past field freshly covered with pig manure does not make for a good time). So Hawaii was great for relaxation but not so great for getting ready for a century.

We arrived back in Minnesota on Thursday morning, drove to my brothers house on Friday and the century was on Saturday. When we left for Hawaii the temperatures were in the high 80's, I prayed it wouldn't be that hot for the century since, as previously mentioned, I hate riding in high heat and humidity. God sometimes has a funny way of answering prayers. I know this because the forecast ride time temperature was 37 degrees (yes thats Fahrenheit). But of course I planned for the possibility of cold weather and packed cold weather riding gear right? Well, not so much. But I at least did have a windbreaker right? Again, not so much yes as no. So... when my dad showed up at my brothers house we headed over to Wal Mart to see what they might have to help out. Selection wasn't great but I did find a long sleeve jersey and a pair of camouflage gloves. The gloves were under $3 so I figured if they got too warm I'd chuck them into the ditch or something.

The next morning we were up early to head to the starting point. It was butt cold. I mean see your breath and watch it freeze and fall to the ground cold. OK maybe not that cold, but it was freezing if you were dumb to enough to show up in a long sleeve jersey and camouflage gloves (oh yeah, I was wearing shorts too!). There is only one word that would describe the first 12 miles or so, that word being Brrrrrrrrrrrrr! My legs just turned blue remembering the experience.

Anyhow, because it gets light later this time of the year, the ride had a relatively late start time of 7:30AM. They announced in the pre ride briefing that they would like to have everyone off the course by 5PM if possible. That's 9:30 hours for you non-math types or a little over 10mph average including time spent on breaks. Based on our times for our previous shorter rides I figured this would be close to when we would actually be finishing.

So 7:30 AM we headed out led by a rider in a giant Badger costume (only in WI). The first 12 miles were, because of the immense cold, quite miserable. It was so cold nothing would loosen up and my heartbeat was about 200 bpm just trying to pump enough blood to the extremities to keep my body alive. I have to tell you that if I had been asked after the first 12 miles what are chances of finishing the century were I would have put them at about 10%. At least for me... My dad was chipper as ever talking about how cold it was but looking excited enough to ride a double century.

Luckily not long after the first rest break a couple of good things happened. Number one the sun came up enough that the icicle hang from my thighs started to warm up enough that they were dripping a little. Number two I caught myself worrying about how cold it was, and worrying about my knee that had been bothering me the last couple of rides, and worrying about my "nomads" and if they were going to give me trouble today. So I said to myself, "Self, cut that out. Look around, check out the great WI scenery, and just ride to have fun." So that's what I did. We really were in a beautiful part of Wisconsin. We headed out of Sheboygan past a number of dairy farms and headed into the Elkhart Lake region. My dad was hoping they'd let us do a lap of the famed race track there but we were thankful they didn't once we heard a race going on. That would've been interesting, race cars at 160 mph 500 cyclists at 15mph.

There were a number of challenging hills. I remember a couple of the better ones were on County MM only because as we were ascending one of them one of the other rides was talking about "oh yeah good old MM". I think by that they meant #@*!!& MM.
They were pretty fun hills though, more up then down on this particular portion of the ride.

After Elkhart Lake we were off into the Kettle Moraine forest (important note: I make no guarantees that any of this ride actually happened in the order I give here as by the end of the day I was required to completely shut down and deprogram large portions of my brain in order to finish the ride. The one exception is that I know the beginning came long, long before the end.) The Kettle Moraine Forest was beautiful. This alone made me glad we did the century as only the century riders completed the Kettle loop. We passed a number of lakes and streams and did quite a few more hills.

Lunch was being served at the half way point which was good because I was starting to get hungry. With about two miles to go to the lunch stop, however, (lunch was at the half way point) my left knee started to hurt BAD. What was worse the last section before the lunch stop was all uphill and uphill made my knee hurt REALLY bad. Just make it to lunch I thought and with a little rest maybe I can go on, but I wasn't feeling real confident at this time. But I did make it to lunch where we were able to refuel on some tasty subs along with the other typical rest stop food (bananas, gorp, etc).

Off we went again. My knee wasn't doing great but better than before at least. My dad's knees were bothering him some as well so I figured if he could do it so could I. The return trip was long! Much longer than the ride to the half way point. There were hills that I KNOW weren't that steep but it was all we could do just to get up them. There was one stretch between rest stops that was about 18 miles but I'm sure we actually rode 75 miles to get there. After that rest stop though (I think it was around mile 78) I think we both started to feel a lot better. We could finally envision ourselves actually finishing this ride.

Oh, but I need to back up for one of the funniest parts of the ride. As we passed the mileages of our different training rides we would take note of it and talk about the ride that we had done to that mileage. So at mile 50 we talked about the Ride for the Arts our first big ride of the season. Then at mile 64 we talked about the Pedaling for Kicks ride, the 64 miler we did by our house here in Normal, IL. My dad was hurting at the end of that ride. Apparently he was hurting even more than I had realized because as we hit mile 64 of the century he said something to the effect of "Man, if I felt that bad right now knowing we still had 38 miles to go I'd just aim for the nearest ditch and chuck myself in and end it." It was made even funnier because at the same moment we both looked to the right and the dropoff to the side of the road was about 50 feet and he quickly said "Well, maybe not this ditch..." Delirious as I was from having already ridden 64 miles I about drove over that dropoff I was laughing so hard.

So back to mile 80 where we find our two idiots, er , uh, heroes chugging along at a painful 10mph and now outside the 5:00PM finishing window but liking our chances of finishing none the less. We gutted the last 20+ miles out somehow. There was a good deal of downhill in the second half of the ride which made sense since there was so much uphill in the first half. In all I think our elevation varied from 600' up to 1100'+. We even managed to skip one of the last rest stops as they had 3 rest stops in a 15 mile stretch or something like that.

It was pretty exciting to watch the last few tenths of a mile tick down towards 100 on the GPS and finally see it roll over to 100. Even more exciting was riding back into the Environmental Center at 102 miles and making it back to the car. That was a great feeling knowing we had both made it. We discussed how we had both prayed frequently throughout the day and I'm sure we did it on alot more God power than on our power. I joked that next year we should shoot for a sub 8 hour time and my dad replied that he didn't even want to think about getting on a bike let alone riding a century for awhile. Pretty good for an almost 61 year old to ride 100 miles though. Just glad we both finished as I would've felt really bad if he had finished and this 34 year old hadn't!

Anyhow, gotta go. I'm riding my bike to work tomorrow so I should get some sleep! Ride on!