So yes, I did have a 400-mile week. Well, to be more precise, it was 390 miles in seven rides over eight days. The AIDS/LifeCycle is 545 miles over seven days, so I was still quite a bit shy of that. What does a 400-mile week look like?
- Monday—51 miles (Esparto with Davis Bike Club)
- Tuesday—0 miles (rain)
- Wednesday—30.7 (Winters with DBC)
- Thursday—38.8 (Yolo, solo)
- Friday—60.3 (Vacaville, solo)
- Saturday—47.1 (Nimbus Dam to Newcastle with Sacramento ALC folks)
- Sunday—72 miles (Vacaville and Elmira, solo)
- Monday—90.5 (Sacramento/Woodland/Esparto/Winters, solo)
There were a couple of reasons for this. My partner, Lisa, was traveling in Spain, so I had a lot of spare time. Also, this past week was the best stretch of weather we’ve had in a long while and I wanted to take advantage of it. Plus, it’s easy to ride big distances out of Davis. The town is surrounded by a lot of open space. You can go miles and miles without any stop signs or traffic signals.
I have been counting on riding long distances in March to reach a tipping point. Like most riders, when I first start training for an event I get to a point in each ride when I look at how much further there is to go and feel a twinge of despair. As in, “I’m this tired and there’s still ten miles to go?” At some point in your training, however, that equation flips to the other side and you feel a twinge of disappointment that there is only ten miles left to go, because riding a bike is fun. Once you’re off the bike, you have to face all the problems of life that had somehow vanished while you were riding.
So my big mileage week was designed in part to get to that point sooner rather than later. It was also meant to get me to a place where distance felt comfortable again. As any ultra-distance rider will tell you, long-distance riding is 90% mental training. It is more difficult to sit on a bike that many hours in a day than it is to pedal that many. At some point early on your legs just turn without any thought or too much effort. But your arms get tired from leaning on them; no matter how good your saddle fits, there will be periods where it is extremely uncomfortable to sit in any position for very long; and when you can see the hills you’re riding to twenty miles off in the distance, it’s really hard not to think you’ll never make it. I think that’s why most ultra-distance riders are older: it takes patience to ride lang distances.
Kathy is leading a 60-mile AIDS/LifeCycle training ride in LA on March 23. Her longest ride this season is the 40-mile ride we took last month out of Paso Robles. She plans to lead the ride from the tandem. By getting longer miles in ahead of time, I hope to be able to make it easier for her to bridge that distance gap. She’s already crossed the tipping point, where the end of the ride is a disappointment and not a relief. In fact, I think she’s always there. Now we just have to get her to where she feels that way on distances over 50 miles when everything aches and the end seems nowhere in sight.
