I rode a hundred miles today

[ninevirtues]

Noteworthy because it's the first hundred mile ride I've been able to do since 2000. Hooray!!! Yeah, it still hurt occasionally (that chronic injury thing is still with me), but I remember riding 65 miles this time last year-- and it REALLY hurt; I wouldn't have done that ride, except I trained a couple of ladies to do their first metric century, and wanted to be there to support them when they finished it, which they did. I am very happy to find that 100 miles this year didn't hurt as bad. PROGRESS!

Now for the story: This is the local club century, called the hunnert and nineteen hunnert because we take highway 119 over the border into Virginia and return, traveling 100 miles on the way. Now, I'm used to California centuries, in which you show up when you want to (say, anytime between 7AM and 9AM), sign a waiver, pay an entry fee, and that buys you feed stops (where you can stop and eat) and sometimes sag support (someone drives the course with bike tools to help you out if you have trouble, but there may only be one of them for 100 miles of route). This was not like that. We all showed up by 8 AM, it was club members only (because no one else knew about it and it was not advertised), and one club member volunteered to follow us in his van with water, tools, and lunch. Someone's wife made cookies and other yummy baked goods to send with lunch, too.

On the way out, I had a cultural moment. For months now, I've been seeing buildings I can only describe as shacks-- unpainted one-room wooden buildings, sometimes with cement plastered in the cracks between boards, sometimes not; sometimes falling down, sometimes not. It absolutely blew my mind that (a) someone used to live there (b) No one had torn them down as eyesores and (c) ANYONE would EVER consider that a fit place to live.

Well, I found out what those are today-- someone on the ride told me: They are tobacco curing shacks. To my great relief, no one has ever lived in those. When tobacco is harvested, people hang it in those shacks and light a smoky fire under it to cure it. No one cares if the shacks are falling down, because they are used for two weeks out of the year. (If it falls down completely, these days they replace it with a corrugated metal shed and a butane heater).

Back to the ride: Three women and about 20 men started the ride. One of the women went home at the 25 mile regroup point. The other one rode until lunchtime and then drove the sag van 45 miles back to the bike shop from there. That left me with about 20 fast guys who were apparently having a sustained testosterone moment. Yikes! I can really tell that I'm riding with people who are primarily cyclists, because they ride a lot harder than I'm used to, and they expected to stay together as a group and engage in classic road race tactics.

Well now-- the longest I've ridden so far this year is 65 miles. There was no way I was going to be able to do a hard, hilly group ride for 100 miles. I knew I could finish, but I was going to do it at my own pace. I let them know that, reassured the sag wagon driver that I had her cellphone number and the cellphone number of someone else on the ride, politely declined the driver's offer of a motorpace, and had at it. Richard (a generally sturdy individual who spends most of his free time out in the woods on a mountain bike) stuck around with me, and we finished the last 25 miles or so together.