“Ride #73: My One Thousand Mile Month”

This month turned into a successful, personal, pet project without me even knowing it until it was half done. It started with just two simple goals: ride very consistently, and ride a century. Both were important goals because the PMC is always the first weekend after July, and my training before July was very spotty (and included no centuries at all).

A few days into the month I decided on a schedule of "six days on, one day off" the bike. Since Thursday night's group hill ride is the hardest of the week, Wednesday would be my day off (with the added benefit of leaving me conscious for Bible class that night).

By mid-month I'd done pretty well. Still wasn't perfectly consistent (but it's not like I'm doing this for a living), but in the first fourteen days I'd ridden eleven times and finished 449 miles.

Hmm. 449 miles. I realized that this made it quite possible to reach 1,000 miles by the end of the month. I had a new goal, though it was almost another two weeks before I mentioned it here.

The century was laid down exactly three weeks into the month, on Friday the 21st. It wasn't fast, but it was hot, solo, and included most of the biggest hills in my area. I'm confident that I would have been significantly faster if I'd used my solo-century route from previous years.

On the other hand, that century was a noisy burp in my otherwise quiet, well-mannered training schedule. I didn't ride the day before, nor the two days after. Packing all those miles into one day was risky: I certainly would have ridden more miles overall if I had stuck to the schedule, but then I wouldn't have the pain of a 100 mile ride burned into my butt. :-) (Sounds bad, but it's important.)

My weight bounced around like a super-ball. Comparing my heaviest and lightest days, you might conclude that I lost 14 pounds. That's pretty darn good... but who knows if that's real or not? A little variation is normal, of course (and the bigger you are, the more variation you should expect), but five or six pounds (in either direction!) in a single day? That's just weird. (See the last column of this month's stats table.)

I didn't lose anywhere near what I wanted to lose before the PMC (which would be another ten pounds), but I am actually a few pounds lighter than I was last year at this time. (Who knows where I'd be if I'd ridden consistently for three months instead of just one?)

The last ride of the month was 53 miles. It wasn't fast, but it was comfortable. I should mention that for the last few days, I've focused almost exclusively on cadence. (In fact, late last week on a 40-mile ride I average 87 rpm. :-)

Stats: 52.32 miles (84.23 km) in 2h 43' 31" for an average speed of 19.19 mph (30.90 kph).

Oh, in case nobody figured this out already: I have a new script that generates these nifty stats tables based on any date range in my database. (So all I have to do is provide the start and end dates, and it gives me back the HTML, ready to drop into these reports.)