The short version: Friday, for no particular reason, I decided to go for a little bike ride. So I biked to the end of the road. And when I got there, I thought maybe I'd bike to the end of the town. And when I got there, I thought maybe I'd just bike all the way to Purcellville.
Yes, that's dialog from Forest Gump, edited to change running to biking, but it pretty well fits.
Really, here's how it went: Since last year's catastrophe I've been working to build up my cycling endurance (I would love to build up my speed too, but that seems to be a lost cause). A few weeks ago I hit a major milestone when I rode a metric century: 100 km, or roughly 62 miles. Shortly after that I was talking with a friend about cycling during a shiva (mourning ritual). He's a cyclist and opined that if you can ride sixty miles, you can do a hundred. I'm not sure I buy that argument, but I wasn't going to argue with a guy whose father had just passed away. But I did believe that, having done sixty miles I could do eighty, and that just maybe if I had some gas left in the tank at the end of eighty miles I could push on beyond that. So, I figured I would try an eighty mile ride with the possibility of an extension. As it happens, there's a wonderful almost exactly eighty mile bike ride pretty much right out my front door: the W&OD rail trail out to Purcellville and back.
Here's the thing: if you're going to be on your bike for umpteen hours you want the weather to be as perfect as possible. Not muggy. Not cold. Not windy. Certainly not rainy. So, here comes this forecast for perfect, perfect weather on a Friday, which is a day off for me and, being a weekday, a good day to ride the W&OD (which local cyclists pronounce "wad" rather than "Double You and Oh Dee"). The trail can get pretty busy on weekends. Friday, it was!
I wanted to do the ride solo, since I wanted to be able to choose my pace and my breaks without having to negotiate with anyone else. Plus, if I dissolved into a heap at mile 75, no one would know but me :) Fortunately, in this day and age of cell phones and Uber (plus the fact that a good bit of my ride would be along one Metro route or another), I knew that even with a mechanical or personal breakdown I wasn't going to wind up too stranded. So, Friday, solo it was!
Since the ride was going to be an all day affair and so my plan was to start riding at 6:30 AM. As it happened, Valerie had been having some issues at work - and so I decided to hang around for a bit so I we could chat in the morning. With that and the usual last minute this and that (slathering on sun screen, for example), Friday, solo at 7 AM it was!
A lot of weekend warriors buy into all sorts of "sports nutrition" that's sold by the sports-industrial complex: energy gels, Gatorade, anti-"bonk" bars and the like. I was having none of it. Knowing that there would be plenty of opportunity to buy stuff along my route I left home with a pretty minimal kit: one water bottle (if I ever ride a century again this is something I will change - I will add a second water bottle cage to my bike), a 100 calorie Kind bar as an emergency snack, my phone and external battery, headphones in case I got bored, arm sleeve thingees to keep the sun off, and basic tools to fix a flat tire and other minor issues. A lot of people wouldn't do such a ride without chamois creams, body glide, or whatever to prevent chafing. My skinny build means that generally nothing on me rubs together, so I rode with my shorts unbuttered. I did wear tight Spandex shorts rather than my usual baggies, making me look as much like the frou-frou cyclists I normally mock as I ever will.
I headed out. Mentally, I was carefully monitoring my condition, making sure I wasn't showing any signs of tiredness, making sure to keep hydrated. Yes, I was an endurance athlete in touch with my body's performance! Then I looked down and realized I had ridden only five miles. If I was going to obsess at this level it was going to be a long day. So I relaxed and rode on.
I rode all the way out to Purcellville (40ish miles) without any major stops. As is my wont, I took a lot of bathroom breaks along the way - an issue for me when I leave for a long period of exercise in the morning right after drinking my usual morning bucket of (decaf!) coffee. I did have to walk my bike for a bit at one point, as there was a crew repaving the trail, but with the reward of riding fresh, smooth pavement for a long stretch. Later on the trail was closed in another spot for maintenance work, but only for a short distance. Contrary to my usual experience, after a while I did start getting a little chafing in one spot as I rode. I found a way to tug my shorts into the right position after each time I stopped to minimize the issue, a little dance I wound up doing after every stop at a road crossing, water break, etc. I figured I might stop in at the bike shop that sits right at the end of the trail in Purcellville to get some of the body glide sort of stuff I had earlier eschewed.
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| Trail detour #1 |
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| Trail detour #2 |
Surprise! The bike shop is no longer there. However, in its place is a nice little bakery. I went in and chatted with the young guy behind the counter who said he couldn't imagine doing a ride of the length I was on. After drooling over the carrot cake muffins and tasty looking scones, I opted for the relatively healthful yogurt/fruit/granola parfait and spent my first real break of the day on a park bench happily eating my yogurt. When I finished I spent a little stretching, during which time a group of guys rode up - retirees, by the looks of them. I chatted with them. They were from Maryland but had ridden only from Herndon. I, without an ounce of smugness, I swear! told them I had ridden all the way out from Arlington.
Having finished stretching and humbly asserting my superiority as a cyclist, I started back. I was mid-morning by this point and I started to think about lunch. It would be nice to make it all the way back to the Whole Foods in Vienna, but by my estimation I wouldn't get back there until around 2 PM, and I wanted to eat before that. I rode on, figuring out I would eat at some point when the opportunity presented itself - plus, I had a magic power-up up my sleeve.
While the W&OD is rolling, in general it's uphill on the way out and so I got treated to some nice downhill sections as I rode back. Fortunately, one of the work crews had finished for the day and so had to contend with only one detour. I felt pretty good when I hit the fifty mile point until I realized that it might be only my halfway point for the day - man, a century is a lot of time on the bike! As I approached Herndon (about 60 miles of riding) I decided I wanted to eat but wanted to keep it on the light side. So, rather than look for a real lunch somewhere I decided to stop at The Green Lizard bike shop/coffee bar and picked up an energy bar of some kind, plus the aforementioned power-up in the form of a cup of regular coffee. It's a well-documented fact that caffeine can improve exercise performance. I assiduously avoid caffeine these days and so on the rare occasions when I consume it it feels like a super-energy pill, or like Popeye's spinach. Yes, I was caffeine "doping" :) Anyway, at the Green Lizard I ate a protein Clif Bar of some sort and had a small latte, though I didn't even finish the latte because I was worried about consuming too much caffeine. I hadn't brought extra sunscreen with me, and so at this point I put on my arm sun protector sleeves. And then off I went, soon crossing the 62 mile threshold, from which point every inch would be a new personal record.
I had brought headphones with me because I figured that by this point I might be bored out of my skull, but somehow I just kind of got into the zone and never felt the need for distraction. There's always something to look at, and the miles kept ticking away. On the climb into Vienna I found myself moving pretty slowly. A guy came by and encouraged me to draft behind him - but I wanted to earn my miles. Plus, I have never drafted another cyclist and figured that seventy miles into a ride was the wrong time to start experimenting. About this time I got a few weird pains in my left knee. I geared down a little bit and fortunately the pains didn't continue.
I found myself reaching home at the eighty mile point, as expected. This was the big decision point - call it a day, or keep going? I rode up to the house, a dangerous proposition - it would be easy to quit once I was already home - but to tell you the truth, I was still feeling pretty good. I made myself a snack of peanut butter and jelly on multi-grain bread. I texted Valerie to tell her what I was up to and coordinate our plans for the evening, which yielded a typically non-committal "let's figure it out later" response. I filled my water bottle with nice cold water and headed out to continue riding. With eighty one miles under my belt a ride around the "Arlington Loop" would get me just about the mileage I needed. However, I really didn't want to ride the up-and-down up-and-down rolling hills of the Custis Trail, so I took the Custis only as far as Glebe Road and from there took Fairfax Drive/Clarendon Blvd. down into Rosslyn, where I picked up the Mount Vernon trail. I always love riding down the river and so my spirits were buoyed.
I made a quick detour into the Columbia Island Marina to use the bathroom (I swear, I visited every bathroom and Porta-potty along the whole route). There was a band playing at the marina bar, but I soldiered on. From there it was the Four Mile Run trail across to Shirlington, and finally the little eastern bit of the W&OD (miles 0 to 4.5) that I had missed when I headed west in the morning. That last bit of the W&OD is a slow, steady uphill and I'm embarrassed to admit how slowly I was going by that point - maybe 10 MPH. I had started to get a stomach ache and while I wasn't mentally spent, my body was getting tired.
As I hit mile 99 I bumped into cycling friend Erin heading the other way (on her way to the Friday night Crystal City Happy Hour, I surmised - correctly, it turned out). We waved. She of course had no idea that she was seeing me as I reached the end of my century ride but was very excited when she later learned that was the case.
I had been watching the mileage on my Garmin bike computer. When I got back to the neighborhood I was a fraction of a mile short and so I did some loops around the neighborhood before heading up to the house. As I pulled into the driveway the Garmin read 100.3 miles. Strava, always a little more generous, gave me an extra mile. I was pretty hungry at this point and felt like eating despite still having a stomach ache. I made myself some lemonade to which I added salt, and ate more multi-grain toast, this time with hummus. Mindful of the cardiologist's admonition to always cool down at the end of exercising I paced back and forth in the kitchen while my toast toasted, which is how Valerie found me when she got home. I probably looked a little crazy, but fortunately Valerie was excited for me for having achieved my century goal rather than just thinking I was a madman pacing our kitchen watching bread toast.
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| Final Garmin results |
So, success! Stomach ache went away later that evening. Not too sore the next day (except saddle sore). And we did go to Crystal City that evening, where I got a lot of kudos from my friends for having ridden my first century.
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| Victory! |
Now I'm one of the cool kids :)
Strava: https://www.strava.com/activities/1640702587
