6 hours of fun

Smiling, because we hadn't started yet.

This week, my workout schedule called for a 6 hour 15 minute bike ride on Saturday.  Well, the way our schedules worked out, Old Wise One and myself were able to get this long ride done on Tuesday (which means I'm obviously switching around my schedule)!  And honestly, this is actually much better for both of us, because a 6 hour ride by yourself can be brutal.  

We started the day at about 5:45 am or so, planning to go out for a 3 or 4 hours, maybe come back and refill our water bottles and food supplies, and then go back out to finish the day.  The biggest obstacle we had planned was South Mountain, which is a pretty grueling 13 plus mile climb.  As we headed out, we quickly found out that today was not going to be quite what we expected.  It was going to be very windy, and hot.

There was a very steady wind coming from the East, making every flag we saw stick straight out.  We rode for about 2 hours before beginning the South Mountain obstacle.  Thankfully, we made it to the top without any problems, other than huge gusts of wind coming very close to blowing us off our bikes.  At the top of the mountain, we asked another cyclist to take a picture of us with one of our phones.  The guy took the picture, looked at the screen (which displays the picture after you take it), and handed it to us.  Here's that picture:

Nice job, buddy.

Ha!  Nice camera work!  This guy must have been delusional, because he actually took a second picture, went through the same process of looking at the screen then handing us the phone, and he had completely covered the camera lens!  He should have probably stayed up on top of the mountain to recover a little bit longer before he headed back down.  Oh well.

We made it back down the hill without crashing, which is always nice.  Once out of the South Mountain area, we stopped at a Circle K to refill our drinks.  We were at about three and a half hours at this point, so a refill was much needed.

We cruised around for the next two and a half hours, battle the crazy winds that seemed to never let up.  When we finally heard the alarms on our Garmin devices go off to let us know that we had, indeed, reached the six hour mark, we were happy as could be.  It had been a long day of strong winds, and it was now getting to the point of being seriously hot.  We headed home and finished up with a time of six hours and seven minutes.

Still alive!

We could tell it was hot when we finished, but we weren't sure how hot, until we looked at the temperature gauge in the backyard, which is in the shade of the patio cover.  It read 100.4*F.  Wow.  We knew it was hot, but I expected something in the 90's.  And the best way to cool off after a long ride like that, in temperatures like that?  Jump in the pool.  And that's exactly what we did.

All in all, it was a great ride.  We didn't have the average speed that I'm hoping to maintain for IM CdA, but with the conditions, I'm super excited about what we did.  Plus, I've been doing so much riding on my indoor trainer, I'm just happy that I held up for six hours outside!  Only a few more weeks until June 24th is here!

Thanks for reading!