Great news !

First episode of the new season... totally epic, hilarious, awesome.

(Doctor Who, if you really don't know what I'm talking about. And if you do, you just laughed. Doctor WHO, hahahahah)

As has been reported elsewhere, I confirmed my psychosis today by biking 100 (actually, 102) miles, from Irvine to San Diego.

It took 8 hours total including rest stops, 6:45 rolling time. That's a pace at the high end of my optimistic goal pace. I'm really shocked at my performance. I mean, I knew on paper I'd done the (literal) legwork to train, but still, this was almost 50% farther than my previous longest ride, and included one intense climb 80 miles in (Torrey Pines). I had no idea how I'd fare. It's been an intense and empowering day.

All followed by one hell of a party on the train ride home. Crowd surfing, for crying out loud. You'd never guess it was a train car full of people who'd just tortured themselves for 8ish hours.

Lots of people have been super encouraging over the 5 months since I set myself on this stupid course. Many many thanks for that. It's surreal that the day has come and gone. Hard to know right now whether I'll do this to myself again, but I couldn't be happier that I pulled this off.

That's fantastic, amazing. What was the event?

Awesome. Quite the achievement.

So, since this is sponsored by Amtrak I assume the goal is to show that if you can pedal at a steady 15mph pace then you can, in fact, get to San Diego faster than by taking the train?

Not actually sponsored by Amtrak, they just book a whole train for the ride back up, and the route down (mostly) follows the tracks.

The nice thing is, because they book the whole train, there are no stops on the way back up, so it actually goes pretty quick for once.

Wow that is an amazing ride! Congrats!


So how do you feel today?

I feel perfectly fine today. I laughed at the pre-ride advice the club sent out saying, "Be sure you hydrate and eat post-race, especially if you plan to ride the next day" (emphasis mine). But seriously, I could get on my bike today no problem. I've been training for about 5 months for this, purposely riding routes that, while not as long, had far more strenuous climbing than anything I did yesterday. I've been far more exhausted by some of those than I was yesterday. I credit that to both my pre-ride prep (carb loading and some tune-up rides during the week) and in LARGE part to the club that put on the event. The refreshments and hydration they provided at all the rest stops (OMG was it glorious to see huge chunks of fresh pineapple at the 50 mile mark) meant there was no problem keeping my body fueled properly which is the key to NOT being in pain at the end.