Terrible Hills! Mos Def!

Two posts ago, I mentioned the crazy "Terrible Hills involving the Letter B" ride, and indeed I was insane enough to actually try and do it. There are already several ride reports out there from other people in what was a great group of riders, and I will keep it short.

I hadn't done any long ride since the first week of July (traveling, moving, ...) and thus I was slow and suffered a lot. I fell behind the rest of the group quite early due to general slowness, having to buy new batteries for my GPS, and a wrong turn on Buffalo Road. Probably that was not the worst thing to happen because that at least allowed me to ride at my own pace. I did, however, catch up with the
rest of the group at the end of their lunch stop at Wegmans. Fortunately I spotted Sam's brightly colored FLCC jersey and reached the group just as it was getting ready to go again. Unfortunately, that meant that I didn't really have time to eat and drink more and in the long run that should prove to be disastrous. Anyway, I was fairly determined to make it the whole way, but the not terribly steep but long climb up Bostwick was draining. (Bostwick is my favorite downhill...) I knew that what was to come was my most feared climb: Blakeslee Hill. I had ridden up there a couple of months ago and barely made it -- and that was on a pretty short ride with fresh legs. Well, I completely bonked, taking two short stops on the climb and taking a long stop at the top of the hill. My body clearly had run out of fuel and I gobbled down two whole Clif Bars in record speed. It was obvious that the ride was just too much for me and I decided to ride back home. At the end of the day I had logged about 135 km and 2600 m of climbing. I didn't bring the camera, but fortunately Max Kraft took some nice pics.

On a side note, I decided to throw on my new shiny Brooks Swift for the ride. I was a little skeptical if it would be a good idea to attempt an extremely hard century ride on a new leather saddle. But it turned out to be quite okay. The saddle is comfortable, not too narrow, and it's already showing signs of breaking in.

July and August summary

As mentioned in my previous post, there are no separate summaries for July and August. In both months together I rode a meager 600 km, 338 on Wolfgang and 262 on Gunnar. If we'd assume that the riding was evenly distributed between the months (which it was not, because I did almost zero riding in July), that would bring both months down to the lowest average daily riding, even worse than the winter months. It's definitely time to crank it up a couple of notches before winter comes!