Today we embarked on a 105-mile ride through the hilliest sections of the Boone, NC area. The course is the Blood Sweat and Gears Century route, with the apex of the route ending at the road peak of Snake Mountain at mile 64.
Our target was 15mph for an average, but to make ourselves feel better we "raced" a virtual partner traveling at 12.5 mph. He beat us the first hour...
The majority of the climbs, however, were fairly gradual and long, allowing us to tempo up them fairly easily and conserve energy for Snake Mountain. The Boone area is either up or down, and this route was no different.
As usual, Joe "Mountain" Bray dropped us on almost every climb he wanted to. Sometimes he chilled with the mortals, but if he wanted to ride away, he did.
Fortunately, no mechanicals or crashes, just 9900 feet of climbing. Around mile 82 I decided to drop the hammer on a rare flat section, maintaining 22-23 for several miles until we hit an awesome climb with 6 switchbacks. I dropped the gas a little bit towards the end, but once mile 90 hit we went into survival mode and took it easy up all the climbs.
At the end of the day we had 9900 feet of climbing in 6 hrs 43 minutes for a 15.6 mph average...not terribly impressive average, but for the course difficulty we were happy with it
Wont lie, Im too tired from the ride to talk about it much....and tommorrow we have 95 miles which includes Beech Mtn and Iron Mountain. Heres the ride tommorrow:
http://www.mapmyride.com/view_route?r=869123738356149939
MOre updates tommorrow!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment