Wheelsucker

Oh, century rides, why are you 100 miles long? Couldn't you be, like, 45 miles instead?

Last year I did the Iron Tour with a friend and some of his co-workers that I met the morning of the ride. Six of us started out together. It was 95 degrees by the 30-mile mark. By mile 40, three had dropped. One zoomed off into the distance and finished the whole thing in about two seconds. My buddy and I hung until mile 60 where he announced that he was done, plopped on a picnic table at a rest station and didn't pedal another stroke.

I felt okay enough to finish and was on my own for the last 40 miles. It poured, then hailed, then hailed and poured for most of those miles. It took me forever and ever to finish -- I think I was possibly the last person to finish the full century.

But the course, complete with quiet roads, lots of green and never-ending rolling hills, was fantastic, the rest stops had PB&J, cheese and sometimes wine and it costs next to nothing to do so I lured Bill back to Philly for the weekend by paying for his entry and we set out this morning for what turned out to be a beautiful and relatively uneventful 100 miles.

After the century course split from the other distances we were basically on our own, seeing only a few other riders along the way.

Before we started Bill had convinced me that I'd be dragging him along. The opposite, not surprisingly to me, turned out to be true. I sat on Bill's wheel for approximately 97 of the 101 miles we ended up riding. I think Bill surprised himself with how good he felt throughout the entire ride and I surprised myself by not getting dropped like a ton of something.

Plus, as Bill had to flee back to his summer home as soon as we were done, I managed to get my bike off my roof rack all by myself. I am a big girl now.

I am so excited to sleep right now. Hopefully I will be able to drag myself out of bed for an easy recovery run in the morning. And I finally took my SmartWool compression socks (courtesy of an awesome REI deal) out of the package and am currently compressing away. People swear by compressing the hell out of their legs (Do you? Does it work for you? Does the fact that a pair of these things costs approximately 7 billion dollars make any sense to you?). I am hoping there is something to this because I don't want to take more than a day or so recovering from today's ride.

Unrelated: I bought new road running and trail running shoes yesterday. I bought the same Cascadias that I've grown to love -- or so I thought. I bought them several sizes too large (I thought I knew what size I was) and didn't realize it until I got home and checked them against my current pair. And now they obviously have to go back. I hate shopping/stores/dealing with receipts/credit cards/cash registers so the fact that I have to return them makes me grumpy. Thanks for letting me share -- I feel better now.

That is all.