Anna from the shop decided she was going to do the Hell Of Hunterdon ride this March, and after looking at the profile, I was sold. Selling Jen is a different story, but in the meantime, I'm going to train for it and if I can do it, game on, if not, there's always next year.
The Hell Of Hunterdon (HOH) ride is 76 miles and close to 5,000ft of climbing. It's not a little-boy ride. Since my knee is a stupid piece of garbage, it has a tough go of it after 40 miles of riding my goal is to add five to ten miles a week until the end of March and see how it goes. If my knee can't make it and I have to bail out of the ride, as long as I made it 50 miles, I'll feel like I accomplished something.
To start training, Anna and I decided that we're going to stop doing the Monday Morning Meetings with the shop guys (a MTB ride at Wiss) and start doing a lengthy road ride with some bigger hills tossed in the mix. I have been mentally putting together a ride I wanted to do around Valley Forge that has 3 Cat. 4 climbs in it. I tried to do this ride on Thursday, but it started to snow, so I only did one of the hills. Today we did all three and added in another short steepy for good measure. The ride only ended up being 28 miles long, but we did 2,500ft of climbing, so it wasn't too bad. I had a slightly longer course planned out but Anna's legs were starting to hurt before we did the third climb, so we opted out of it. To be honest, I don't blame her. It's not an easy ride, and my legs were hurting too. I'm only convinced that I had anything in my legs because I had been off the bike for the four days prior. Now, I know I can do the ride, and I'm only going to add to it. I have a 35 mile loop with 3,000+ ft of climbing, and a 50 mile loop that incorporates the Phoenixville loop I've done. If I can do the 50 mile loop for the month of March, I think I'll be able to finish all of HOH.
HOH is the first "ride" I've done since the City To Shore ride I did in 2008. I tend to shy away from them because you have a mass horde of people who don't know what they're doing and because I'm terrified of large crowds. Two pretty good reasons to avoid rides. Last year, HOH had 300 riders and it's not a course for beginners. I'm sure once everything breaks up into groups i'll be riding with 5 people and be more than comfortable. I'm also kind of psyched to have something to work towards. I feel the best I have ever felt on the bike, I'm doing longer rides with more and more climbing and I'm more excited about riding bikes than at any point... and it's 30* out! I can't wait until it's warm.
No comments:
Post a Comment