Marathon Me

After Friday’s ride I was feeling pretty beat up and texted a friend of mine, Corey May, and told him I am basically a big sissy. He of course concurred and added some additional challenges to my manhood in typical Corey fashion and invited me to come ride with him Sunday morning for 70-80 miles.

Well the farthest that I have ridden in almost 4 years was 38 miles, and I did that on Friday. So it seemed like a good idea and I told him that if needed he should feel free to leave me in the dust. Corey is in much better biking shape than I am and I fully expect to get beat by an hour on the bike by him and at least 30-45 minutes on the swim by his wife Tricia. I’m hopeful I can beat both of them on the run.

We started out from Corey’s house downtown and meandered down Barton Springs and headed to 360, we hit the rolling hills of 360 which felt pretty good on the way out, but I would like them as much on the way home.

We turned off 360 and got onto Jollyville, then cut through the Motive parking lot and wound up on Parmer again. Hello….Parmer!

Parmer was still windy but it was cooler this time of day and so it wasn’t as big of a deal. At about mile 32 Corey asked if we wanted to take a turnaround, but I pushed for the extra 3 miles as I really wanted to hit 70 miles as it quite possibly may be my longest ride before Ironman.

On the way back we stopped off at a gas station and refilled our water bottles, and by refilled our water bottles I mean that we got some Gatorade and Corey had some chips and I had two Whatchamacallit candy bars. Fuel of champions!

I felt pretty good through the first 50-60 miles or so but the last 10 down 360 were brutal. It had started to warm up, but it was still okay, but the hills just seemed to go on and on and on. A couple times I just stuck behind Corey’s wheel and drafted like a champion. (Okay probably not like a champion, as in a draft legal race they would probably be closer than I was, and in a non-draft legal race it would be cheating, thus both deny my champion status).

We finished the ride salty and tired averaging just under 18 mph, which made this ride both my longest and my fastest in years. I think we could have held the 18 mph, but the last 2-3 miles we had to go through a lot of stop lights and the starting/stopping killed the pace.

We had taken a detour to avoid the 360/Mopac intersection which added 1.5 miles on to our ride, so finished up with 71.5 miles. Now I only have to add about another 50% to get to Ironman distance…Yippie.

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Tags: General, Training //