100 miles to nowhere

I've had the idea of a 100 miles to nowhere ride on my radar for about 6 months or so.  The thought came, of course, from the Fat Cyclist.  I don't really follow his blog but my boss does and we've been talking about it a bit ever since RAAM ended.  The rough 'rules' or guidelines for a 100 MTN ride can be found on Fatty's site.  There are a couple of places I had in mind for the 100 mile effort, Kennesaw Mountain, laps on the crit course, a couple of different routes I could do in Marietta...  Kennesaw would be tough, 100 miles would be about 20K feet of climbing(!) and would likely take close to 10 hours.  The crit course would be a lot faster, but both of those are almost an hour away from my house.  I decided on Stone Mountain because I could start early with lights, knew it would be relatively fast, and the laps of almost 5 miles would keep it from getting too boring.  

The idea of doing a century a month for however long has also been kicking around in my head for quite a while as well.  I've had some stretches of 3 to 5 months over the last couple years but that's about as long as it's gone.  Had a pretty good opportunity this year because of RAAM, but it kind of fell apart after the race.  Plus, even though I rode just over 500 miles during the week of RAAM, I actually never did 100 miles in a 24 hour period.  So... the century in Las Vegas got me 100 miles in September, last weekend was my last chance to get 100 miles in for October.  It ended up being a pretty tough ride.  Life and work has prevented me from getting as time in on the bike as I'd like and in the 12 days leading up to the ride, I had ridden once for a total of something like 16 miles.  Not exactly the type of lead up you'd hope for.  

The ride (link to Strava) ended up being about what I expected.  I didn't do it quite as fast as I would have liked, the climbing ended up being a bit more than I expected it to be.  There was some kind of charity walk at he park that day and some kind of art and craft festival that caused a bit more traffic than normal.  Both of these slowed me down a little, but honestly didn't make a huge impact.  It got tough towards the end to ride by the car every 15 minutes or so knowing that I could just pull into the parking lot and stop.  I'm glad I had tweeted something about the ride earlier that week, gave me some accountability to actually finish the ride. Of course I haven't ridden at all this week, but it's only the 5th of the month so I've got 3 more weekends to get 100 miles in this month.