Solvang Century Bike Ride

Catching up on my world here...



I did my first "century" bike ride back in March.
Yes, 100 miles
Yes, all at once.
I had never been to Solvang and a some buddies of mine from Chevron that I had ridden with previously invited me along at the last minute to come and hurt for about six hours and change.

We (John, Dan, and myself), left the SF Bay Area Friday afternoon in order to miss the bulk of the traffic which was a smart move and arrived in Solvang before dinner time. We met up with Don who was coming up from SoCal and tried to find some dinner. After a nice walk around Solvang for about an hour (working up a good appetite), we settled for a breakfast and lunch place that was serving dinner due to the large bicycle crowd. All you can eat spaghetti sounded like a great idea at the time. It took a bit of convincing to get our fill of all we could eat but we ended up leaving full and happy.
Saturday morning came much too early but we rolled our happy butts our of bed and proceeded through the fog and the cold to the starting line. It was probably about an hour after we left the starting line before I could put on my sunglasses due to all of the fog we rode through.
Solvang is beautiful, click here for some pictures of my friends and I in action
Part-way through the ride, I stopped to grab some pictures of the guys and when I started again, I pulled the classic noob maneuver and failed to clip in correctly. BLAM on my ass I went. Of course a friend from work, John Rhodes, happened to be riding by and saw my humiliation. Oh joy. We rode together for a bit before I took off to catch up with my Chevronite friends, flatting almost immediately of course! After fixing my bike, I was off again and caught up with them at the next rest stop.

The GPS data dump from my ride is available, just click here.
The numbers looked like this:
6,736 feet of climbing
100.58 miles of riding
6hrs, 20mins of total riding time
15.9 MPH average
49.8 MPH top speed!!!

After one of the rest stops, I forgot to kick my GPS back on so I missed capturing the worst climbing of the ride and some of the downhill after that so the distance is a touch short but close enough.

As a reward, the four of us found a nice Italian place for dinner and began the denial phase of how fast we were (not!), and how we could improve for next year.

So bottom line, how was it? Good fun! I will do it again next year if it fits into my training schedule.