Second Century (Almost) of the Year

century ride, cycling, UMCA Year Rounder | UltraRob | Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007 at 9:58 pm

April has come and gone. Until Sunday my longest ride for the month was barely over 20 miles. My last long ride was the end of March when I rode from Avon to Glenwood Springs and back.

I’m still trying for the Larry Schwartz award in the UMCA Year Rounder Challenge this year. Last year I achieved the Platinum level in the UMCA Year Rounder Challenge which requires at least 5,000 miles in century or longer rides. For the purposes of the challenge, rides of at least 90 miles count since some organized centuries aren’t quite the full 100 miles. I’m pretty certain I won’t even reach the Gold level this year which is a total of 3,000 miles. The Larry Schwartz award is for doing a century every month. You can miss two months and make them up in another month. I didn’t ride a century in January or February so I can’t miss any more months.

Fortunately the weather was nice on Sunday with a high of 81 degrees. Last Tuesday it had rained at my house with a little slush mixed in. At my work which is only a few hundred feet higher, it snowed all day with strong winds. Some areas to the north and east of Colorado Springs got over 2 feet of wet snow. Wet snow this time of year isn’t unusual but normally it doesn’t drift. My brother that lives east of town had 5 foot drifts in his yard on lat Wednesday morning.

With all the stress at work, I’ve had colds 3 times in the last 2 months and have been on antibiotics for over a week. was in last Friday to get my monthly Xolair shot for asthma and my blood pressure was slightly higher than a month ago. I think it’s about 30 points higher than normal.

I didn’t get out until early afternoon on Sunday for my ride. I decided to ride to Elbert and back since it’s pretty flat. I knew I needed an easy route to get in a long ride. In addition to not riding much and being sick, I spent 12 hours working on my garage Saturday.

It was a great day just to go out and spin for a while. For over the first hour, my legs were dead but they slowly came around. Even though it had been in the 60s the Thursday and Friday and almost 80 on Saturday, there was still a few feet of snow in some of the gullies near where Elbert Road crosses the Palmer Divide. The hills had white lines of snow drifts all over them. My brother lives just a couple miles from there. I got in 92 miles with only 2408 feet of climbing. My ride time was 6:12 which isn’t fast but probably not unreasonable considering everything.

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