Stick a Fork in Me...I'm Done

Part 1: Albuquerque "Metric Century"

Summary: I put the distance in quotation marks, because this ended up being closer to 112K than 100K. My Garmin measured 68.85 miles with 1238ft of climbing. Add on the distance from/to the car and we easily did 70+miles. Despite this, I was smiling as we packed up the car to return home.

The course proflie: I messed up something on my Garmin, so I ended up capturing the ride data in 2 chunks. The first 10miles looks a lot like the last 10miles, nothing too exciting, just imaging an extra 10 at the beginning that look like the last 1o. It's pretty obvious where the hard part was.

Thoughts from the experience:

* Love the Novarra Mezzo shorts (those are the ones I mentioned in an earlier post...only with the pro chamois rather than the recreational gel). I bought a second pair on the way home.
* Love the event jersey that we purchased for an additional fee. Worth every penny.
* Don't love climbing. Probably never will.
* Don't love riding downhill on streets with traffic and no bike lane. In fact, downhill is scary for me. I start reaching for brakes when I see 24+ mph.
* Definately need gloves for long rides. Didn't have any, but bought some on the way home for next time.
* The aqua rack rocks. So do the insulated polar bottles that I bought to load into the aqua rack rock.
* So do the boy scouts that held my bike at rest stop #2 while I used the porta-potty
* 70miles is a long way. I increased my longest ever cycle distance by 32miles. Experts don't recommend increasing you distance by this much in one ride. Several parts of my body agree.
* Yes, I would do another one, but I would inquire more carefully about the exact distance in advance. Every inch after mile 60 was a struggle for me. The fact that the course ran long was almost enough to put me in tears at the end.

Part 2: Mariposa "Death March"

Summary: The Mariposa run was this morning. We chose the 10K distance. This was supposed to be fun and scenic. Okay, I admit it was scenic, but fun was totally missing for me. No happy face at the end of the race. In fact, I was quite grumpy. This is a first for me.

The course profile: First off, please note that the starting elevation is basically up where the top of that bike ride was on the day before. The first mile or so was downhill. Yikes. That means we have to go back up hill. And then it just seemed to go up and up and up. I did a lot of walking. And grumbling. It seemed like we should end up going downhill for the last mile, but instead, this is where the course took a left, offroad and onto the mesa. And it was mostly uphill in sand. What the font?!? I felt like I should switch to hiking shoes. Who designed this course and what made them think that this little stretch at the end would be fun?


Thoughts from the experience:

* The race was very well organized, but the course must have been designed by sadists. I won't be back next year.
* Final time was 1:14:something. For the record, I'm not unhappy because of my finish time; I'm unhappy because (in my opinion) the race course sucked.