MS Bike Ride ~ 62 Miles

I'm way behind in my blogging, so I'll catch you up on my recent adventures. The weekend before last I did the MS Ride. This is the event for which I did all the fundraising with the chocolate-covered marshmallow Easter eggs. It wasn't a race but rather an organized ride. They mapped out several routes of various distances and had water/snack stops all along the ride. I signed up for the 62 mile ride. The furthest I'd ever ridden before this was 52 miles and that was just during a training ride about 3 weeks before the event. So 62 miles was a challenge for me.

I was technically on a team ~ Team OutSpoken ~ but it was a pretty dysfunctional team. We only had one team meeting and that was the kick-off meeting when we all joined up. I never saw the team again until the day of the ride. I saw some of them occasionally during the ride and I also saw a co-worker and some friends from church here and there, which was fun, but I rode nearly the whole distance on my own. I love riding through the Virginia countryside. It is so beautiful! There were some intense hills and I was tired at the end, but I was pleased with my pace. My final time was 4 hours 22 minutes, which was a pace of 14.3 mph.

After the ride I wanted to get a feel for how far 60 miles really is, so I looked up the distance between my house in Reston, VA and Rob's house in Columbia, MD. Our houses are only 46 miles apart. That means that my bike ride was as far as riding from my house to Rob's and partway home again. Wow! That's really far! It takes me 40 minutes to drive to Rob's place at highway speeds. I don't think I'll ever attempt to bike there, but if I did, I know I could make it that far and then some. Until the next ride event, I'll keep on biking!