Going to the Extreme

When I tell people that I ride bikes for fun they usually ask me how far I ride, 5-10 miles? When I tell them that I usually do 40 to 60 miles most weekends they think that is a lot of miles. I tell them that if you build up miles slowly as you begin to ride its really very easy to do long ride and you can even do 100 miles with out much of a problem if you put in enough training.

After being in the hills last weekend I decided to do something flat this weekend down in the pine barrens. At 60 miles this would be one of the longer rides I do. 60-70 miles is about longest rides I like to do especially early in the season.

We started from Mansfield park and I was joined by Chris, Pete, Laurie(second week in a row), and Jack (who rode in from Bordentown because apparently 60 miles was too short a ride for him).

We headed out the bike path to Island Rd and then went around Fort Dix and through Browns Mills to get to the pinelands. We had to a slight detour on Catesville Rd as it was more gravel than road so I'm taking that road off the route. Here is the modified ride we did.

Our first rest stop was at the ranger station at Brendan Byrne state park. As we were there a bunch of other riders pulled in. I saw that Mary was part of the group. This was one of the randonneurs rides that Mary does. Today they were doing 600k and in case you can't translate that in your head its a HOLLY SHIT 372 mile ride. Now this is over 2 days so its ONLY 186 miles a day. But the last time I did a century you know what I wanted to do the day after doing a century? Not get on the bike and do another fucking century and this group was about to do an almost back to back double century. It makes my 60 mile ride feel like a ride around the block.

After leaving Mary and her truly insane group we headed down through the pinelands and ended up at Nixons for our real rest stop. There we met Raj who is also a randonneur. He was only doing a 73 miles as a warm up to his 600k ride next week with 50 other randonneurs. Apparently this year is the Paris randonneur 1200k and you have to do a 600k to qualify for it which is why so many people are doing the 600k. I can understand a few people wanting to push their body to the extreme but it is amazing to me that there are over 50 people in NJ who actually do this. To do these rides its 14-17 hours in the saddle for two straight days. This is not only physically difficult but must be a big mental strain. I can imagine with that many hour on a bike you must start to hallucinate or freak out at some point.

In any case I was happy with the 60 miles we did. The weather was a little more humid than predicted so I was a little worn out by the end of the ride. I wish Mary and her fellow randonnerurs good luck on their long travels but for me I keep my rides well under 100 miles.