I thought I'd do my mid-life crisis quietly: I've decided to start training for a 'Century' bike ride: one hundred miles in a day. I've done the metric century - 100K, or 61 miles - a fair number of times, and have done 75 by mistake once, but the century eludes me. Some of my cycling buddies can trot off a 100 mile ride without a second thought, but I know for sure that right now I would have very severe trouble.
I'm going to follow a training programme from the rather ancient and now possibly out of print 'Richard's Cycling for Fitness', which has a reasonable graded approach over 16 weeks, which takes me to 29th August. Many cycle training books assume what seems to me an lunatic rate of ramping up the miles. Right now, I'm doing around 70 miles in a week - about half the final weekly target in the last couple of weeks in preparation for the century.
In addition to miles, I need to get my pace up to a solid 15 Mph over the full distance. Once I'm properly back in the saddle, I'm planning on going out with the Sotonia crew on their weekly 40 mile rides.
One tiny difficulty is that officially organised rides in the UK tend to be measured in Kilometres. Audax UK has rides of 150Km (93 Miles - not quite enough) and 200Km (124 Miles - too much!). I'm not going to worry about that too much right now.
Of course, the road to not cycling is paved with good intentions, so you can monitor my actual progress on mapmyride.
