Half Century....plus a few

I hit it pretty hard this morning on the bike.  Last night, I mapped out a route to attempt today that would net me 58 miles, including a long, difficult uphill section.  I need to go that far and more if I want to do a century (and I do).  The long, hard uphill is also necessary, because the Lake Tahoe Century has a couple of big, steep hills.  Conditioning will be key.

Alas, I made a couple wrong turns this morning.  Here's the route I planned.



And here's the one I took.



I ended up going 60.4 miles: more than I planned, but I missed out on the big hill climb.  It's just as well, though, because boy was I HURTING at the end.  Holy cow, the last 15 miles were not fun.  And when it was over....well, I don't recall my legs hurting that much after the marathons I ran a few years back!  Perhaps I overdid this one.  Before today, my longest ride was 48 miles.  Based on that, I quipped a few weeks ago that I thought a half-century was a whole lot easier than a half marathon.  Methinks I was incorrect in that, after today.  Ouch!

That's ok though.  Soon after I got back, the Admiral and I loaded up the Midshipmen in the car and went to get a late breakfast.  I got a breakfast quesadilla and chocolate milk.  I heard about a medical study a few weeks back on a science and skepticism podcast that I listen to (The Skeptics Guide to the Universe) which found that chocolate milk is better for post-workout recovery than all the sports drinks out there.  That was all the encouragement I needed, and now I stock up on chocolate milk whenever I think to.  :)  After breakfast, we ran a few errands, and now we're back home watching The Fox and the Hound with the kiddos.  I'm feeling a lot better already, though the legs are still rubbery.

One bit of annoyance during the ride: the headset to my new iphone.  The iphone 4 came with Apple's cool new headphones with integrated controls for features like volume, answering calls, and making a voice command phone call.  Mine got shorted out or something during a ride in the rain, so I started using the Admirals, since she never uses hers.  Those are now shot too.  I guess dripping sweat onto the little control bud must have shorted it out or something.  For the first 45 minutes or so, all was fine, but then the podcast started skipping around the different places in the episode or different episodes entirely. Then the voice command feature turned on for a moment, followed by a continuous scan through my music repertoire (at about 15-30 second intervals).  You can imagine how annoying that was.  One time, the voice command feature actually called someone without me even trying to order it!  It was an old number, though, and doesn't work anymore, but that could have been weird.  At some point, the imapmyride app stopped working for about 20 minutes.  I discovered that after getting annoyed with the podcast chicanery and stopping to fish the phone out of the pouch of my camelback to try to fix it.  Once I re-started the app, it continued just fine, so I didn't lose anything really (nothing that I couldn't fix on the mapmyride website).  But it was really quite annoying!

This had happened with my old iphone too, stopping when I swapped out with a new headset back before I upgraded phones.  So that makes 3 headsets that I've gone through in the last 3 months.  Clearly this ain't working.  I think I'm going to shop for a bluetooth headset, to avoid the cable shorting issue.  I just hope there's one out there that will let me control at least some of the phones features beyond just answering calls.  And that is a full headset, not just a bud in one ear (gotta have stereo music, after all).  I guess we'll see what's out there.