Ride 122k. Pretty simple, very painful. After last week I was very worried about running out of gas again, so I bumped up my calorie intake from 1700 to 2200, give or take. I also ate a lot more before the ride. Before I even left the house I had eaten 1000 calories. By the end of the ride I had 2000. I've had days after the Saturday ride where I didn't even eat that much that day.

This ride started off very slowly for me. I was riding with the same people I finished with the week before, but when one woman broke out I went with her. We found another group of riders who were perfectly matched for me. I finally learned how to draft properly, and found it quite enjoyable. I've never had people behind me before, but I learned to be smoother with my inputs and learned how to trust them behind me.

I did managed to lose half our riding group when I was leading, but it worked out nicely. We caught up to Caius, Rodney and a couple other riders and made it to Cheltenham, which was having a soap box derby. We hung around to watch a race. We kinda wanted to stay there for the rest of the day. They had a barbeque and other small town street festival type things. It was really cute.

There was one section with some really wild looking geography, which I really want to go back for. It looked like the desert or something that you would create in KPT Bryce years ago. Right after that I looked down and saw 70 km/h on the speedo... in a 50 zone.

The break in Belfountain was nice. Great sandwiches, and lots of people on those big motorized bikes.

The ride back was relatively uneventful. There was a lot of downhill. One section we dropped 400 ft over a couple km. I was averaging 50 km/h for it. That was sweet. The rest of the ride was tough, but not as bad as the hills we had to go up. It was a very hilly ride, but for parts of the ride I was able to spin up the hills. I kept my pace the same as during the flats, but because I was spinning I wasn't getting as tired. I don't think I'm going fast enough to spin during the flat parts, but uphill it's definitely extremely helpful. I like powering over the hills and getting them over with.

I did get a flat 10k from the end. I was going to by a spare tube when we passed a bike shop, but I didn't want to have to carry it around. This from the guy who's carrying around a full screwdriver. Mountain bike tires are pretty big, but I had never seen a road bike tire before. Fortunately Caius had a spare that he let me borrow. When he pulled the tube out of his bag I couldn't believe how small and light it was. It got me back. I'm going to pick up a couple spares today actually.

Back pain wasn't quite so bad this ride. I spent a bit more time completely upright on the granny part of the drop bars, but I also made some adjustments to my seat. I moved it forward a lot, which definitely helped. I was still in a lot of pain, but I didn't think I was going to keel over and die because of it. Next week I'm going to compensate and drop my bars a little bit. Might as well try it...

Final stats:
Distance: 123.08 km
Time: 5:19
Actual time: 6:46
Average speed: 23.1 km/h
Max speed: 72 km/h
Average HR: 130
Peak HR: 172
Time in zone 3: 2:27
Total ascent: 1777 ft

Heart rate was much lower than last week. This is why I actually finished. Speed went up too. I'm going to start remembering to stop my watch on long breaks, so my average HR doesn't get affected by sitting around. It's really throwing it off.

Now I'm debating what to do next. Next week is a 130k ride. It's the last ride with this group of people, since they're leaving for Montreal the week after. I can either continue going on longer and longer rides and prepare myself for the Scugog Century, which is a 161k ride (100 miles), or I can level off and just ride 100k a week. I think 100k is a very nice distance for a weekly ride. It's not too far, but you still get a pretty big sense of accomplishment. Then again, I can probably do both, since the Scugog Century is at the end of August. There's lots of time to prepare for that.

The other option is to actually try a "try a tri" triathlon. Caius has done it, and he said it was damn hard. It doesn't seem that rough. 400m swim, 13k ride and 2.5k run. On their own they're all a piece of cake (maybe except for the swimming). I don't know if I could swim that far, even doing a backstroke. I think when I was a kid doing swimming lessons I might have done 100m, but for all I remember it could have been 25. I'm thinking about going to the gym this week and seeing if I can backstroke 400m. If I can then I'll consider the tri. Why try a try a tri triathon? Just because I wanted to type that sentence!