Reston Century 100 mile Bike Ride Recap

Reston Century Quick Recap

Start/End Location: Reston Town Center, Reston, VA

Date: August 25th, 2013

Total Moving Time: 6:07

Total Cumulative Time: over 7.5 hours!

Just a quick re-cap in the interest of time.  Knocked out my first 100 mile bike ride!  Calling it "hard" would be deceiving.  There really isn't a point in the ride where its difficult or you feel like failure is possible, its just a really long day out there on the saddle, peddling, stopping for breaks, eating and drinking along the way.

The registration and start was very informal, much more relaxed than
anything I have seen in the running world.

You could start as early as 6:30am, or as late as 10:00am!  I think full century riders were required to get started by like 9:00am though and be finishing up by 4:30pm.  We set off at around 7:30 in the morning, not as early as I would have liked but not too late either.

The first major aid station around 30 miles in.

You are out there a very, very long time for a full century ride.  I'm glad I did the 100 mile option (there was a metric option, or around 62 miles), but this was a tough ride, hilly, and with more stops&starts than I would like.  You can get very sunburned too when you are out that long.  Somehow, I managed not to get burned by applying sunblock in the morning, reapplying later in the day, and wearing my white arm sleeves for the last few hours when the sun was really strong.

Break time before getting back on the W&OD trail to head back toward
Reston.  This was about 70 miles in for us.

Pumping up that new tire!
About 80 miles in.

 Of course what ride would be complete without a flat tire?  I didn't even hit a big bump or any debris, just cruising along and hear a "pffffffff" sound.  I suppose I'm lucky that this was my first flat tire, and that I had an experienced biker along with me to make sure things were repaired correctly.  It really wasn't a big deal - pull out the flat tube, isolate the hole, inspect the rim and tire, put the new tube in, pump it back up as best I could (to about 90 PSI) and off I went.  The next rest stop pumped it back up to 115 PSI and gave me a new spare tube.

After finishing at Reston Town Center with my buddy Reza.

100+ miles in the books!

Since we had taken a wrong turn earlier we modified our route to still hit 100 miles.  However, once we got back to the start/finish area we were only at like 96 miles, so we undertook a [mentally] painful out and back on the trail to bump the mileage up over 100.  I was actually curious to see what would happen to the distance pane once I broke 100 (since it always shows 2 decimal places).  It wasn't very exciting just to see it go down to one!  But fun to see 3 whole numbers to the left of the dot.

I was freakin' starving after this one, and took it upon myself to order pizza.  All that bread just tastes so good after a full day of activity.  This is quickly becoming my go-to meal post Marathon or Ultra - and now for post-really-long-bike-ride too.

Post workout dinner of champions.