Ride Report: Tour de Paws Metric Century

Pre-Ride:
The ride wasn't scheduled to start until 9am, but since my tri team member (Hi Audrey! ;-) and I both had a four mile brick run scheduled for after the 63 mile bike ride, we decided to head out early. So instead of getting up at a decent hour, I was once again out of bed at 6am. Got to the ride start and registered and we headed out almost an hour before the official start.

Ride:
The ride starts out and ends on a super busy street, but fortunately, that's only two miles in total. It starts with a good size hill and ends with and even better one.

I was wishing for arm warmers during the first 10 minutes of the ride, but after that, I was fine. The first 22 miles and the last 15 miles were on familiar terrain for me and in the middle, I got to discover some new roads. Yay.

The time was really flying on the this ride, mostly because of the great conversation. The route is very pretty, but I was surprised at the amounts of good hills that were packed into this course. According to the cue sheet, there only one grunt hill, but there were a good many other grunty hills there too.

Due to us leaving early, we were happy to find, that the first rest stop at mile 17/51 was already ready for the riders to come through. Also, a big shout out at the rest stop volunteers! Great job all around! Thank you!

We got passed by the lead group around mile 27... Those guys were moving it. They had a motorcycle escort with them and the motorcyclist  came up to us just at the right time, when we were chased by two big dogs... Thanks again for that!!

The ride didn't have ups and downs for me, it was just a constant plucking along... Last 10 miles really hurt and that kind of surprised me. My legs just had enough and I wasn't looking forward to the run at all.

Brick Run:
I did a quick change into run shorts and a t-shirt. I don't like to ride in tri shorts for anything over 40 miles and of course, I don't want to run in my diaper cycling shorts. Sorry if this is TMI: Unfortunately, I didn't wear a more supportive sports bra... What works for cycling, doesn't necessarily work for running. Ouch!

Other than that, the brick run was alright.... We got it done. Nuff said.

Post Run:
We got back to the start/ finish of the ride and immediately dug into the post ride buffet. We said down with some of the rest stop volunteers and had some good conversations. I didn't even notice how late it had already gotten by that time, so eventually I booked it home.