cycling
12. Juni, 14:42 Uhr
I'm writing this mostly for the few people who will search for it when they have the same question I had: "Century bike ride on a hybrid?"
Yesterday I did my first century ride. It was the "[Ride to End Alzheimer's](https://ridewithgps.com/routes/12496009)" in NH/MA. Here was my experience riding a hybrid for 100 miles:
* Before the ride, I made peace with the fact that I may literally be the last person to finish.
* My bike is a 2016 Giant Seek 1. Using my scale at home, I measure the weight of the bike to be 29.8 lbs (13.5 kg). No clips or custom handlebars, just added water bottle cages and a bike computer thing.
* With stops, my time was right around 7.5 hrs (though, caveat to this, see below), but I was actually NOT the last to finish, probably because...
* Most of the other cyclists were older. Many of them commented on my bike. One lady was kinda bitchy ("I didn't know you were allowed to do the century on a mountain bike"), but everybody else that commented was either concerned ("Are you doing ok with that bike?" as they passed lol) or encouraging ("You are kicking butt with that bike!")
* My training was basically: commute to work 2 miles each way as fast as possible (lots of red lights and stuff too), and do increasingly long trips on the weekends. Two weeks before the ride, I was able to do 80 miles in one day with a backpack full of weekend travel crap, in 90 degree weather, with a pit stop for hiking down/up a small-ish chasm. My avg speed for that last training ride was 11.8 mph because I had to stop every so often for traffic or to look at directions.
* My buddy is in pretty good shape fitness-wise and had a road bike, but he had barely trained specifically for the century. (He's been focused on training for a marathon, so running instead of cycling, etc.) Our pace seemed to match pretty well. We had three other friends doing the ride with us, but they were up ahead of us the whole time. The fastest of our group finished at least an hour before us.
* I seemed to be better than average on the hills, possibly due to training harder on hills in general, due to having a heavier bike? I would pass folks and leave my friend behind on the hills just cuz I wanted to go at the pace I was used to. Then at the top I'd go slow until my friend caught up.
* **Would I ride a hybrid for another century in the future?** I think so, assuming it was similar level of difficulty and a similar crowd of people. I might feel a bit more self-conscious if the other participants were all crazy fit young folk.
* **So my advice, if you're considering riding a hybrid for a century**: 1.) I would argue that **training ahead of time is *even more important for you* if you are riding a hybrid.** You have *heavier weight* to bring 100 miles, *higher tire friction* due to larger tires+weight, and *higher drag* because your positioning presents a larger cross-section to the head wind. I think to be safe, you should make sure you can do at least 80 miles without feeling like dying. Because each step-up in your training is again, more difficult if you're on a hybrid. 2.) **Think about the actual event** (its purpose, who your fellow riders will be, how long before they "sweep" the back end, etc) and **ask yourself if you are OK being one of the last people to finish.**
* I was really fucking proud to do the century, so I gotta post a [pic of me and my bike](http://imgur.com/9ryp1Ns) after we finished the ride. The event raised a shitton of money for Alzheimer's research/patients and we all completed the whole century. Pretty cool.
The caveat to my completion time was that around mile 90, I had a spill, and my bike got screwed up after that. (Story time!) At one of the pit-stops, a bike mechanic put oil on my chain. After that, my chain slipped off the cog. nbd, just pull over and put it back on. Happened a second time, but again nbd. The third time that the chain slipped it was fairly violent; it got caught somewhere in the pedals, and because the pedals locked up I flew forward and lost control (pushing down on the pedals to suddenly realize they're not moving meant I was pushing myself up). I crashed and got scraped, minimal blood, just shaken up. We got my bike to work again, EXCEPT after that, my gear shifter wasn't working properly. So for the last 10 miles or so I was stuck in some really high gear (or highest gear, not sure since it's an internal gear hub). The last few hills were awful lol. Our time probably would have been closer to 7 hours if it weren't for that.
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