August 13th ride - Solo Century

The plan this Saturday was to test out the "Tree City Rolling Ride" It's a ride sponsored by the local Greensburg Indiana YMCA. Last year was the first year of the event. Their longest ride was 30 miles, so I didn't participate, this year though they have a 60 mile hilly ride. I have already signed up.

The routes aren't marked yet, but they do have a map on their web page that doesn't include street names so I made a sheet with what I thought would be the correct route. The 60 mile ride as I rode it was only 50 miles long, so I missed 10 miles somewhere. Which actually could have been a blessing since part of the ride was extremely hilly! The only part that I had issue with was south of the town of Buena Vista on Hamburg road. Sections of this road had a light amount of loose gravel on it. This road also had the most difficult climbs, although the climbing sections did not have loose gravel, there was one large descent with loose gravel making for a cautious descent on my very narrow 23mm tires.

I believe the ten miles I missed are on Hamburg road, since Hamburg road at one time split off in two directions with the same name! I think I took the wrong fork.

I'm looking forward to this ride which will take place on August 27th starting at the Greensburg Elementary school. The YMCA link is down at the moment, once the link is back up, I'll point to it here.

After checking out the 60 mile ride I decided to make a Century of it. I rode through town then up old highway 421 and back. I took an extra long break at the 70 mile mark (over an hour) at home to recoup from the heavy climbing of the first half of the ride.

This Century had more climbing then any other Century I have completed (over 3000 feet), I started late at 10:30 AM and I was up till 2:30 the night before. Even though I had all these things going against me, this was still my fastest Century yet!

Link to ride details

Here are the summary stats: