July 9th ride - solo century and new goals set

Plan 1: Goat ride.
My plan today was to do the Goat ride in Brown County to test my hill climbing abilities:The Goat ride The local Shelbyville bike group Shelbyvelo worked on organizing this ride. This is their second year for the ride, I like the concept that you get tokens for each ride you complete then you can show off all your tokens to show how many of the rides you actually did. If you do all four rides (over 116 miles of very hilly rides) you get your name listed on next years shirt created for the ride.

But I ended up accidentally sleeping in so I scratched that.

Plan 2: ride with Greensburg group.
Instead I tried to hook up with the local Greensburg group that sometimes meet at 8:00 on Saturday mornings. I rode around town a bit waiting for anyone to show at the high school. It was a no show, perhaps they were doing the Goat ride.

Plan 3: do a solo century.
I ended up riding the loop from Greensburg, Versailles,  North Vernon then back to Greensburg. This loop is about 20 miles short of a century  so I had to add some miles around Greensburg to complete the 100 miles.

I decided to take it slow since this is a longer distance ride and for some reason I seem to have some type of mental issue with riding a century (my wife says I have a lot of mental issues). Not sure how to explain it, but destinations that are over 40 plus miles away seem unattainable for a round trip, even though I shouldn't have any problems with such a trip. I mean if I can ride 60 miles non-stop riding as hard as I can, what is the issue with riding 100 easy miles? So I have decided to ride some solo centuries to overcome this fear of centuries.

It started off very sunny with very low chance of rain. Around Napoleon and Osgood it became very foggy, so much so that I had to take off my glasses and even the Garmin GPS had moisture on its screen that had to be wiped off to be read. Visibility was very low so I turned on all my lights.

I made four stops including stopping at my Moms to visit her for a few minutes. Unfortunately the highway between North Vernon and highway 46 was recently chipped and sealed. making it a very rough ride, I only rode it for a couple of miles. A bridge was also being replaced and had to be detoured around.

It was an excellent ride and I felt great afterwards. perhaps I'll try another one tomorrow.


I have also set some new goals:
2x centuries over two consecutive days
100K under 3 hours (62.14 miles)
It'll probably be a while before I try these goals, but they are there when I'm ready.


Stats of the ride:

July 6th ride

It was very hot and humid, I took it easy and searched for some hills to practice climbing.  The hill I used is around 150 foot in height according to the GPS. The steepest part is around 80 feet in height. This is one of those hills that are so steep that you can't see a good portion of the road until you are actually on that section of the hill.

Unfortunately there was some road work at the bottom of the hill, that crossed the entire street and was covered with loose gravel. I also coasted over 37 mph even though I used my breaks to slow down. I have some pictures of the hill, I hope to upload them later. I was able to maintain a 9.4 mph average speed while climbing the steepest section.

Stats:

July 4th ride

Nice evening for a ride, very little wind. The downtown miles lowered my average speed by about 1 mph.

Climbing hills
I'm really starting to figure out a great method for climbing with the Musashi. I actually lift my rear end slightly off the seat which seems to give more power to the pedals. I think this works on the Musashi because of the combination of the seat angle and the frame stiffness.

With the Vision R40 I just lowered the gear and pedaled as fast as I could. Which is what I have been doing on the Musashi.

With this new method I can actually use higher gears and get higher speeds. For example on the group ride from July 3rd, there was a fit cyclist going up a hill, he was out of saddle and hitting it hard. I was actually keeping up with him, I then decided to kick it and easily passed him. I couldn't believe it, I was going over 21mph up a good hill on a recumbent!

Summary stats of the ride:

July 3rd Century ride

Today I did something a little different. After doing a search on the Internet I found that a group from Shelbyville Indiana had an early morning ride planned. The ride started at 6:15 at the Shelbyville High School.

There were six others that shown up making it a nice sized group ride. We rode to a town called Nineveh which is just West of Camp Atterbury. Once we were back in Shelbyville I decided to solo to Greensburg and back for another 50 miles to complete my second Century ride for the year.

I'm now over 1600 miles for the year.

I can definitely see myself riding with the Shelbyville group some more, I had a lot of fun.
Here is a link to their blog and they have their rides listed here

Direct link to ride details
Summary stats for this ride: