So, I normally don't write about training rides/runs, because, well, they're just not all that interesting. Unless I took some awesome pictures, there just isn't much point in sharing my experience of turning the pedals over and over to the giant world of the internets. Because who cares? But last night... that was almost epic. Particularly for a weeknight. Epic things aren't supposed to happen on weeknights!

Christian, a Colby cyclist, is in town all summer, so we got together to ride. Christian is crazy. He might even be described as sketchy by people who have raced with him. Most importantly, the kid can f#*&@n HAUL on a bike. I think my first mistake was to suggest doing a 4hr ride with someone who is decidedly faster than I am. The second mistake would be to actually DO that four hour ride. Luckily, Colin came along so I knew I wasn't the only one suffering.

I planned out a route, ~60 miles, that went out and about and circled west of 495 before heading back east. I even went to the length of printing out the map. This was a good thing. We started a little on the late side, 5pm, and I quickly decided that I do not ever want to ride with Christian in traffic again. He's only been in Boston for a month, so I gotta give him some credit, but seriously, he is going to get killed or badly hurt one of these days. We finally get out past all the traffic onto 117. There is a slight tailwind, but we're moving at 26mph. Which is really fast in my book. The plan was to take this road out to past rt 62 before we hit up some of the smaller roads, and this plan was a good one. And then, on one of the smaller roads, we got to a fork, while we were going down a hill relatively fast, and we took the left fork, and we should have taken the right hand one. But, since it was uphill to turn around, the lazy cyclists just kept riding, assuming that we'd be able to find a way back to our original route. Oops.

Eventually we wound our way back to 117, realized where we were, kept going the wrong way, and then changed course completely, going south through Marlboro. I was cooked at this point. We hit a little hill and it was just explosions going off in each quad. This happened on every little bump that passed for a hill afterwards. We determined that whimper pace is when the heart rate is in level 2 or so, but the legs have exploded beyond help. We got to rt 20 finally, and started working our way home. It hurt. Then it got dark. Colin had a blinkie, I had a white light thingy that almost passed for a light, Christian naturally had no lights, punk. Then Colin's light fell off. Now I was starting to feel kind of sketched out.

We got down the hill into Wellesley, and made it to comm. ave with no mishaps. Rode the carriage road back up the hill, getting onto the grass any time a car came down that street. I don't think I've ever been so glad to get home from a ride. My legs were cooked, but it was more the mental exhaustion of not knowning when a car was going to slam into you that wore me out. Oof. It ended up being 3.5 hrs, ~65 miles, although I clocked 80 for the day after going to work and back. That was SIGNIFICANTLY faster than I normally ride... So yeah, between the darkness, the humidity, the lostness, and the speed, I feel like that almost counts as epic.