Blue Ridge Parkway Ride

It seems that everything I add in here relates to biking lately!

After the Silver Comet adventure last week, we undertook something completely different this week.

We went camping at Montebello with the Outdoor Adventure Social Club.

It was a full weekend to celebrate the club's 5th year in existence. There was music (including my tunes on Friday night) and tons of activities.

Amy decided to lead a bike ride. Initially the plan was to do an advanced ride in the morning and a beginner ride in the afternoon. However after scouting out the local roads, we found it would be at least an hour drive (like, in a car) to get to any terrain suitable for a beginner ride, so that plan was scrapped.

I'm going to try and map this route and link to it, but it was pretty ridiculous.

We turned left out of the campground and started straight up a hill for almost 2 miles. I'm sure some people would have loved it, but after an evening of staying up late, poor nutrition and subpar sleep (not to mention alcohol for some of the riders the night before), this was the kind of climb that made many people want to quit. In fact, we had 2 folks drop out after 1.5 miles.

After some sitting and thinking and discussion about turning around and putting the bikes on the car to drive them to someplace more fun (read: easier) to ride, we opted to go ahead and ride to the Blue Ridge Parkway, just to say we got there.

Of course once we got to the parkway, we decided to ride a little more.

This was brutal after the climb just to get there, however, in retrospect, it wasn't quite as bad as I thought at the time. The climbs were longer, but nowhere near as steep.

We rode about 6ish miles to a picnic table and had lunch. It doesn't sound like much, but at this point, we had been on our bikes for about 2 hours!

Then we decided to turn around and head back down. Fortunately, all the climbing we did to get to our lunch spot meant that it was primarily descents to get back to the road to the campground! It took us probably more than an hour to get to the picnic table, and probably about 20 minutes to get back down.

So naturally, after a lunch and a bunch of fast downhill riding (after which we all felt invincible! Note: never plan the rest of your day's biking immediately following long stretches where you don't have to pedal), we figured we needed to get at least 20 miles in.

That decided, instead of turning off to head back to the campground, we went the other direction on the parkway. One guy in our group had a GPS, we found a route that would add a few miles and get us back to the campground.

There was more climbing, but again, it was not severe and actually kind of pleasant (as long as you didn't look too far ahead to see how long the hill lasted!).

We reached our turn off and (incorrectly) calculated that we needed to add about 3 more miles to get to 20, so we kept on, planning to turn around after 1.5 miles.

This was where the highlight (sarcasm) of my day occurred. After doing another little climb and riding about 2 miles, the people in front hit the top of the hill and turned around to head back.

I stopped pedaling and unclipped to take a drink and turn my bike around, but the second I put my foot on the ground and put a little weight on it, but left quad completely cramped up. I couldn't even bend my leg to get off my bike. I had to lay the bike down on the ground, so I could swing my leg off it to sit on the ground. It took several minutes before I could bend my leg, but once that happened, everything was good to go.

I attribute that cramp to my poor nutrition and hydration the evening before. I was wearing my camelbak and had a bottle of gatorade on my bike as well, but that wasn't enough hydration on a hot day (probably close to 90, but for the first time this season, so I wasn't particularly acclimatized to it). Regardless, I'm going to the bike shop after work today to get a second bottle cage and water bottle!

All in all we wound up doing just under 23 miles in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Quite an accomplishment for and overweight, underexperienced (this is only my second year cycling, compared to about 6 years for the next least experiened) rider like myself!

I have to say I was quite proud of finishing that ride, especially considering how badly I wanted to quit at the beginning! One of the other guys really helped my by riding slow along with me and encouraging me to keep going. Doing a ride like that is so psychological, any kind of support you can get helps!

Hopefully I'll get a couple of pictures up soon!