Longest Ride of the Season (so far)

My schedule for riding has sort of been messed up this past week due to some pretty bad thunderstorms on Friday. In a way, this was a blessing as it shifted my rest day to Friday, giving me Monday's as a day to do a longer ride than I'm able to on days when I have to go to work.

So with that in mind, I planned on doing my longest ride of the season today, an old favorite, the Danville-Peacham-Barnet loop. I was put in mind of doing this loop when I was looking at an old cycling log from 3 years ago and I saw that my first ride on this loop (though in the opposite direction) was after a couple months of riding. That is about how long I've been riding this year so it seemed like a good time to make the ride.

Now, 3 years ago when I first did this ride it took me 2:23 to complete the 31 miles. In looking at my blog entries I see I had last done this loop 2 years ago in a sort of race simulation, covering the same route in 1:34. Today was something in the middle, covering the route in 2:08. So I'm right where I've felt I was....getting into decent shape. When I did the ride in 1:34 I was 59 lbs lighter than I am now, which accounts for some of the difference in time. I was also putting out an average of 81 watts more back then (192W today vs 273W 2 years ago).

In looking at some of the best power output for both rides, I find that the short duration power is quite close, but as the durations get longer the difference in power output maintained gets larger. That seems to me to be a case of endurance. I've got the strength to push the power out, but not the endurance to keep up the pressure for extended periods of time. Endurance will come.

Another interesting thing from today's ride is how important it is to drink enough fluids while riding. This has often been a trouble spot for me, as I never seem to be able to keep up with my fluid loss. Today was a good example of that. I drank 2 full bottles of sports drink during the ride, which is about average for me on a 2 hour ride. That is about 40 oz of fluid. When I got home I got on the scale and found that I had lost a further 3 lbs. So I was only replacing about half of the fluid I was losing from sweat. Hard to believe I sweated out more than a gallon, almost 2 gallons of fluid on this ride.