Metric Century Progress Report

The Joy of a Group Ride
(The Great Western Bike Rally, 1968)

My first group ride after moving to California was the 2018 Art of Survival which I rode with my high school riding buddy, Roger. Back in 2016, at the Modesto Roadmen 50th Reunion, Roger urged me to ride Eroica California with him. I couldn't join him in 2017 because I was caring for my sick wife. When, in 2018, I again couldn't go with him, this time because I had pneumonia, Roger suggested the Art of Survival as another ride we could do together, and I managed to make that one. That event offered rides of various lengths, and Roger and I decided to ride the "metric century", a ride 100 kilometers (62 miles) long. The Art of Survival is held near to where Roger lives, a seven hour drive from where I live, so I spent both the night before and the night after this ride with Roger and his wife Janet and we had lots of time to talk about many things, one of which was Roger's plan to ride a metric century a month. I was very excited by Roger's plan, and decided that I, too, should try to do that, a plan I announced on this blog the following August.

Precisely what were Roger and I planning? Subsequent history indicates that Roger had a well thought out plan but I confess that my adoption of Roger's plan was an impulsive response to his enthusiasm and thus not carefully thought out. I think the reason I got excited is that I had really enjoyed the ride we had just done and wanted to keep doing rides like that. Upon reflection, there were two attractions of the Art of Survival ride that made me I want to do something similar on a regular basis: the social aspect and the challenge; I had found the ride hard but doable. Unlike the 200 kilometer rides I was doing five years ago, I hoped that I could do 100 kilometer rides without the months of preparation the 200 kilometer rides required, that they would not leave me so tired that it would be a year before I could do another one, and that I could do them on the hilly roads of California. And I also wanted to ride with Roger and with large groups of other cyclists.

When I got home, I started looking for more group metric centuries and built up a list of almost 100. The sources I used to assemble this list were the California Bike Ride Calendar and California Bike Rides. I took me some time to assemble this list, my babysitting responsibilities increased with the birth of my second grandchild, and as I worked my way through the list, I found that, for a variety of reasons (too expensive, too hard, ...) not all of them were rides I wanted to do. In fact, the first one I decided to try was The Golden Hills metric century in October. I mentioned it to Roger, he was interested, so we rode it together and had a great time. I also found that these group rides are not evenly distributed throughout the year. There were 17 rides in October, 1 in November, 0 in December, 0 in January, 1 in February,  and 2 in March, so all of a sudden, I was staring at April and Eroica California. The good news was that this year I finally made it to Eroica. The bad news is that the ride I chose was not a metric century. Why? Because the shortest ride at Eroica which qualified as a metric century was just too hard for me.

What made this ride "too hard?" As a general point, it is extremely difficult to come up with a route for a ride which is exactly 100 kilometers (62 miles) long, so a typical metric century is at least 100 kilometers long. Thus, at a given event, the shortest ride over 100 kilometers can be significantly longer than that. The shortest ride at Eroica was 33 miles long. The next shortest ride was 74 miles, more than the 62 miles of a metric century. But the problem with this ride was not so much the 12 extra miles as it was the hills. My 33 mile long ride included 1,400 feet of climbing. The metric centuries I have ridden have had about 2,000 feet of climbing. The 74 mile ride had 5,700 feet of climbing.

How much climbing is too much? During the 2019 season, I learned that I can ride 65 miles, I can climb 4,500 feet, but I probably can't do both on the same ride. The two metric centuries I rode were rated as "easy", but I still found them to be about as much as I wanted to do. They were each about 65 miles long and each had about 2,000 feet of climbing. In July of 2019, I rode a one pass version of The Death Ride which was 49 miles long with 4,500 feet of climbing, and I felt like that is was absolutely the hardest ride I can complete. One rule of thumb I have come across is that in terms of difficulty, is that 100 feet of climbing is equivalent to 1 mile of distance. If we add feet of climbing divided by 100 to distance to get a difficulty score, then the two metric centuries I rode each had scores of 85 and The Death Ride had a score of 94. Based on how hard I found the rides, that feels about right to me. The ride I did at Eroica had a difficulty score of 42, easier than I might have ideally chosen, but the next longer ride had a score of 130, more than I think I should attempt.

Another factor that affects ride difficulty is how fast the ride is ridden, not in absolute terms like miles per hour which is affected by things like how much climbing there is in the ride, but in relative terms, how hard I push during the ride. Consider my Go-To Alpine ride, 23 miles long with 1,300 feet of climbing which I have ridden approximately 100 times over the last two years. The fastest I have ever completed it is in 1 hour 44 minutes, the slowest, 2 hours 9 minutes. The fastest ride left me a lot more tired than the slowest. Despite my out of control compulsion for analysis and metrics, this is not an attempt to add one more parameter to my difficulty score but to recognize that such a score has its limits. This is just one example, there are many more factors that affect ride difficulty (e.g. choice of bike) but length and amount of climbing is where I stop.

At the top of this post, I noted that one of my major reasons for wanting to ride a metric century a month was because they provide opportunities to ride with my friend Roger. But even on my first ride with him, the 2018 Art of Survival, I realized he is a much stronger rider than I am. In contrast, he and his brother-in-law Dave, who ride together a lot, are similar in ability. For Eroica 2019, Roger and Dave did the 74 mile ride, while I did the 33 mile ride. For Golden Hills 2019, they did a full century (101 miles) while I did the metric (65 miles). Roger and Dave completed metric centuries each month from April through October of 2019, and they invited me along on all of them. In the end, I did Eroica, Art of Survival, and Golden Hills with them (albeit over easier routes in some cases.) Many of their other rides were too much for me, having up to 7,000 feet of climbing. As we were leaving Golden Hills this year to make our separate ways home, we shouted out "See you at Eroica!" I hope so, and I hope we see each other at Art of Survival and Golden Hills as well. That said, the reality is that they will want to do rides that are beyond my strength. As much as I would like to join their team, I don't qualify. What, then, should I do going forward? I don't need to ride metric centuries for my health, I can satisfy that need with much less riding, so I should do what is fun, and I think the social aspect more than the challenge might be the key to that. Right now, I am looking at the ride schedule of one of the local bike clubs, the Western Wheelers. Maybe riding with them is just what I am looking for.

Training

Wait, what, all of those posts on training for a metric century, that was all for nothing? Not at all! Even if I add no metric centuries to my schedule in 2020 beyond what I rode in 2019, I still need to get in shape for The Art of Survival in May and The Golden Hills in October. I have come up with two different approaches to being in shape for a metric century. The first is used when I have not ridden a metric century the previous month. It is the plan I used to prepare for the 2019 Golden Hills metric century. If I am routinely riding a 34 mile ride each week (which I am currently doing) it takes me 4 weeks to get ready for a metric century. The second training plan is to be used when I want to ride metric centuries two or more months in a row. Again, assuming I stick with my schedule of riding a 34 mile ride each week, then that is all the preparation I need. The only problem was that I had never tested that second plan, I had never ridden a metric century two or more months in a row. When I got home from Golden Hills in October, I executed my "metric century a month" training plans over the next 4 weeks and in November, I rode a solo 100 kilometer ride on local roads, and it went fine. I was tired at the end, but not overly so. A solo ride lacks the social aspect of the Metric Century a Month plan and is not a substitute for that, this was just a test, but a test I passed. Thus, the training plans I have blogged so much about should allow me to ride Group Metric Centuries whenever I want.