Training and Raining

I've been riding with my awesome bike group since last September. In January we decided to ride the Wine Country Century in Santa Rosa. We were excited to get signed up. The ride is open to 2500 riders and it sells out in three days. Ten of us signed up for it as well as the woman who started this bike group and who now lives in Utah. Oh, and Mark. Mark and 11 women set to ride. Thanks to my Garmin Forerunner that records every mile I had ridden, I knew that in the last 13 weeks I'd ridden over 1200 miles. It also said I'd burned over 63,000 calories, which poses the question, "Why aren't I as skinny as a rail?" But hey, I'm fit, so I'll settle for that. The Century would put me over 1300 miles. We watched the weather for two weeks and it appeared that there was a possibility of rain. As the time neared, it looked like the possibility was turning to likelihood. Hmmm. Exactly what was my dedication? I've ridden in rain before. It's not fun. You get wetter than you can imagine, you have lakes inside your shoes, you have spatters of grit up your front and your back. As a matter of fact, you have road grit everywhere. And you are cold. Like someone turning on a fan when you are soaking wet and telling you that you have to stand there for an hour or two. It helps a little that you are moving and creating a little body heat. Oh, and it's dangerous. The roads are slick, your brakes are wet, there is a greater chance that someone else will do something that causes you to fall. I also dread a flat tire. It's bad enough to get a flat tire, but changing one in the rain.... We all met in Santa Rosa the night before the ride and had a lovely dinner at an Italian restaurant decorated with cycling jerseys and cycling pictures. There were 12 of us for dinner. Mark and 11 women. He loved that. Rain poured down outside. Rain was forecast for the entire weekend, but maybe it would stop? The dinner was great fun and we agreed that we would check weather.com the next morning to see what it would be like. The next morning at 6:00 am, weather.com said that it was 54 degrees outside and that it would be cloudy until noon and then start raining. Okay, maybe we could get in a good chunk of the ride before it started. We left the starting point at 7:20 am. By 8:30 am it was raining. Then it rained harder. At the first rest stop (mile 25) we re-evaluated. Mark and I decided we'd had enough and said we'd start heading back by a different route, but still nearly 25 more miles. We ran into another friend, Shelley, at the rest stop and she joined us. Some of the bike group said they'd go a little farther and then head back, some were undecided. We had seen many on the side of the road changing flat tires. When we arrived back at the starting point around 11:00 am, having ridden nearly 50 miles in the rain, we were dirty and cold, but surprisingly fresh and not all that tired. It was weird, because we didn't feel like we had really done a bike ride and all because we had fallen short of our goal. I later learned that five women in the group finished the century around 4:00 pm. One of them had a flat tire at mile 85. The other four had never done a century before and were determined to go the distance. Amazingly, one of those four had crashed her bike in her first attempt at a century, broke her ankle, and had had pins in her ankle until February. So hooray for those turbo women! I'm just happy to have lived to ride another day.