On The Road
by: Bill Oetinger 2/1/2007
A Century a Month
We introduced a new program in our cycling club last year. We called it The Century-of-the-Month Challenge.
It all started the previous year when one club member set a goal for himself of doing at least one century each month, all year. He did it just for himself, not as part of any official series. Another clubster heard about his little self-imposed challenge and suggested the club should institutionalize the concept for all the members for 2006. And so we did. We promoted it--mildly--and set up an interactive page at the club’s web site where members could log on and record their centuries for all to see. This of course made it a sort of competition, for bragging rights, if nothing else.
We also made it a point to schedule at least one official century each month on the club’s ride list. Sometimes there were more in a given month, but always there was at least one, and that one was always designed to be not too brutally hard; something that would be accessible to most of the membership.
In 20-20 hindsight, the name was a mistake...a misnomer. “Century-of-the-Month” implied that only the officially listed rides would count, whereas our intention had been to encourage folks to do century-distance rides of all sorts and to log them all at the on-line site. The official ones were there just to give people a handy venue for knocking off at least one century each month, in the company of their club mates. It took us a fair amount of follow-up work to put the message across that in fact all rides of approximately 100 miles were grist for our mill. Brevets, doubles, races, training rides, tours...all of them.
We’re continuing the program in 2007, although we have changed the name to The Century Challenge in an effort to clarify that matter of which rides are eligible to be counted. While we didn’t see quite as many people getting into the interactive log as we wanted, there were still quite a few folks involved--enough to make it fun--and we hope and expect to see it grow this year and in the future. More gratifying perhaps was the number of people who were showing up to do the listed century rides, whether they bothered to log them or not. Healthy turn-outs, month after month, even in the chill winter weather. It was fun to see so many people embracing the prospect of riding 100 miles in a day.
Folks who have done longer rides--ultramarathon or randonée or race distances--may come to take the humble century for granted. And yet for most recreational cyclists, the century is still a very big deal. I will wager most of us can recall when we did our first century: what a challenge it was for us, and what a shining accomplishment. Every year, thousands of riders will tackle this challenge, often in the company of hundreds of their fellow cyclists in organized, pay-to-ride events. For most of those riders, it will be the most ambitious challenge they will undertake in their cycling careers. It may be the most ambitious physical challenge of their lives. Some will go on to longer, more difficult rides, but for most, the century will remain their personal Everest...the ne plus ultra of bike rides.
So it makes sense and is good fun to celebrate this accomplishment with a club program that offers the riders an opportunity to politely toot their horns about this fine thing they’ve done, and in the process to encourage and assist them to do it again...and again. Part of the reason I’m writing this column is to encourage you and your bike club to organize something similar. It takes very little effort to get it up and running. Assuming your club has a web site, all you need is one club member who knows how to build the interactive page. Then you do a little promoting at the web site or in your club newsletter. And finally, you need a few members to list and lead the centuries in the club each month. I suppose this last item is optional. You could just put up the web page and let your members find their centuries wherever they may. The eager beavers are going to do that anyway. But the listed rides were a big part of what made the series fun for us, I think.
You can check out our on-line century log here.
My own experience of our club’s century-a-month series turned out somewhat differently. To put it in the simplest terms, my century-a-month morphed into a century-a-week. That’s right: 52 of them.But it wasn’t as simple as one a week. I started the year with the notion of doing the one-a-month series. That seemed like a realistic program. I’m not big on setting goals; on buying into a major agenda for the season. I’ve even written one of these columns on the topic of what a lousy idea it is to get locked into such an agenda. As you’ve heard me say a few times before, I am more process oriented than goal oriented. I would rather focus on riding my bike today than on some year-long quest, whatever its nature. So how did I end up banging out one century every week for the entire year?
Frankly, I’m still a bit mystified about how it happened. I really did not plan it that way. I did one century only in January. I did another on Super Bowl Sunday in February, getting home just in time to see the Stones at halftime. At that point, I’m pretty sure I was still thinking in terms of one a month, if I was even thinking about it at all. But then on the last weekend in February, my buddy Rich suggested a ride that added up to 103 miles (including the commute from my house to his house at the start and home again at the end). After the ride, I logged onto the web site and punched in “2” instead of “1” as my total for the month. I think it struck me that two looked better than one, and if two was good, then maybe three or four might be better. I honestly don’t recall the thought process that provoked me to start doing more centuries. It just sort of snuck up on me. I’m only guessing that that second century in February acted as some sort of trigger on my imagination, opening up the possibility of doing more than one century each month.
In any event, at that point, I was so far behind any theoretical schedule of one-a-week that I dismissed entirely the idea that I would ever catch up. It wasn’t even a premise worth considering...a non-starter. Besides, you may recall we were suffering through the absolutely worst, rainiest season in history at that point, and it seemed to me highly likely that I would fall even further behind as I missed weekends because of rainouts.
All I will admit to in the way of an agenda is that I decided to start doing a century a week at the beginning of March, figuring I would simply see where that took me. I was more interested in putting up a number like four or five on the club’s log each month than I was in any year-long goal. Once I acknowledged to myself that I was indeed buying into some large-scale project, I made three promises to myself: 1. It would be a one-year-only proposition; 2. I would stop doing it as soon as it stopped being fun; 3. I would never let it become obsessive...meaning I would never allow logging another century to interfere with the overall quality of my life.
Amazingly, in spite of the dreadful weather we endured over those Spring months, I managed to squeeze in a century every weekend, and I only rode in the rain once. That ride was probably the one that set the hook in my jaw for the season-long quest. It was the second weekend in March, and it was pouring crowbars and clawhammers at my house. No way was I going out in that soup! But the weather maps showed me that the front had not yet reached Napa Valley. Most people think Sonoma and Napa Counties are next door neighbors. They are on a map, but in the real world, a high ridgeline divides them, and any weather coming in off the ocean hits Sonoma County first and then stalls out for a few hours before finally cresting the ridge and pouring down into Napa Valley. I turned those few hours of grace to my advantage: I threw the bike in the car and drove to Calistoga, then did a ride up and down Napa Valley on dry roads, one step ahead of the advancing storm. I almost got away with it totally dry, but the storm finally caught up with me with about 20 miles to go on my century, and that represents the only time in that wettest of all possible seasons that I got really drenched. That desperate measure of racing over to the next county to squeeze in another century marks the point at which I know I was in for the long haul.
I stuck with the one-a-week pace until July, when I snuck in an extra one on the Fourth (a Tuesday). That was my first week with two centuries. But then in August, I only logged two all month. This is where the no-obsession clause in my contract kicked in. The wife and I were heading up to Oregon to a family reunion that had been months in the planning, with relatives gathering from as far away as Southern California and Montana. I planned to take the bike and steal a day from the family to knock off a century. I had the route all laid out. But at the last minute, I said to myself: “Hey chump, you’ve got a very few days here when you can visit with your elderly parents, with your brother and sister and your nephews and your own kids--all together for the first time in several years--and you plan on squandering one of those precious few days on a solo bike ride?” To have done so would have been the very definition of obsessive behavior. I left the bike home, and what with one thing and another, I lost two weekends in Oregon. Then, back home, I lost another when I badly sliced a tire during what was supposed to be a century. It was a sudden front wheel blow-out that left me skittering on the rim at 43 mph. (I didn’t crash.) But after four attempts at booting the damaged tire over the course of ten miles, I was forced to give up at 80 miles.
I lost ground in mid-September when I was off on a multi-day tour. I did almost 500 miles in seven days, but none of those days was a century. With the travel days tacked onto both ends of the tour, that effectively killed off two weekends without adding to my total. At that point, I was so far behind any 52-century schedule, I wasn’t even thinking in those terms.
But then, for a lot of little reasons, I started catching up. In the last week of September, my wife went out of town and my work schedule was forgiving, so I had the time to ride, and that’s what I did. I logged five centuries in 11 days. I kept doing one each weekend in October and snuck in one extra weekday century that month as well. I lost one weekend in November when I was laid low by a cold--my only illness of the year--but I made up for it with two weekday centuries. The weekday centuries were the key. Typically, I take Tuesday and Thursday afternoons off each week and do a couple of 40+ mile rides. It wasn’t much of a stretch to alter that and do just one 100-mile ride on Wednesday, and I ended up doing that several times.
It wasn’t until somewhere around November that I actually began adding up the available weeks left in the year and calculating what it would take to get to 52. It still didn’t seem possible, especially with the rainy season looming on the horizon. I figured for sure I would lose some weekends somewhere. But in fact, the threat of rain actually helped: whenever I saw a dodgy looking forecast for the upcoming weekend, I would rush out and do a century midweek...sort of a preemptive strike, to make sure I got one in before the weather hit. But the weather never did hit, and on most of those weekends, I still managed to get my ride in. With those weekday centuries thrown in, I logged seven in December, the most of any month all year. 15 of my last 19 rides of the year were centuries. It started to add up, and finally, a week before Christmas, I found I had caught up to one-a-week pace. Even with taking the Christmas weekend off to be with family, I was able to close out the deal with the club’s Last Chance Century on December 30.
I have never done anything like this before. I doubt I have done more than two dozen centuries in any year previously. I know people who have done a century a week for a year, and I have always marveled at what an achievement that must be. It never occurred to me that it would be something I could do or would want to do. I really did back into this in a somewhat haphazard, half-assed manner, and I’m still a little amazed that it happened.
Curiously, this is the first year in a long time that I did not enter a single official century...a paid, mass-ride sort of event. None of my centuries followed that route. I did do our club’s Wine Country Century--riding as a course marshal--and the second half of the Terrible Two, if you want to count them. But aside from those backyard rides, nothing of that sort. 16 of my centuries were official Century-of-the-Month rides. 21 were shorter club rides that I padded out to century length by riding from home. And 15 were completely solo. 34 of the centuries started from home: no fossil fuels were harmed in the making of these centuries!
In addition to the solo centuries, many of the other rides involved at least some miles riding alone. Most of the commute miles to and from club rides were solo, and even on the club centuries I often found myself riding alone. I can’t keep up with the fast kids anymore, and this past year I became a master at going off the back of the group...of letting the leaders go when their tempo didn’t match my own. Altogether, I would guess that at least half of those 5200+ miles were ridden alone. While I very much enjoy riding with my friends, I have to confess that I think I enjoyed the solo miles the most, especially the ones where I was off any listed route and was free to meander around and explore whatever little roads appeared in front of me. If you read my Extreme Noodling column, you know I love prowling around and rooting out new roads, and the many solo miles afforded me many opportunities for discovering those buried treasures.
Perhaps the thing that surprised me most about this whole improbable adventure was how comfortable the rides turned out to be. That’s not to say they were all easy centuries. Not one of them had less than 4000’ of gain, and several had over 10,000’. There was a period, from late April to the end of July, when almost all of the centuries were monsters...some because of the brutally hard climbing and some because of the wilting heat of mid-summer (up to 107°). And yet I finished almost every ride feeling reasonably fresh. In many instances, I had enough energy to go out and mow the lawn or split firewood or do other chores afterward. Never once did I bonk, nor did I suffer any chronic aches or pains along the way: no saddle sores, no bad knees, no hot feet...
This is not meant to be a boast. I am truly surprised that it felt that way. I think of myself as a very average rider, and not a young one either. (I turn 60 next month.) And yet I was able to knock these babies off one after another without really blowing a gasket. Apparently the body can adapt to the distance...take it in stride. I mention this in the hope that others might be inspired to try something similar. Perhaps not a century a week, but at least one or two a month. If I can do it, so can you!
I’m not sure I can begin to express how enjoyable and satisfying this whole experience has been for me. And how pleasantly effortless. My body became so habituated to the distance that I was able to put it on cruise control and roll out the miles more-or-less stress-free. I tried to explain this to one friend by saying the process of doing a century had become routine for me, and he said, “Oh yeah: boring!” But he misunderstood me. What I meant was...well, try this analogy of a passenger train: the engineer and the crew on the train are all doing routine jobs to keep the train moving in the right direction, and as long as the engine gets enough fuel, the wheels will keep turning and the train will keep moving. But meanwhile, up in the Vistadome observation lounge, this one happy passenger is enjoying the heck out of the journey...sitting back, looking around at the wonderful scenery; taking it all in, and just generally having a fine time. He’s only vaguely aware of the effort being made by the crew and the engine. All that stuff takes care of itself--the engine drivers keep cranking away and the wheels keep going around--and he just gets to enjoy the ride. That’s how it was for me.
So...what a long, strange trip it turned out to be. As for my promise to make it a one-year-only deal, I am sticking to it. On the first weekend of the new year, I had an opportunity to ride to a club ride and back home afterward, and with a little wiggle here and there, I could easily have turned it into a century. But I got up on the January morning in question and looked out the window at a cold, grey day and thought about hitting the road an hour early to ride to the start. Then I looked back at my warm bed, with my warm wife in it, and it was a no-brainer. I hopped back in bed for another hour and then drove to the ride.
I plan to play the Century-a-Month game this year. I may do two in some months, but mostly it will be one. And that will be plenty. I’m glad I did what I did, but I’m also glad it’s over.
Bill can be reached at srccride@sonic.net