As race day approaches, I continue to incrementally increase my mileage and will eventually get to 20 miles the week before the event. After my most recent ride, I realized that I wasn't supposed to be at 10 miles, I was actually scheduled to hit 12 miles. So I had some catching up to do and needed to come up with yet another new route.
Which brings my to my current dilemma. I'm sure you've noticed by now that I do pretty much all my riding at night, which I really like because I basically have the sidewalks and bike paths to myself (except for the occasional raccoon and rabid dog, of course). But it also means that it's dark, and I'm not about to get rammed by some redneck in a monster truck whose blind spot starts at the 6-foot-high mark, so I try to restrict my riding to routes that aren't major traffic arteries and don't have bike or pedestrian paths. And I've found that even some of the bike paths aren't lighted, so I either have to know where I'm going or go on faith. And I don't have a lot of faith in my own sense of direction, so the last thing I want to do is get lost somewhere I'm not familiar with and end up being eaten by coyotes and discovered 4 days later by some kid walking to school -- and sadly, I was just blocks away from a familiar intersection.
But I digress. The bottom line is that I needed a new, longer loop, and I needed to stick to what I knew. So I Frankensteined it -- I took bits and pieces of all my prior rides and pieced together a nice 12-mile loop that featured some uphill, some downhill and everything in between (which I guess would actually just be flat land). I tried my best to avoid any backtracking, and save for a little over a mile-and-a-half, I was successful. This may not sound all that impressive, but I was able to work this out using an area that's only 17 square miles that met all my criteria (lighted, bike paths, no monster truck incidents, no gruesome discoveries by tweeners).
And the end result was pretty good: another Personal Record for distance (somehow came up short of 12 miles, with 11.87) at a decent pace (4:51). I've come to terms with the fact that I'm probably not going to hit my goal of 4-minute miles in the triathlon, but it's not going to stop me from trying ... I'm just not going to beat myself up over it.
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