Little Red Riding Hood

Saturday was a big day for me, I went on my first 100 mile bike ride.  Yes, 100 miles. How long does it take to ride 100 miles on a bike?  Well, it took me about 6 hours, but I was able to stop a few times along the way so the ride took a total of 8 1/2 hours to complete. I participated in "Little Red" as it is known, which is one of the most popular all-women rides in the country and starts in a small town about 45 minutes from where I live.  3500 women come from all over to be part of the "Little Red Riding Hood".  They provide breakfast before the ride and several stops along the way with an entire spread of all of the foods and water you need to fuel up. It's so popular that this was the first year they had to go to a lottery registration. Fortunately my team of 12 got in. 

 

I'm new to the sport of cycling.  How new? So new that when I registered for Little Red I hadn't even been on my bike yet.  In the last few years injuries have kept me from running and it has been kind of a bummer.  I really enjoyed training for races and exercising with friends and I just wasn't able to do it anymore.  As it turned out all of my running friends started switching to cycling anyway so I decided to follow the crowd.  I bought my first bike off of KSL.com in November and put it in the garage until the weather warmed up. I started going on rides with friends in April in an effort to get ready for the big "century ride".   I started with a 20 mile ride, bumped it up to 30 the next time around, went to 40, and then a week ago Saturday I went 70.  I figured I was ready to just go for it and see what happened.

 

 The weather was perfect and the scenery was out of a story book.  Since most of the roads were rural we didn't have to deal with a lot of traffic and there were people all along the way to help if anyone ran into trouble. It was such a fun day!  Oh yes, I'm saddle sore, but I did it and felt so accomplished as we pulled up to the finish.



Cecili, Annie, Desi and Me at the finish line.

My back pockets were full of GU chomps and other freebies from previous stops. They said to help ourselves to however much we wanted. . .so I did.

Here is everyone enjoying their finish line ice cream.

When I was done I got a text from Adam, "So is it your new favorite thing?"  Yes, it is my new favorite thing.  It has all of the things I liked about running, but it isn't running, so the void has been filled. Sweet, we're back in business.