Weekend (riding) recap

How fitting that today is World Bicycling Day today as we spent much of our weekend on two wheels. Not only do I love riding my bike but I absolutely love riding my bike in and around Greenville. Our terrain forces you to improve your skills (mental and physical), resilience and endurance - there's no easy riding here.

Our athlete Robb flew from LA to Greenville to spend two days of private training with us in route to IM Ireland and IM Whistler. Robb is a strong cyclist (who loves challenging courses) so we made sure he got his money worth with lots of time in the saddle, exploring all that our challenging terrain has to offer. Our coach gave us the ok to load the up the weekend with cycling miles so it was a win-win for us all.

On Saturday we set out for a long ride up and over Cesar's Head. The weather was a bit "cooler" (in the upper 70's) which made for a refreshing start to the ride. Up in the mountains it was even cooler which was a great relief compared to the mid 90+ temps we have been experiencing lately. The official climb up Cesar's Head is 6.2 miles (from the veer off point, ~2000 feet elevation gain) but in reality, it's closer to 7.2 miles as you have to climb to the veer off point. After the descend, we headed toward Dupont State Recreational Forest which is mostly rollers before a 4 mile section of super punchy and technical climbing and descending. Then it was more rollers before we arrived to Flat Rock for our bottle-refill/croissant stop. Then it was a fast 1:36 hr back home as Robb was leading the way and he was pushing the effort. In total, we did 4:48 hrs of riding, 83 miles and ~6200 feet elevation gain. After the ride we did a ~21 minute run off the bike. A solid day of training!

On Sunday we set out for what was suppose to be a ~4 hour ride but the bad news was that we got a little lost and the ride turned into a 5 hour ride. The good news was that we discovered a few new routes because of the unplanned detour. Despite going through all types of Ironman emotions and physical highs and lows throughout this ride, it was a really enjoyable time spent on two wheels. We finished the ride with 5:02 riding time, 94 miles and ~5500 feet of elevation gain. This ride took us past Clemson and then back through some beautiful twisty roads with lots of rollers. Before the last climb back home, we finished with a solid 30+ minutes on Pumpkintown where Karel was pushing the pace while Robb and I stayed right behind his wheel.

Over 48 hours we accumulated 177 miles, almost 12000 feet elevation gain and close to 10 hours of riding. Thank you body! And no honks or close calls with cars. If anything, the roads were pretty quiet. Thank you cars for letting us share the road with you.

Here are a few pics from the two rides.