Someone once asked me (most likely a non-cyclist) how it's possible to cycle 100 miles in a day. I'm not sure what I said, but one possible answer is this:
a) get on your bike
b) start pedalling
c) after 100 miles stop pedalling.
As well as being a bit flippant, that answer is a bit simplistic, although it does also have a ring of truth to it.
Anyway, today I've had reason to think about my answer in a bit more depth, and I've decided to add a few additional steps to my original response. So here's a much more detailed answer to the question:
How do you cycle 100 miles in a single day?
a) Set aside a day for cycling, and then completely fail to use it. Make sure you sleep in, then get put off by a light shower of rain in the morning. To compound matters, try to ensure that you don't step outside even once during the entire day. Don't even empty the bin. Instead, spend the whole day doing completely pointless things around the house. Google loads of inconsequential crap on the internet, spend ages thinking of pointless status updates to put on Facebook and Twitter, and waste hours and hours on other life-sucking and time-wasting ways such as spending 2 hours picking your all-time greatest World Cup XI on various sport websites. By the end of the day, you will have cultivated the notion that you are wasting your life, and very possibly, this will lead to a coiled spring-like build up of latent energy, you may even experience some borderline self-loathing.
Any time that you do not waste on utter pointlessness during this 24 hours of not going outside, could be spent reading some really quite depressing history books, let's say perhaps on the subject of the development of the atomic bomb, and in a wider context the move towards the indiscriminate bombing of civilians during the Second World War. The following morning, you will wake up glad that you are not a citizen of Dresden on Valentine's Day 1945, nor are you an inhabitant of Hiroshima on 6th August 1945. Most probably if you had been in either place, you wouldn't be waking up at all.
b) As well as the historical reading, try and keep up to date with current news events too, on your lazy day of stupor. If, for example, it's the 70th anniversary of D-Day, and also if it's quite close to the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, be very happy that today is a day you can pretty much do what you want, and not a day you have to invade France to fight some Nazis, or alternatively go into town to protest against a totalitarian regime. Use a combination of the latent energy build-up from your day of pointlessness in tandem with your gratitude at having been born in a very lucky time and place, to get your ass into gear. Get up early on this blessedly free Day 2, and get on your bike.
c) it's always a good idea not only to get an early start, but get an early start on a day in June. If you manage to set off around 7.30 am, this will give you around 14 hours of daylight for your ride. This will allow you not to panic about the passage of time. To help you with this, arrange for there to be nothing or no-one at home who is depending on your safe return. If you've a partner, try and ensure they're out at work for at least 12 hours, and even better, try and engineer a split from them prior to the ride. This will mean that when you crawl home later, you will be able to pass out in the bath, and you won't need to cook them a meal. If you have a dog, get someone to look after him for you, or alternatively wait until he's dead before setting off. If he's already been cremated, he won't need to go outside for a wee.
d) don't take any lights. although it's not a race, you don't want to dawdle either.
e) conventional wisdom might say that to prepare for a 100 mile bike ride, doing some cycling would be a good idea, but as an alternative, perhaps you could spend 6 weeks or so prior to the ride, not doing much in the way of cycling, but instead how about suddenly taking up running after a 12 year gap, thereby embarking on a concerted attempt to destroy your own knees before the ride.
f) again conventional wisdom might say that to do a long ride, you should pick a fast bike. A way to get around this is not to decide in advance that you're going to attempt to ride 100 miles. That way, you may well end up riding by far the slowest bike of the 3 you own, a mountain bike perhaps. This will make it more of a challenge. Make sure you're at least 10 miles from home before you start thinking about a century, this will make it unlikely that you'll want to go home and swap bikes.
g) In case your initial rage / disappointment with yourself from the day before should start to run a little low during the ride, keep topping it up by visiting lots of places that remind you of relationships that you've managed to screw up. For example, you could spend some time looking for and failing to find a bench you used to sit on with our girlfriend in Boston Spa when you were a teenager, or you could also cycle through some places that remind you of time spent with your wife, another relationship where things have now gone utterly pear shaped. Good examples of this for me would be Beningborough Hall, Easingwold, Fountains Abbey etc.
h) Another good motivator is to keep going past places which remind you of horrible events from the historical past, which you are lucky enough not to be part of. On my own ride, these were such things as a monument to the Battle of Bramham Moor 1408, and a monument outside York dating back to the 17th Century where people could meet safely and not catch the plague. These kind of things can remind you that things could always be worse.
i) If you start to suffer from physical or mental fatigue particularly during the latter half of the ride, keep reminding yourself that you are lucky not to be being bombed, or conscripted into a war, and that it's only a bit of tiredness, which will pass.
j) even though you are making it up as you go along, try and pick a fairly flat ride, and also pick one that is on roads you know reasonably well. That way, you won't need to waste time looking at the map too often. If possible use a combination of a previous 100 mile route which you've ridden several times, added to which you could use the route of an Audax which you've also ridden a few times. If you do take a few wrong turns due to faulty memories, try and only take enough of them so to ensure that when you get home, you've ridden as close to exactly 100 miles as possible. No point doing any extras, and also it's never much fun if you underestimate and then you have to do laps of your own street to get over the 100 mile mark.
k) if you can, go it alone. This will cut down on any time you might need to spend waiting for people, arguing about the route, or generally having a conversation. This will also help in making any food stops pretty short, as you will be able to concentrate on shovelling food in asap instead of speaking. In the absence of someone to talk to, try riding through Yorkshire in the period leading up to the Tour de France coming to the area. This will keep you amused looking at the efforts local villages have made to embrace the event.
l) to give yourself some extra incentive to get out there, try signing up for some events in the near future which you are currently nowhere near fit enough to do. Having some goals which you're a little bit intimidated by will help you get the bike out of your spare bedroom and onto the road.
m) try and choose a route which goes through some medium sized towns but make sure these are towns which you've been to before and which you either know how to get in and out of quickly, or you know how to skirt the edges of without actually going into. This will save time getting lost in one way systems or pedestrianised precincts. It's also helpful to pick towns which don't have a train station. This means that if you're flagging sometime after halfway you won't have the option of cutting the ride short, and you'll just have to keep going. Good examples of this would be Easingwold, Ripon and Wetherby.
n) try and have the foresight to plan ahead, so that you live somewhere where you can get a hot bath after the ride. This should help bring back some feeling into the legs which you have almost destroyed. Possibly not such a great idea is to place the bath inside a second floor flat though, as you will then add insult to injury carrying your bike up the stairs.
Well, that's pretty much it! There you have it, the secret of my success!
As with any advice, I wouldn't expect you to follow it exactly to the letter. It's more of a guide really, based on my own experiences over the last 48 hours, 48 hours where I sat around all day yesterday getting into the mindset that I'm wasting my life, and then today I rode 100.95 miles, probably on the wrong bike and with very little training. I was out about 11 and a half hours to do that, but I probably rode for under 10 hours altogether as I had stops at 25, 40 and 67 miles (pork pie, Lucozade, fruit scone in that order).
I've just looked back on some stats from the last 7 years, which revealed that today was my 14th ever ride of over 100 miles in a day. It's the first time I've done one completely solo since my first ever one in 2007, when I was testing out the first 100 mile route I ever designed.
Today was the first time I've ever done 100 miles on a mountain bike, and it's also the first time ever I only decided to make it a century ride after I'd set off. Normally I plan these things to death, and work it all out in advance, but today, powered on by a bucketful of rage at myself for wasting yesterday, along with a measure of gratitude for a beautiful summer's day in which I wasn't being bombed, forced to fight in a war, or otherwise oppressed in any way, off I went.
Given all of the above, I'd have to say it went pretty well. I'm a bit tired now though...
a) get on your bike
b) start pedalling
c) after 100 miles stop pedalling.
As well as being a bit flippant, that answer is a bit simplistic, although it does also have a ring of truth to it.
Anyway, today I've had reason to think about my answer in a bit more depth, and I've decided to add a few additional steps to my original response. So here's a much more detailed answer to the question:
How do you cycle 100 miles in a single day?
a) Set aside a day for cycling, and then completely fail to use it. Make sure you sleep in, then get put off by a light shower of rain in the morning. To compound matters, try to ensure that you don't step outside even once during the entire day. Don't even empty the bin. Instead, spend the whole day doing completely pointless things around the house. Google loads of inconsequential crap on the internet, spend ages thinking of pointless status updates to put on Facebook and Twitter, and waste hours and hours on other life-sucking and time-wasting ways such as spending 2 hours picking your all-time greatest World Cup XI on various sport websites. By the end of the day, you will have cultivated the notion that you are wasting your life, and very possibly, this will lead to a coiled spring-like build up of latent energy, you may even experience some borderline self-loathing.
 |
| Get on your bike! |
 |
| Not exactly light reading |
c) it's always a good idea not only to get an early start, but get an early start on a day in June. If you manage to set off around 7.30 am, this will give you around 14 hours of daylight for your ride. This will allow you not to panic about the passage of time. To help you with this, arrange for there to be nothing or no-one at home who is depending on your safe return. If you've a partner, try and ensure they're out at work for at least 12 hours, and even better, try and engineer a split from them prior to the ride. This will mean that when you crawl home later, you will be able to pass out in the bath, and you won't need to cook them a meal. If you have a dog, get someone to look after him for you, or alternatively wait until he's dead before setting off. If he's already been cremated, he won't need to go outside for a wee.
d) don't take any lights. although it's not a race, you don't want to dawdle either.
e) conventional wisdom might say that to prepare for a 100 mile bike ride, doing some cycling would be a good idea, but as an alternative, perhaps you could spend 6 weeks or so prior to the ride, not doing much in the way of cycling, but instead how about suddenly taking up running after a 12 year gap, thereby embarking on a concerted attempt to destroy your own knees before the ride.
f) again conventional wisdom might say that to do a long ride, you should pick a fast bike. A way to get around this is not to decide in advance that you're going to attempt to ride 100 miles. That way, you may well end up riding by far the slowest bike of the 3 you own, a mountain bike perhaps. This will make it more of a challenge. Make sure you're at least 10 miles from home before you start thinking about a century, this will make it unlikely that you'll want to go home and swap bikes.
 |
| Possibly another bike would have been faster? |
h) Another good motivator is to keep going past places which remind you of horrible events from the historical past, which you are lucky enough not to be part of. On my own ride, these were such things as a monument to the Battle of Bramham Moor 1408, and a monument outside York dating back to the 17th Century where people could meet safely and not catch the plague. These kind of things can remind you that things could always be worse.
 |
| My legs are a bit sore from cycling, but thankfully I'm not going to be hacked to death in a sword fight today |
 |
| Yorkshire Humour - at first I thought a man trimming his hedge had got into difficulty |
k) if you can, go it alone. This will cut down on any time you might need to spend waiting for people, arguing about the route, or generally having a conversation. This will also help in making any food stops pretty short, as you will be able to concentrate on shovelling food in asap instead of speaking. In the absence of someone to talk to, try riding through Yorkshire in the period leading up to the Tour de France coming to the area. This will keep you amused looking at the efforts local villages have made to embrace the event.
 |
| Good effort this one |
m) try and choose a route which goes through some medium sized towns but make sure these are towns which you've been to before and which you either know how to get in and out of quickly, or you know how to skirt the edges of without actually going into. This will save time getting lost in one way systems or pedestrianised precincts. It's also helpful to pick towns which don't have a train station. This means that if you're flagging sometime after halfway you won't have the option of cutting the ride short, and you'll just have to keep going. Good examples of this would be Easingwold, Ripon and Wetherby.
n) try and have the foresight to plan ahead, so that you live somewhere where you can get a hot bath after the ride. This should help bring back some feeling into the legs which you have almost destroyed. Possibly not such a great idea is to place the bath inside a second floor flat though, as you will then add insult to injury carrying your bike up the stairs.
Well, that's pretty much it! There you have it, the secret of my success!
As with any advice, I wouldn't expect you to follow it exactly to the letter. It's more of a guide really, based on my own experiences over the last 48 hours, 48 hours where I sat around all day yesterday getting into the mindset that I'm wasting my life, and then today I rode 100.95 miles, probably on the wrong bike and with very little training. I was out about 11 and a half hours to do that, but I probably rode for under 10 hours altogether as I had stops at 25, 40 and 67 miles (pork pie, Lucozade, fruit scone in that order).
I've just looked back on some stats from the last 7 years, which revealed that today was my 14th ever ride of over 100 miles in a day. It's the first time I've done one completely solo since my first ever one in 2007, when I was testing out the first 100 mile route I ever designed.
Today was the first time I've ever done 100 miles on a mountain bike, and it's also the first time ever I only decided to make it a century ride after I'd set off. Normally I plan these things to death, and work it all out in advance, but today, powered on by a bucketful of rage at myself for wasting yesterday, along with a measure of gratitude for a beautiful summer's day in which I wasn't being bombed, forced to fight in a war, or otherwise oppressed in any way, off I went.
Given all of the above, I'd have to say it went pretty well. I'm a bit tired now though...
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