PA Biking Day 1 - My 100th Century

I rode my 100th Century (100+ mile ride) in Amish country outside of Lancaster PA with 6 of my cycling friends: Jesse, Ruth, Doug, Cathy, Leslie and Mark. Leslie and Mark have been riding in this area for many years, so they were the ones who have organized this trip. The weather for the week was predicted to be great but warming from highs in the low 70s on Monday to the low 80s by the end of the week. We decided to do our longest ride on the first day because of the cooler temperatures as well as our legs being fresh.

We rolled out from our hotel in the morning to clear blue skies and temperatures in the upper 50s. Quickly, we were in lovely countryside.

Fairly early in our ride, we came to our first covered bridge. Every ride this week would have at least a couple of covered bridges on the route.

Because we are in Amish country, we would frequently see horse drawn carriages.

And of course, corn fields would also be an extremely common sight as we biked. Pictured above are Ruth and Jesse.

Here is Leslie cycling through another of the covered bridges in today’s ride.

As the title indicates, this was my 100th century ride. My first was back in 1981 when I biked from our home in Evanston IL to where my parents were building a house in Delafield WI. At the time, I was cycling 16 miles each way into downtown Chicago for my summer job. This commuting, combined with my youth, allowed me to just barely complete that ride. It was over 30 years later, when I got back into cycling in 2013, that I rode my next century. In 2014, I rode my 4th century at a four day event called the Vermont Challenge. It was there that I first met Jesse and Ruth who have become incredibly close friends as well as my most frequent cycling companions over the past decade. I also first met Cathy on that trip. Mark and Leslie I met more recently through Jesse and Ruth. Doug, in the foreground, is the husband of one of our bridesmaids. He was introduced to this group when I hosted a century from our house in Chatham back in 2016. All told, this is a fabulous group of friends to share this milestone ride.

Since I began cycling seriously in 2013, I have bicycled over 67,000 miles and seen countless red barns such as the one above. Most of the time I ride alone since my cycling friends live in different states. Despite this, most of my centuries have been with friends. When Jesse, Ruth, Doug and I get together for several days of cycling, we usually throw a century (or sometimes two) into the mix. In 2019, when I cycled across the country from Santa Barbara to Myrtle Beach, I rode 17 centuries in preparation for the trip and an additional 18 centuries on the trip. That was by far my biggest year of cycling.

The 5-year period from 2015-2019 was when I was doing the most cycling and was my strongest as a cyclist. During that time, Jesse and Ruth gave me the nickname “The Kengine”. As a large guy, I was never the best at climbing, but especially during that period, I could ride fast and take very long pulls on the flats. A pull in cycling is when you are leading a group of riders, cutting through the wind, letting them draft behind you which saves them considerable energy especially if you are either cycling fast or into a headwind. Nowadays, I am a bit more likely to be a caboose rather than a Kengine, but I still have my moments. The cabooses above are actually motel rooms. This was near the end of the ride and a fine place to end this post.