40 Miles for my 40th Birthday

Well, I turned 40 over the weekend. It was my wife's stupid idea that I should ride 40 miles to celebrate that. I took off THINKING I'd probably go 40 miles, but I wasn't tied to the idea.

I looked through my training log and found a lot of "long rides" of 33-38 miles. I had to look all the way back to 2012 to find a 40 mile ride! (That ride was 43 miles with an 18.18 mph average.) So it had been nearly 9 years since I biked that far! (And the time before that was in 2010 when I biked with my brothers-in-law and we pulled each other 44 miles with an 18.5 mph average.)

So I gutted it out on my 40th birthday and got in 40 miles. Well, 41.29 exactly:

It doesn't look like much until you realize that everything
east of the Mississippi is a big out-and-back tacked on.


Elevation. I hit some hills!


Labeling some hills. After the turn-around, it was just the reverse, until climbing Ramsey Hill.

The wind started quite out of the south, and that's the way I headed to start. I wanted to go down Big River's, but the start of that trail was closed, so I headed down Water Street to climb Ohio Hill (for fun). Split number 3 to 4 on the map above is the Ohio climb, and I knew it wasn't going to be FAST: I was 10 miles into a 40 mile ride, so I wasn't going to blow my load right here. I ended up climbing it in 2:23, which I didn't think was too bad. When I looked back to "hill repeat" bike workouts, I found 3 workouts where I did Ohio Hill 3 times for each workout (for the first 2 workouts, I then went off and did Ramsey Hill 3 times as well; and for the final workout, I just did Ramsey Hill once on my way home). In 2013, I averaged 2:23.7 up Ohio; in 2014, I averaged 2:26.7 up Ohio; and in 2015, I averaged 2:15.3 up Ohio. So my 1x up Ohio on a long ride and as my 2nd outdoor ride of the year in 2:23 wasn't too horrible.

But things were about to get more horrible.

Being I was heading into the wind mainly to start, I'd be pushed more from the back on the way home. Here's a zoomed-in example on my map (that shows reds as fast and blues as slow):

South into the wind around mile 18, and back with the wind around mile 21.


Not the wind but the hills here: FAST (red) down the hill on Hwy 13
from near the top of Ohio, and SLOW back up the hill around mile 25.

Climbing back up from Water Street to 35E around mile 33 was grueling.

And I actually had to stop 2/3s of the way up Ramsey Hill and walk my bike. That's NEVER happened before. But I've also NEVER climbed Ramsey Hill 36 miles into a bike ride before.

I was around 19.0 mph once I got to Downtown St. Paul around mile 35, but then I had to climb into downtown, and then do that horrible Ramsey Hill climb. AND THEN the wind had switched from more southerly to being out of the west, so the final 4 miles down Summit Ave was straight into the wind. My overall average dropped to 18.3 mph by the time I made it home (with my last split heading down Summit averaging 16.0 mph - yikes).

Well, not doing THAT again any time soon...