Mountains?

We had our second century ride from Madison, WI to Soldiers Grove, WI. The ride was extremely beautiful, and the roads were very good. The county roads in Wisconsin are particularly well labeled, which makes it easy to relax. On other days we have to pay a lot more attention to the cue sheet and to finding unlabeled roads. When we started in the morning, we labeled our legs with mileages 0-100. Throughout the day we crossed them out every ten miles on our way to 100 miles.

We got an early start, and the morning was cool. We also knew that the host we would be staying at wouldn’t have much going on, so we could ride past 4 if we needed to. The first 80 miles were very flat, and the surrounding areas were beautiful. We were able to hold a very fast pace, and my group averaged about 15 miles an hour for the first 80 miles. My group stopped to swim as the day got hotter, and we knew we were still making good time. One member of my group was also amazed by all the cows we were seeing. He insisted that we stop for 45 minutes by one farm while he tried to convince the cows to come closer.

Unfortunately, the ride got harder in the last stretch. There were some really big hills we had to climb,  and our assumption that we had plenty of time turned out to be premature. We could all tell that we had gotten stronger since we had climbed the last mountains, but it was still a struggle at the end of a very long day. It was especially challenging since the ride turned out to be 110 miles, not just 100. 

The last mile of the ride was amazing though, there was a very long steep downhill that seemed to go on forever. 

The end of the ride ended on a high with a long descent into a valley where the host was waiting. There were groups waiting to cheer on everyone as they finished. At the end of the day we had ridden 110 miles at an average speed of 14 miles per hour. Including stops the ride took over 11 hours, and we had a top speed of over 40 miles per hour.. In addition, it was the ride with the second most elevation change all trip (over 4,000 feet).