Day 17 - Serenity In Seneca!
Updated: Apr 30, 2019
First, I'm sorry I've been a little lazy in my blog posts! But I've been enjoying my time off!
On 4/18 I rode into the lake house in Seneca, SC! What a great place to spend some time! Thanks, Joe Calabro, for letting me stay here! I'm pleased to say I got here a day earlier than I expected. That's a good thing for on the 19th there were some hellacious storms that blew through. High wind and rain to the point I was looking for Noah's Arc. I was glad that I wasn't out in that weather trying to make it to Seneca! I've only been writing about my ride days, so it took me 17 days to make it from Key West to Seneca, SC. I'm very pleased with that accomplishment.
But it wasn't without some challenges getting here. The ride from Hartwell started out pretty flat. I was surprised! The weather was beautiful, if a little warm. But the closer I got to Seneca, the more hills I encountered! Downhill was awesome! Those 35 mph downhills were fun to experience. But as I've written before you want to maintain momentum on the downhills to make it up the hill you know is coming either immediately or a bit down the road. Well, because of the many twists and turns in the bicycle route I had to stop many times to get my bearings. Well, one of those twists was at the end of a particularly fast descent and I had two options, around the hill or straight up it! Of course Google said straight up. So up I went up probably a 12% grade. This is the first time I've actually struggled to get up a hill. I felt like my legs were going to give out. But I put my gears in their lowest ratio and pushed to the end! It felt good to get to the top. After that it was but a short ride to get to the finish on the lake, but of course, the last part of that is straight up hill! The reward is well worth it! The next blog post will go through my break. Hopefully the ride will begin again on Wednesday 5/1, but that's for the next blog.
For perspective here are some stats. Since Key West I've cycled 971.98 miles according to my Garmin. This includes 22 "plug" miles for that day where my Garmin died at 35 miles, but Google showed 57 miles from Zach's place to St. Augustine. During that time, I've expended 34,180 calories and ridden for 78 hours! Average speed was 12.2 and average daily mileage was 57.18. I climbed 12822 ft and descended 11266 feet for a net gain of 1556 ft. For reference and to note how flat Florida is, 8793 ft of climbing and 7655 ft of descending was in the last 5 days of riding! So 1138 feet of elevation gain was in the last 5 days! I expect the next couple of weeks is going to have A LOT of climbing. When I get to Gettysburg, PA I'll update my stats.
Comments