The Triple Bypass is a one-day ride over 3 Colorado Mountain passes.
The route is about 118 miles with 10,800 feet of elevation gain.
While I've done several Century Rides over the past couple of years, 118 miles will be my longest ride ever, and I've never come anywhere close to climbing 10,800 feet in one day.
The mileage doesn't concern me at all. All that climbing does.
So, over the next 61 days or so, I will be training to increase my climbing ability.
Saturday, I did my first "Triple Bypass Training Ride". As a bonus, I also increased my #MetricCenturyEveryMonth streak to 34 months.
So ... being the geek that I am ... I put together a spreadsheet to layout and track to a plan that gets me to climbing over 10,000 feet by July 13th.
I figure if I slowly increase my climbs over the weeks until the event, I should be able to get to that number.
So, I somewhat arbitrarily chose a starting elevation of 2,000 feet, and took an average increase I'd need per day to reach 10,800 by July 13.
I did similar math for the distance.
So by May 12th, my goal was to have at least one ride of at least 42 miles and 2,788 feet climbed. I easily reached that.
May 19th 51 miles with 3,707 feet climbed
May 26th 60 miles with 4,627 feet climbed
June 2nd 69 miles with 5,546 feet climbed
June 9th 78 miles with 6,466 feet climbed
June 16th 87 miles with 7,385 feet climbed
June 23rd 96 miles with 9,224 feet climbed
July 7th 114 miles with 10,143 feet climbed
I'm not sure this is actually do-able from a time-commitment standpoint. But it was fun putting together the spreadsheet.
For what it's worth ... this ride surpassed my May 26th goal.
We'll see how I do as the miles and elevation gains get much bigger.
And ... my first "real" test / training ride for this endeavor was Saturday morning.
I got up and dressed well before sunrise. I was on the bike just before 5:30 am, and rode from my house up to the start of Triple Bypass in Evergreen, Colorado. Then I went a few miles up the first of the 3 passes.
Basically, my goal for the ride was to see how far I could get in 3 hours.
At the 3 hour mark, I had traveled about 30 miles and a little less than 5,000 feet elevation. I turned around to head home.
I think I got about half-way up the first pass of the Triple Bypass route. Not bad for a first try.
According to the spreadsheet, I'm ahead by about 3 weeks.
It is still pretty cold in the mornings here, so I was in pretty warm clothing. This made me a little hot for all that climbing, but going down, I was sure happy to have the warmer stuff on.
It was a gorgeous ride with amazing views, and I saw a fair amount of wildlife on the way up.
The ride back down was much faster and easy. Go figure that one out.
At the end of the ride, I had cycled 62.95 miles and climbed a total of 5,420 feet. It took me almost exactly 4.5 hours of riding time.
I'm actually pretty happy about that as a first attempt.
I'd like to get faster, but to be honest, based on this ride, I think if the Triple Bypass was next weekend, I wouldn't feel too bad about my ability of completing it in a respectable amount of time.
And I still have 61 days until the event.
Because of this long climbing day, I've actually gone well ahead on my #11EverestsIn2024 goal. With all the climbing I'll be doing in the next 2 months, 12 Everests might be more realistic by the end of the year.
I guess we'll see.
Anyway ... if you follow along on Sheppy's Blog: Triple Bypass, I'm sure I'll share more of my adventures preparing for this event, and I'll almost certainly post something about the event itself sometime shortly after I ride it.
And ... as always, stay tuned on the regular SheppyBrew Channels to see what is happening with beer and other things: SheppyBrew's Facebook Page; Sheppy's Twitter Feed; SheppyBrew's Instagram Page; and SheppyBrew's Website.
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