Today's expedition was a failure and a great disappointment. My aim was to bike 270 km to Perry, NY on Friday, run the Rochester NRE on Saturday with 120 km of biking commute, run the Billygoat on Sunday, and bike back to Toronto Sunday afternoon (270 km). It was a very ambitious undertaking, and I had no notions of being able to compete in the races. Merely completing the expedition would be a spectacular achievement.
My longest one day ride was
365 km in October 2021, and I had confidence (apparently unjustified) in my endurance. I had also executed a 560 km two day ride in September 2021. Certainly I was worn out after that effort, but I reasoned that spreading this trip out over about 72 hours would make it feasible. I cleaned and lubricated my drive train, acquired an 11L saddle bag for additional cargo, and prepped in my usual way, with several thousand calories of assorted foods for the ride down. I slept quite poorly during the week leading up to Friday - a mix of life/work stress and falling off the rails a bit. I started on Friday more tired than would have been ideal. To complicate matters, weather conditions were suboptimal - it was a chilly 10 C for much of the ride, and it didn't really warm up. Early morning rain in the Hamilton area led me to postpone my departure time to 7 AM instead of 3 AM, with a target arrival time in Perry of 8p. There was an odd southeast wind against which I struggled from Burlington to Niagara.
I battled through, and when I reached Niagara, I decided that I was not up to the challenge of the weekend. I had been struggling and having to work much harder than I was prepared to attempt for two more days, and I had serious misgivings about how challenging Sunday's return ride would be if I was struggling so much on Friday. I had work meetings on Monday afternoon that I needed to make. I stopped in Niagara for a late lunch before deciding to bail back to Toronto. Because train service from Niagara isn't operating for whatever reason, I eschewed the bus from Niagara (which would have taken two hours to get to Burlington) and biked back to Burlington, where I picked up the train.
Clearly, my fitness was not up to this challenge, and I haven't ridden enough this year to execute something like this. It's possible that I might have persevered through the effort, but I wasn't comfortable with the margin of safety I was leaving myself. Of course, in the worst case, I could have stayed at a hotel on Sunday night to recover before biking back, but limping across the finish line isn't how I planned to execute. Clearly, I need to be better rested before attempting these endeavours, as well as leaving more flexibility after the event for the unexpected. The weather conditions were not ideal, but hardly anomalously adverse, and if marginally unpleasant weather is enough of a barrier that the enterprise is called into question, then I wasn't ready in the first place. I have more multiday expeditions planned, and I was pleased that the logistics - my loadout, my fueling, my trusty Wahoo Elemnt Bolt, and my bike - functioned well.
I'm disappointed, but I will live to fight another day. This is the first time I have abandoned an expedition since October 3, 2020, when I curtailed a 300 km ride after 75 km because it was 4 C, and the cold proved unbearable. I obviously need to get more riding in and do some quality so that I can more easily sustain higher speeds. I adjusted the times for these entries to moving time, but the total time was a disappointing 12 hours from Toronto to the Burlington train station.