A recipe for success

It is said that with age comes wisdom. I would be happy for that to be true, because today I must have been very very young then.

For example, if you want to make a long bike ride in order to hit some milestone, like your first metric century, it is not indicated to follow ANY of the following points:

• instead of doing this in the season, when you’re fit, wait over the winter, during which you should indulge in food and drink with only an occasional short bike ride, so that most of your fitness is gone and replaced by a few extra kilograms;
• instead of choosing a flat route that you’ve done before, extending it a bit to hit the target distance, think about taking the route from one of the people you follow on Strava (and I mean real cyclists here); bonus points if you choose one they mention was about training instead of a freeride and gave it a meaningful name like “The ride of 3 peaks”, something with 1’500m+ altitude gain…
• in order to not get bogged down by too much by extra weight (those winter kilograms are enough!), skimp on breakfast (just a very very light one); together with the energy bar you eat, something like 400 calories…
• take the same amount of food you take for much shorter and flatter rides; bonus points if you don’t check the actual calories in the food, and instead of the presumed 700+ calories you think you’re carrying (which might be enough, if you space them correctly, given how much you can absorb per hour), take at most 300 calories with you, because hey, your body is definitely used with long efforts in which you convert fat to energy on the fly, right? especially after said winter pause!
• since water is scarce in the Swiss outdoors (not!), especially when doing a road bike ride, carry lots of water with you (full hydro-pack, 3l) instead of an extra banana or energy bar, or a sandwich, or nuts, or a steak… mmmm, steak!
• and finally and most importantly don’t do the ride indoors on the trainer, even though it can pretty realistically simulate the effort, but instead do it for real outside, where you can’t simply stop when you had enough, because you have to get back home…

For bonus points, if you somehow manage to reach the third peak in the above ride, and have mostly only flat/down to the destination, do the following: be so glad you’re done with climbing, that you don’t pay attention to the map and start a wrong descent, on a busy narrow road, so that you can’t stop immediately as you realise you’ve lost the track; it will cost you only an extra ~80 meters of height towards the end of the ride. Which are pretty cheap, since all the food is gone and the water almost as well, so the backpack is light. Right.

However, if you do follow all the above, you’re rewarded with a most wonderful thing for the second half of the ride: your will receive a +5 boost on your concentration skill. You will be able to focus on, and think about a single thing for hours at a time, examining it (well, its contents) in minute detail.

Plus, when you get home and open that thing—I mean, of course, the FRIDGE with all the wonderful FOOD it contains—everything will taste MAGICAL! You can now recoup the roughly 1500 calories deficit on the ride, and finally no longer feel SO HUNGRY.

That’s all. Strava said “EXTREME” suffer score, albeit less than 20% points in the red, which means I was just slugging through the ride (total time confirms it), like a very very very old man. But definitely not a wise one.