For years I have tried to participate in the Gold Coast Century, put on annually by the Huntington Bike Club. It was always one thing or another, but this year, I made room in my calendar for the ride. It is a quite hilly century on the North Shore of Long Island. We all started out from Greenlawn in Suffolk County. I took my LOOK KG381i for this ride, due to the significant amount of climbing involved. It did not let me down, and the recently installed Campy 34/50 compact crankset performed flawlessly. I did not see any fixies or recumbents.
I had been doing climbing practice over the past month, but lost a lot of training time when we had day after day of monsoon rains two weeks before. My zeal to make up for lost time may have affected my tapering off time prior to the ride. In any event, it was one hot day! As the temperature cracked 90 degrees after noon, I made the decision that 70 miles were adequate, given the conditions. This ride is well designed so that a bail outs are possible at several points along the route.
All in all, this was a great ride on the Gold Coast of Long Island. It has plenty of scenery, lots of mansions, views of the Long Island Sound and Connecticut, and very friendly participants. Many thanks to the Huntington Bike Club for putting on such a wonderful ride.
No comments:
Post a Comment