Joel Hainley : San Francisco Bay Area Software Consultant

I’ve finally settled down on a challenge for bicycling for the next 15 months. I’m going to be spending the next two months building up my base and getting my speed and strength built back up. Not commuting anymore, it’s been hard to easily maintain my fitness level. You read it all the time in the bicycling books and magazines but I’ll say it again, commuting is a low pain way to keep yourself in great shape. When I was riding my bike back and forth to work every day I would get a minimum of a 16 mile day, and I rarely took days off, so I kept up a good base mileage even in the worst weather that Northern California could muster.

In April, once I have my base established and have regained some speed and strength, I’ll do my first century. I’ve assembled a tentative schedule for the next 13 months after that. I’m going to be riding a century a month and working on building up my strength, speed, etc. Most of the centuries through the spring, summer fall, will most likely be supported centuries, but into the winter the century schedule gets very thin and there aren’t a lot of supported centuries so some of these will probably need to be self-supported rides. This isn’t really a big deal though, during training for my first century a few years ago, I was regularly riding 85-90 miles on a Sunday long ride.

Please note : I’m not saying that I’m going to ride a total of 12 centuries so that they average out to 12 months, but I’m going to be riding 1 century each calendar month ( or as close to it as i can be there is one century that I was considering counting for  July of this year, that actually happens on the last weekend in June, but that might change. )  The idea here is that riding 12 centuries during century season isn’t that difficult given that you can get the time to take off every weekend for a couple of months to get it done, but that riding a century each month will keep me in shape year round without having to get crazy in the early part of the year with “building up my base” again.

So that’s it, now you have something to hold me to.  One century a month - 12 centuries for the 12 months between april 2008 and april 2009. I’ll be posting weekly mileage/training reports, and monthly recaps and hopefully chronicling my experience during this endeavor. Rock on!

(btw : My goals for 2009 aren’t complete yet, but all of this century riding through 2008 and into 2009 is working towards a goal of riding a double century sometime during 2009. )