Ride With Purpose 100 mile Bear Mountain Boondoggle Part 1

boondoggle :work of little or no value done merely to keep or look busy

(from dictionary.com)

I spend probably too much time on the Internet. One of the triathlon websites I frequent is Race With Purpose (www.racewithpurpose.org), populated by a group of athletes who train and race together with the larger goal to raise donations to support youth-wellness causes. Shortly after returning from a week of frolic in Lake Placid, the following email was sent to some of the RwP folks:

Beautiful view of Manhattan skyline from Bald Mountain

summit...behind holisticguru.

From: Javier
To: jen; christine; coach_adam
CC: tomn
Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2008 15:57:58 -0400
Subject: RE: Warning: Female triathletes, age 25-30, beware...

I am thinking Sunday August 3rd is looking Preeeetttyyy
good for the:

"Ride With Purpose, 100 mile Bear Mountain
Boondoggle"

Whats all of this talk about lederhosen? Are those
the revolutionary german tri suits that are coated with tefflon so that after a
race or workout you can throw them on the fire for for cooking stuff
with?

So this is how the Boondoggle started. Christine had discovered some new cycling skills and got a better bike fit, and Javier suggested a long ride. Unfortunately for Javier, shortly thereafter he took a bad fall and broke his collarbone and was sidelined. Jen got roped into a Sunday conference call for work. We picked up a fourth along the way, Conner. Adam pieced together cue sheets from a variety of rides he had done and produced a draft turn sheet which we would use. The course was sort of a figure 8, and after the descent from Bear Mountain State Park we would depart from the route we took coming out and enter unknown territory. One of the purposes of this ride was to check the accuracy of the turn sheet, gather mileage information for each piece, and identify water, food and rest stops throughout.

In addition to getting to spend some time with a few awesome friends, my purpose for the day was to knock off a hilly century to kick off my training for IMLP2009, and to start gathering power data to establish my Functional Power Threshold. I had a loaner Powertap 2.4 installed on my Cervelo P2C a couple of days earlier.

We all met at Adam’s in Scarsdale Sunday morning around 7:30 and were on the road by 8:00. What a beautiful day, nice puffy white clouds, cool clear air. Adam commented it was really like an early fall day, a special treat considering it was early August during a summer of alternating torrential rainstorms and stifling heat waves.This area, considered part of the Lower Hudson Valley, is extraordinarily scenic and includes gorgeous wooded residential property and public parks and several reservoir lakes that provide drinkign water for New York City.

We attacked the course, and in the early stages the ride was pretty easy, no big climbs, some nice descents, and the turn sheet was right on. I had a 3 liter camelback with Gatorade and two bottles behind my seat. I think everyone else had two bottles each on frame cages. We made one brief stop in some bushes to “wag the dog” ( I think this is a New England expression), and a stop at the mini mart near the base of “The Goat Path” for water. Here I discovered i had left my wallet in the car back in Scarsdale. (Chris I still owe you 5 or 6 bucks.)

The Goat Path is so named because it is steep and narrow, and we rode up in single file, me leading and Adam in the rear. Christine and Connor stayed right on my rear wheel all the way up and back down the other side, where we stopped to wait for Adam before we crossed Bear Mountain Bridge. From this spot you look across the Hudson and up at the mountain, and it is awesome to know you will be climbing that shortly. Adam just blew past us and took off across the bridge and we chased him.

Bear Mountain State Park is about 30 miles north of New York and is popular with picnicking families, motorcyclists and hikers. I did not see any other cyclists as we made the climb up 7 Lakes Drive and Perkins Memorial Drive to the summit. I beleive the summit is actually Bald Mountain and is 1080 feet above sea level. The climb seemed to be never ending, with no respite. My mantra was "Collect Data Points", a phrase I repeated many,many times on this climb as well as on the return to Scarsdale.

Adam and I made it to the top and found Christine and Conner eating cheese crackers.

I'm waiting on an updated cue sheet and elevation data and working on my power distribution graphs, hopefully to be included in part 2.