What am I thinking, considering doing RAGBRAI next year?

Most of this week my legs have felt tired; and it’s hard to put in even 15 miles. RAGBRAI is about 500 miles in seven days; and that’s an average of  roughly  71 miles per day. For some reason I was thinking the daily average was about 40 miles.

Maybe I need to skip the long ride come Sunday; and haul out the foam roller, too. If I ride, I need to get out very early. This crazy heat continues to plague us.

Today it was almost 8:00 am by the time I got going. I used the Camel-Bak; and took along electrolyte drink. I wanted to put in about 16 miles; and managed less than 12! You can that training for RAGBRAI? Or even a personal century?

It wasn’t a fun ride, at all. To begin with, I had to take a detour of several miles to get to the bike path. Sometimes, as today, there’s a train blocking both the closest crossing and the next nearest one.

Then there was the wind. Not that it was really so very strong; 6-8 mph. But it seemed very hard to make headway against it. RAGBRAI can include headwinds as well as hills and heat. So what am I thinking?