Six Things I Learned on a 185 Bike Ride

**Disclaimer- please excuse any typos or run-on sentences. I wrote this early in the morning after biking 185 miles.

Some background

Yesterday was the summer solstice. This means the longest day of the year. In New York City, sunrise was at 5:24 am and sunset at 8:31 pm. I had heard of people doing extremely long bike rides and referring to them as the “Longest Day Ride.” Many people start in High Point, NJ and end in Cape May Point, NJ. This is a 180-200 mile ride (depending on the route) from the top of NJ to the very bottom.

I live in Midtown Manhattan, just a couple blocks from the Empire State Building. My family love Cape May Point, which is how I originally heard about these rides. Naturally, I connected the dots and mentioned the idea of a “Longest Day Ride” from the Empire State Building to the Cape May Point Lighthouse to all of my endurance friends.

Only one bit on the idea. We were doing a 70.3 Ironman race together a couple of weeks ago when I brought it up. He was all-in immediately. He had a history of doing ultramarathons and the tri we were doing together was no small feat. He even recruited another friend to join us.

When I originally had this idea I did not realize the logistical nightmare it would be. When you are riding on a one-way trip, you can only bring what you carry. You then have to figure out a way to get yourself and your bike back home. We didn’t do much planning outside of that part of the feat.

Our route was completely computer-generated by Strava. We wanted the most direct way, on paved and popular roads. It's amazing what a big dataset can do because I don’t think I would change it at all. One mistake we made was not planning our stops. Our thought process is you can't really go very far in NJ without passing a Wawa.

We weren’t completely wrong and did make it the entire way stopping as needed. It took us longer than expected and we finished after sunset, but WE FINISHED! I learned a lot from this ride and wanted to do a brain dump of some of my takeaways. Please remember that I finished at 9:30 last night, showered and went to sleep, woke up at 4:30 to drive to Philadelphia, and took a train to get back to my apartment around 8:30. There will be typos and there will be trailing thoughts.

Here it goes!

1. Extreme focus and hard work make the impossible achievable.

Before yesterday my longest bike ride was a little over 60 miles. I tripled that. The longest athletic feat I had done were two 70.3 Ironmans, which both took me under 7 hours. Yesterday I had over 13 hours of moving time over about 16 hours.

185 miles is really really really far. The drive from my apartment to Cape May is about three hours when I take the Parkway. Also, when I drive, I can take the Lincoln tunnel which would have saved me about 20 miles.

Biking this far was possible because every week I get on my bike and ride. I try to go a little further and faster each time. I also don’t stop when I’m traveling for work. I’ve rented bikes to my hotel room and taken many early morning Ubers to the nearest spin class.

I also work on the mental aspect of endurance. A good friend of mine recently got me into ice baths and cold showers. I used to think these types of things were crazy, but the focus and mental strength it taught me makes anything seem achievable.

2. Everything is relative and all wins should be celebrated.

I remember when I ran my first half marathon. I couldn’t believe that I was able to run 13 miles in a row… without stopping! A couple of years later I ran my first marathon and was running those 13 miles (which seemed insane) weekly as part of regular training.

I had the same experience with triathlons. I was so scared to swim .9 miles for my first Olympic distance triathlon. It seemed impossible and the thought of doing that before biking and running was scary. After putting in the work training, I managed to finish with ease.

Since then, I’ve completed two 70.3 distance Ironman races. The training for them requires swims much longer swims than my original scary distance as a part of regular training.

The point is, its easy to compare yourself to other people. When completing a half marathon you should celebrate, not compare yourself to someone who did a full. The same goes for a swim or a triathlon. Celebrate everything and set the bar a little higher next time. It's really important to have fun. Plus, there are people like the Ironcowboy who completed 100 Ironman races in 100 days. I would get nowhere if I compared myself to that guy.

Celebrate everything and don’t compare yourself.

3. Focus on the big picture, but chase milestones.

As I mentioned before, 60 miles was my longest ride before yesterday. That is less than 1/3 of the distance I did on this longest day ride. It was crippling to be at mile 80 and know that I’m not even halfway done.

Eventually, we started breaking the ride into 30-mile chunks. We decided it would be best to stop and eat a little bit as well as fill our water bottles more frequently. This made the ride much more attainable. Instead of chasing an outrageous finishing number, we were working on milestones.

This has a lot of parallels with business. Strategy is the big picture and individual tactics are the milestones. Errors also have a massive impact but are expected. There was a time where I didn’t keep my hydration levels high enough and paid for it with about two hours of slow riding and feeling terrible. Stopping and getting hydrated set me back on the right path. The same could be said about a failed marketing campaign followed by a strategy reset.

4. The biggest barriers are in our heads.

In endurance sports, you sometimes fall into “the dark place.” It’s a spot in your head that is really difficult to escape from. Basically, you panic and think you can't finish or have a hyper reaction to your pain/dehydration/cramps/heat/etc.

Each of us had our own moments in the dark place. When someone falls into it, it's usually pretty obvious. They don’t talk and their speed drops. They are discontented and clearly in their head. It takes a team to pull them out. My friends pulled me out around mile 80 and again around 120.

Everything hurts. Hands are sore. Chafing and bruising are prevalent from sitting that long. Your back hurts from bending over, your neck from holding up your head. Your feet are hot and hold the pain. Your quads are shot. BUT when you are in a good mental state all of those physical pains don’t matter. You can ride through them and continue on. It is when the dark place takes over that you really feel the pain and want to give up.

5. Prioritize problems to solve.

As mentioned before, there are too many problems or discomforts to deal with all them. There was simply no way I could get out of sitting on my bike so anything that had to do with that was simply a risk I had to manage.

Hydration, nutrition, and mental state were the things I really needed to keep an eye on. I could deal with sore legs and hands, but there was no way I could finish without consuming a couple thousand calories and drinking a full bottle of water every ten miles.

At one point in the ride, my feet started to cramp up. When it came time to stop, I bought a big bag of ice from a gas station and a little Styrofoam cooler. I stuck my feet in the cooler and dumped the ice in, followed by some water to get the cold under my feet too. After that, my feet felt like new. Had I not addressed that early in the ride, I could have had some major problems later.

6. People are amazing and human connection is key to succeeding.

I could not have done this ride alone. Two of my friends completed it with me. They made it really fun. We all talked a lot and commented on the scenery. It made the ride go by a lot faster.

It wasn’t just my friends that helped me along the way though. There were the people standing outside of Wawas and gas stations watching us fill our waters and eat pretzels and bananas. The people who asked us what we were doing and laughed thinking there was no way we were telling the truth.

It was the people who stopped their car to let us cross. It was my dad who spent his father's day rising us in the last 30 miles. It was my sister that drove me to the train the next morning at 4:30 am. It was the waves from other cyclists riding by.

It was the friends and family following on Instagram cheering us on. The texts I got from my wife cheering me on. The friends following on Strava and my colleagues from work asking me how it went today.

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So that's it... One big brain dump. I'm not going to do my normal proofreading because I know my memory clouds and changes things after a few days. Maybe I'll come back and edit it later :)