my first attempt at a century

I planned to get up early but slept through my 6:00 alarm, finally awakening to a child screaming at 7:20. Gretta fed us a large breakfast and we took off around 9:00, only to face what appeared to be another day of headwinds. Even so, after a couple of miles we decided to try for our first century, i.e. 100 miles in a single day. Neither of us had ever accomplished that, or even attempted it, but William’s aunt lived in Wichita, which was just over the triple digits mark.

Our first 26 miles seemed to take forever, and it already seemed unlikely that we were going to make it. We ate lunch in Cunningham at the park. I was already so tired that I fell asleep on the children’s swing after we ate. Whereas, after 25 miles, a mere quarter of the way, it seemed unlikely that we were going to make it, by mile 50 it seemed impossible. Miles 65-87 were particularly brutal because the wind was stronger than the usual 10 mph we’d seen all day. But, we kept pedaling. It seemed a better idea than just stopping on the side of the road. Pratt, Kingman, Garden Plains, Goddard… somehow the towns kept sliding past.

When we were an hour away from Wichita, William called his aunt but didn’t get an answer. He called again when we reached the city limits and again, no answer. So, as the sun set, we picked our way through the dusk.

Our picking job was pretty bad, because we ended up on the main freeway through the center of a town containing 280,000 people, riding with no lights as car after car expressed their opinion of our presence by blasting their horns. We had a Kansas map, but not a Tulsa map, and eventually stopped at a fire station to get directions.

By the time we reached her house it was full dark. We knocked but when we STILL got no answer we understood that there was only one sensible option left for us…

…eat pizza.

We left our bikes in the back yard and walked to a pizza place a couple of blocks over where we spent the next hour and a half filling the gastric void created by pedaling a bicycle for 11 hours. After the pizza we ate some donuts, then walked back to the house. His aunt was finally there, but we didn’t visit long because it was so late and we were so tired.

And why wouldn’t we be? We had pedaled 107 miles today.

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