weekend ride

I rode a homemade century a couple of weekends ago: not a fancy-event century, that is, just an email out to friends saying "Saturday. 100 mi. 6 hours. BYOB."

Three of us hit the road at about 6:30. We started at North Chagrin metropark and rode Cleveland's "Emerald Necklace" counterclockwise. Our early start was successful in getting us mostly across downtown with little traffic interference (the rest of the ride is 95% parks; on Valley Parkway, traffic watches you!).

Two bananas, a clif bar, 160 oz. or so water and a sandwich zip of gorp was plenty to get through in 6:09 of riding time. Clock time was a non-negligible amount longer, since my riding buddies hadn't memorized the directions as precisely as me (and didn't have good enough reaction times when I was executed split-second maneuvers to follow said directions). I'm looking forward to picking up a few more riders and leading a similar route in a few weeks.

I shared the route at mapmyride, since I couldn't find a complete 100-miler around the necklace there already.

Here's our route:
And here's the necklace, as illustrated on the metroparks website. I wonder how much longer the route would need to be to hit all 16 parks...