Los Angeles River Ride - Century - CycleCentury

Decision to ride with the fellow we met at the start (Jason) turned out to be a good one. He led most of the ride and definitely pushed me through the low points on the return from Long Beach.

Weird ride in that about 50 miles is on dedicated bike path and the rest is on pretty crappy urban streets with lots of red lights.

Website description of the century said we'd do the 70 mile ride (an out-and-back to Long Beach) and add laps on the river path to make up the other 30. On the morning, though, they told us we'd do two laps in Griffith Park at the start and then a loop out of Long Beach. The description was that the ride was flat--I knew the park loop well...we train on it often...and it is NOT flat in the least. Significant climb...to be done twice. Well, at least I was going to get some climbing in to make this a better training experience.

Stopped at 3 of 7 aid stations along the way. Wasn't a race, so no real reason not to. Oh, and there was the world's longest, slowest, freight train crossing Main St. east of downtown...to make it even more annoying, it stopped in mid-crossing for about 5 minutes.

Lowest points were between mile 50 and 70...ass was saddle sore and Jason was pushing the tempo to take advantage of the tailwind following us from the ocean. (We knocked out an 8 mile stretch in there solidly above 20mph.) But around mile 80 I suddenly realized most of the soreness was gone and I felt good.

I told Jason when we finished the Long Beach-Seal Beach loop that the ride would only be 93 miles. We agreed to tack on the necessary miles at the end to make it a legit century. So that added some more rollers after mile 93 riding through Griffith Park.

For a relatively flat ride, there still turned out to be about 3095' of total climbing (a lot of it in those two opening loops). Total elapsed time--including our three stops...and the endless freight train--was 7:04.

Nothing really. This was about getting the first century under my belt and hitting a key long ride for my first IM on August 1. Definitely not a race.

Reunited with my wife and her friend and bought some very tasty but fattening food. Felt pretty good physically, actually. Definitely not as taxing as a marathon.

First century in the books.


This is an annual event organized by the LA County Bicycle Coalition. We are members and like to support the organization and the event, but it is only minimally supported. After doing this event twice, I can definitely say that all the distances are short--century only 93 miles. First five miles on bike path heading south from Griffith Park are extremely crowded with lots of novice cyclists who aren't necessarily great at holding their line. Lots of good spirits among the participants, though: The really experienced cyclists seem to take the shortcomings of the event in stride.