75+ Mile Training Ride On the Katy Trail

So I'm in central Missouri at the moment because my daughter is at a volleyball camp at UCM.  I brought my bike along because I knew I had to get another 70+ training miles in before RAGBRAI.

I'd heard about this thing called the "Katy Trail" recently.  Apparently it's a pretty big deal being the longest Rails-To-Trails cycling trail in the US.  It runs along an old railroad line and goes something like 270 miles from Clinton, MO all the way to St. Louis.  We passed under it on I-70 as we were on our way to UCM, and the nearest trailhead is over in Sedalia, just about 30 miles away from where we're staying.  So I thought it would be fun to check it out and put in my 70 mile ride there.

I headed over to Sedalia early in the morning and got to the trailhead a little after 7AM.  It's the old railroad station...pretty cool...

The trail quality is decent.  Some sort of finely crushed stone, packed down really hard.  It was slightly more difficult to ride on as opposed to a paved surface with the road tires on my bike, but it wasn't too bad....at least early on.  Since it's on an old rail bed there are no steep grades, I think they had to be under 3% for the trains.  Because of that however....the hills that were there were REALLY long.  I'm sure a couple of them were a mile or two long...and sometimes there'd be 3-4 of them strung together in places.  There was one town in the middle called Pilot Grove.  It was up on a ridge so it was a several mile long climb to get up to it....coming from both directions so I got it both ways.  It didn't feel too bad initially, but by the end of the day my legs were wore out from all the long gradual climbing.

Every 12 miles or so there's a trailhead with water(usually), a shaded rest spot with information on it about the trail going in either direction as well as local history and info.  The larger towns seem to cater to the trail with shops, B&Bs, restaurants, etc...  I guess they get 300,000+ riders on the trail every year.

It's also almost all shaded, which was awesome today since it was blazing hot.  In the early morning or evening I'd guess it's 80% shaded.  During the middle of the day with the sun directly overhead probably half of it was shaded, but even then there are long sections where trees shade the whole trail.  I don't think I'd have made it today without all the shade.  Like I said, it was HOT once it got past noonish.

I lost track at some point, but I think I filled and drank 8 bottles of water, another 2 big glasses of water at lunch, and 1 gatorade.  I sweat it all out...easily.  I haven't sweat that much in years.  According to the mapping application on the Droid, I burned nearly 3000 calories.  How's that for a weight loss program.  :)   Because the last trailhead stop didn't have water....I ran out about 6 miles from the end.  Not fun.  I was like the guy walking through the desert, turning the canteen upside down to shake every last drop of liquid out of the container.

The total distance was just over 76 miles on my odometer.  The Droid app only clocked 72, but it stopped tracking the ride a few miles short of Sedalia, not sure what happened.  My moving average was just over 11mph.  The Droid app clocked me at an average of 9mph....but it counts the stops.

It was a long day.  By mile 24 I was tired.  I realized later that the trip out was more uphill than coming back was, so that explains part of the tiredness early on.  The last 12 miles of the morning went pretty well.  I took a long break in Boonville and did ok initially on the way back.  But by mile 45 or so I was really feeling it.  The last 25-30 miles were a killer..  By the time I got towards the end I was stopping every 6 miles, then every 3, then 1-2...  My legs were jello and my rear end was sore and numb.  My hands kept going numb too having ridden for nearly 8 hours.  It's a good thing there weren't a whole lot of people out biking today because I was a sorry looking cyclist at the end.  An embarrassment to all who call themselves cyclists.  I was barely making 7 or 8mph on the 2nd cog granny gear.

But....I made it, and now I have just over 500 training miles in the bag, so I can relax this next week and let my body recover a bit before RAGBRAI starts.

Here's a link to the route map at iMapMyRide

I wanted to add some photos too, but Blogger is not cooperating.  Guess it will have to wait.

Matt

EDIT:  Here are the photos...
https://picasaweb.google.com/techminer/KatyTrail?authkey=Gv1sRgCNr47Mjpuv-rhQE