54.2 miles in 5 hrs 24 1/2 min. = 10.0216 mph

Warning: This post could prove tedious for anyone not interested in the complexities of training for a timed ride.

At first I thought I'd missed the 10 mph mark for today's ride. About a mile from the end of the final loop, a 7-miler, I had about given up.

I had started the loop a couple of minutes late. If I had started it on time -- 11:42 -- all I would have needed to do was to ride the 7 miles in 42 minutes (a 10 mph average) which would have gotten me to the end by 12:24, and that, in turn, would have given me a 10 mph average for the entire 54 miles.

But because of my late start, 42 minutes wasn't going to be good enough. I had to do it in 40 minutes or less. And a glance at my trip odometer and stopwatch (a function of my wristwatch) convinced me I wasn't gonna. As I saw the odometer come up on "6.0," my wristwatch showed 34 minutes and some seconds. That meant I was doing better than 10 mph, but not a full two minutes better. I hadn't had time to take in how many seconds more than 34 minutes had elapsed, I only knew that it was more than 34 minutes, which meant I was making up less than 2 minutes.

If I had the heart of a lion and the spirit of a champion, I would have turned on the afterburner right then and burned rubber. But I had no motivation beyond doggedly keeping my pace. The ride seemed plagued with encumbrances, anyway. The biggest slow-downer was Nature: Nature called me twice, and answering her required 8 minutes in the bathroom at the end of the first 20-mile loop, and another 3 at the end of the second. And that was what made me late starting the final loop. Then, a little over a mile into that final loop, there was the traffic light at 229th and Cornell that I love to hate, which turned red in spite of my long and hectic race to beat it. (I had seen that it was green from 100 yards away, stood on the pedals hard, determined to get there before it changed. It went to amber, and for an instant I considering charging ahead, but then decided against it, and braked to a stop, only to watch it stay amber for an insultingly, teasingly long time, sneering at me as I realized that I could easily have gotten through the intersection before it turned red. I timed it: it was red for a full one minute and 30 seconds!) Coming back across Cornell at Brookwood a while later, I miss-timed that light, and that cost me another minute. Then on a bike-and-pedestrian path near the library I came up behind three men ambling along three abreast, taking up the full width of the path. I pressed the thumb thingy on my bell, but it jammed; pressed it harder again and it rang, just as I came up on them so close I had to brake. They startled, and two of them moved to the right, and one to the left, indecisevely, while I mumbled, "'Scuse me" and wobbled at snail's pace through the narrow opening they had provided and up the path, which, of course, at this point was uphill.

And so it was that I came into the final stretch, with no oomph left and no optimism about today's time. I pulled into my driveway and grabbed my pencil to jot down the time. My stopwatch read 0:41, when I ached for it to read 0:40. Then I pressed the button that flicks it over to time of day: 12:24. I blinked. Looked again. It was actually 12:24:30. I was only 30 seconds over my deadline! How could this be?

No matter. What it is, it is, I thought, and hung up my bike, put my gear away, and took a shower. Then I came back and looked at the notes I'd made during the day, and it came clear.

First, I'd simply made a mistake about how late I was starting that final leg. I was only one minute late, not two. The note that I'd made just as I was starting it showed that it was 11:43, not 11:44. So riding it in 41 minutes was good enough to make up the time lost by the late start.

But then something even better emerged. I realized that had ridden 54.2 miles, not 54. How could this be? Well, you see, my bicycle "computer" has two odometers. One registers total miles ridden. It rounds the miles off, not showing tenths. The other is a trip odometer. It shows tenths of a mile. I always reset the first of these at the beginning of a day's ride, but I re-set the trip odometer at the beginning of each loop. And I write down what it records at the end of each loop. And today, I wrote down "20.1" at the end of each of what I've been calling the 20-mile loops. The overall odometer, however, rounded off these tenths, and showed, simply, "54".

So to get the accurate measure of my overall ride, I added the loops (20.1+7+20.1+7) and came up with 54.2. I divided that by 5 hrs. and 24.5 minutes, and voila! I did better than 10 mph for the day.

Whew!