← Blog/August 25, 2026 · 2 min read
Easy Legs, Big Saturday
Four days out from 135 miles, the job is simple: don't wreck yourself. Tuesday's ride was short, slow, and exactly right.
Tuesday, August 25. Four days out.
Fifteen miles. Sixty-seven minutes of moving time. Average watts of 96, which is barely pedaling. Average heart rate of 125, which is a comfortable conversation pace. Suffer score of 29 out of a possible several hundred.
This is what a tune-up ride looks like. Not glamorous. Not a workout, really. Just spinning the legs over, reminding the body what it's supposed to do, and then stopping before any real fatigue shows up.
Why this ride matters
People who haven't trained for a long event sometimes assume the week before should be full of hard riding. Get in shape, squeeze out one more gain. That's the wrong instinct. By Tuesday of event week, the fitness you have is the fitness you're bringing. You cannot earn more between now and Saturday. What you can do is show up rested, or show up tired. That's the only variable left.
So the plan was simple: get on the bike, move the blood around, keep the heart rate easy, and go home. Fifteen miles and 400 feet of climbing. Done by mid-morning.
The number I'm actually watching
Saturday is August 29th. TheBayRide. One hundred and thirty-five miles around the Bay.
I've been building toward this since April. FTP tests, long weekend rides, weeks that went well and weeks that fell apart. All of it pointed at one day. Now that day is four days out, and the preparation is over. The only thing left is to execute.
Average watts of 96 on a tune-up ride tells you nothing about what August 29th will look like. But it tells you I didn't do anything stupid on Tuesday. That's the whole point.
What 135 miles actually requires
I get asked some version of "how do you even ride 135 miles" more than any other question. The honest answer: you don't ride 135 miles in one day because of one decision. You ride it because you made a hundred small decisions over several months. You did the Tuesday rides. You did the long Saturdays when you didn't feel like it. You showed up to boring training rides and got off the bike tired, and then did it again.
This Tuesday ride is one of those small decisions. It's also the last one before the real thing.
What's next
Wednesday will be a rest day or something very short. Thursday, same. Friday, stay off the bike entirely. Saturday, we ride.
If you've been following along since April, thank you. If you're just finding this now, the short version is: I'm training in public for TheBayRide, sharing the real numbers including the slow days, and hoping it makes the whole thing feel less impossible for someone who's thinking about doing it.
Because it's not impossible. It's just riding a lot, for a long time, over several months. One ordinary ride at a time.
From the ride
Ride the Bay with us
The Bay Ride is a charity bike ride around the Bay Area. 135 miles all the way around, or a 35-mile option from SF to Oakland.
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