Route Locked, 8 Miles Done

The route is locked

Tuesday afternoon I rode out to scout a few sections in Oakland and Alameda. Nothing glamorous. About 8 miles, 40 minutes, flat as it gets. But it needed to happen, and now it's done.

The 2026 Bay Ride route is confirmed.

That matters more than any training ride I could have logged that day. One hundred and thirty-five miles around the Bay on August 29th follows a specific path, and that path is now set. Every rider who signs up, whether they're doing the full loop or the 35-mile option from SF to Oakland, will know exactly what they're committing to.

What a scouting ride looks like

Average watts: 72. Average speed: 11.8 mph. Elevation: 102 feet. This is not a workout you post to brag about. I'm including the numbers because honesty is the whole point of this log.

Some days in a training block are hard efforts. Some days are recovery spins. And some days are functional: you get on the bike because there's a job to do and the bike is how you do it. Tuesday was that kind of day.

I'm not going to pretend this moved my fitness. It didn't. My FTP is sitting at 216W right now, well off my peak of 295W from 2022, and a 72-watt cruise through Oakland isn't closing that gap. But it got me on the bike, it got the route confirmed, and it got me thinking again about what August 29th actually looks like from the road.

What comes next

We're about ten weeks out. That's enough time to build real fitness if I stay consistent, and not much margin if I don't. The plan is to keep logging honest numbers here, including the weeks where things fall apart, because that's the only version of this that's actually useful.

I get asked a lot how someone rides 135 miles. The answer is never one big thing. It's months of ordinary rides, including the 8-mile Tuesday afternoon rides that exist just to get the job done. The route doesn't care how heroic your training was. It just asks whether you put in the time.

If you've been thinking about signing up, the route is locked and August 29th is on the calendar. Come find out what the Bay looks like from a bike seat. TheBayRide.com

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