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I’ve been wanting to take the family on an organized bike ride for some time. We thought that this would be a good year to give it a go. Every year my home town of Wichita Falls hosts the Hotter’n Hell Hundred bike race and fun ride. We registered as a family, and held a family vote to pick our team name. The Blue Eyed Racers got the most votes.

We started preparing for the 25 mile ride in July. Our original plan was for me to pull the trailer bike (the half-bike looking thing that attaches to my bike) and take one kid’s bike. The two kids could switch off between the small bike and being towed when they needed to rest. We quickly realized that this would not work. Kat was just too big for her bike and they both struggled in various hilly spots with the small, single-speed bike. Tiger wasn’t able to go more than about 3 miles at a time on his own, but that’s not too bad when you consider that he just learned to ride without training wheels on July 8th!! We couldn’t set the seat height high enough for Kat and low enough for Tiger at the same time so they were both uncomfortable. So, we checked Kat’s savings account and decided that we would pay for half of a new bike for her. She picked a purple Diamondback girl’s bike with 6 gears. I really wanted her next bike to have at least one shifter. My hope was that with the gear advantage and larger bike she would be able to make it the 25 miles on her own. We only had a few weeks for her to get used to it, so we went on several rides working our way up in miles. We got as high as 18 miles two weeks before the big ride.

We loaded up the bikes and headed to WF on Friday. The ride was to start at 7:00AM Saturday. I was concerned about parking and getting to our designated starting area, so we got up early and made it there just after 6:30AM. There were over 11,000 riders in this year’s ride. The official 100 mile race starts first, then all the fun riders head out in order of the distance (100 miles, 100K, 50 miles, 25 miles, then 10K). After waiting our turn, we crossed the start line at 7:30AM.

We held an average speed just over 8 miles per hour and finished in about 3 hours riding time. With 2 long rest stops and multiple water breaks on the roadside we finished the ride in 4 hours and 15 minutes. This slow of a pace was hard for me at times. It’s particularly hard to go slow and keep my balance while pulling Tiger on the trailer bike. I have to compensate for his moving around or leaning and it’s just easier to do when you have more speed to give you some stability. But this was an impressive pace for Kat to maintain. We are very proud of her for finishing this ride all on her own. It was a challenge for sure, but she stuck it out and made it.

You can check out more photos from the ride here.

Filed under: Bicycling, Get Outside, Live Well, Savor Life on August 29th, 2008