When I got my road bike last July I discovered that I loved to take it on 20 or 30 mile rides, and started dreaming of going further.  So, I asked around about good first centuries to aim for, and one event kept getting mentioned again and again: Tour de Palm Springs (with Cool Breeze in Ventura also getting many votes).

The timing was perfect – Tour de Palm Springs happens every year in January or February, so that gave me months to train up.  I followed a training plan from Burke and Pavelka’s The Complete Book of Long-Distance Cycling, which helped me slowly increase my cycling distances from ~50 miles a week about 3 months ago to 150 miles a week in the two weeks before the century*.

The route

The Tour de Palm Springs has 10, 25, 50, and 100 mile cycling routes, all of which begin and end in downtown Palm Springs.  I did the 100 mile route, which looked like this: Continue reading Ride report: A great first century at Tour de Palm Springs 2016 →