A ride too far?

A man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?

Robert Browning

It's been 5 days now since the last climbfest on Bunker Hill.

My back hurts. It's hurt for the last 4 days.

I've been experiencing one of several "failure modes" where the muscles up the back (hamstrings, glutes, back) get super tight and compress the disc bulge I have at S1/S2.

As is my wont, I've been thinking about this a bunch. My thoughts thus far:

1. Too much, too soon. As it happens, my last two outings on Bunker Hill have been among my longest rides thus far this year.
2. My mileage so far this year is significantly down from years past.
3. Making the jump to both the longest ride and a significant amount of climbing was too much.

Stepping back a bit. One of my goals before I stop doing this silly nonsense (or, as it is so often phrased, before I "age out" of randonneuring) is the ACP Randonneur 10000 award. This requires:

• two full series of ACP brevets (200, 300, 400, 600 and 1000km) where longer brevets cannot be substituted for shorter ones.
• A Paris-Brest Paris
• A second 1200km randonnée homologated by Les Randonneurs Mondiaux
• a Flèche Vélocio
• a Super Randonnée 600
• additional ACP and/or RM events to bring the total distance up to at least 10000 km.

These must be completed within a six-year period.

I meet all these criteria but the Super 600K.

I've had two gos at the Super 6: the Snowies SR600K in Australia and the Colorado Front Range SR600K. I didn't finish either due to back pain.

Which brings us back (see what I did there?) to the present.

I'd planned on taking another run at the Colorado Front Range SR600K in July. Although this was looking doubtful due to the Coronavirus, nevertheless I continued to target it. That's what the hill climbing has been about - to try and prepare for an SR600K where I'll do 10K feet of climbing three days in a row (it doesn't fall out exactly like that but bear with me). My thinking was that by doing the Basecamp locally that I could gradually inure my back to the rigors of an SR600K.

But, as noted at the outset, my back hurts.

Right now, I'm not ready to concede that an SR600K just may be more than I'm able to do. My perhaps wishful thinking is that I've just done too much, too soon and that a more gradual ramp up is required.

Edited to add: my goal was never to do a full Everesting to prepare for the SR600K. Frankly, I think that'd be overdoing it in two ways:

1. Doing 30K feet of climbing to prepare for 30K feet of climbing is unnecessary from a training point of view.
2. I think it's not likely my back would ever get there.

A key difference between an SR600K and an Everesting is the SR600K breaks the 30K feet of climbing into three chunks with rest in between whereas the Everesting does it all in one go. My plan was to do at most a Basecamp and more likely to just stop at 10K feet.

At this point, I'm planning on focusing more on longer rides with a fair amount of climbing and perhaps resume the Everest Basecamp challenge at some point in the future. My current thinking is that I can get to the point where my back will take the stress of 10K plus climbing for three days in a row but that it needs to be done gradually. This may be wishful thinking on my part but, as I said, I'm not yet ready to concede otherwise. I'm no small amount of stubborn mixed with a fair dose of stupid.

Stay tuned!