To OLD ALBANY POST ROAD we go...
This years Vermont 50 is coming up fast! It takes place Sunday, September 29th and it will be my 5th year riding the event. I like to put this on my schedule each year because the ride is fantastic and the community is just flat out awesome. Much of the course is ridden in and around private land and farms that families open up to us only for race day. The #vermont50 is 50 miles with over 8,000 feet of climbing on some great single track and plenty of old historic dirt roads.
The last few years I have been enjoying casually going about the race and capturing footage and photos throughout my ride and this year will be no different. However, I still need some quality fitness to get through this race in order to really enjoy it so we are out there putting in some good hard training miles and having ourselves plenty of adventures along the way.
Living in New York we are fortunate to have a great network of trails as well as many old dirt roads to train on. A couple of times each year, since around 2005, I like to visit the Old Albany Post Road area to get in some great training miles. These roads are some of the oldest unpaved roads in the United States. The traffic is light, the dirt roads are in good shape and there are many options to choose from.
I was feeling a bit tired in the legs from the past couple of weeks training and from the amount of trail running I have been doing but was motivated and needed to suffer a bit…which I did on the last climb up Bear Mountain. This year I have been working on getting myself back up to speed in both running and cycling but I am taking my time to do so. I have some big goals for 2020 that I hope to share with everyone towards the end of this year but first up is the Vermont 50 and today’s training ride.