Thoughts on my 6th PeloFondo

A few weeks ago, I participated in my 6th PeloFondo. If you followed my blog for a while, you’ve heard about this Gran Fondo-style endurance challenge for Peloton riders before.

In the world of road cycling, a GranFondo (which is Italian and roughly translates to “big race”) is a long-distance mass cycling event that starts at 75 miles (120 km).

The PeloFondo event takes place several times per year and the main goal is to ride a designated amount of miles over the weekend.  You can join individually or as a team, you choose a total mileage goal, and you can decide if you want to complete the mileage in one day, or if you want to split it up over two days. If you pick two days, your mileage can be split up however you want between those 2 days and over multiple rides.

The recommendation for Peloton riders who use classes is to not follow the instructors’ cues, but instead maintain a steady, sustainable pace (zone 2, if you know your power zones) throughout the rides. You can participate as an app rider, as long as you’re able to track (and then manually report) your mileage on your non-Peloton bike.

Some of you will probably ask: why would you do that?

My answer is: because it’s fun!

Tanja and I signed up together with our Streakers Team (the same team we always join for the Power Zone Challenges).

My #BCBabes friend Sherry has taken on the organization for our Streakers365 team and while there is an official ride schedule on the SUMMIIT App that all PeloFondo participants can follow, she also put together a ride schedule for our team to make sure people can coordinate and ride together because we’re working across different time zones. I’ve got to ride with a few Streakers that I hadn’t seen on the Leaderboard in a while.

I also happened to celebrate my 1,200th ride on Denis’ LIVE 90s Ride on Saturday afternoon. While I didn’t get a shoutout, the playlist was excellent (90s alternative and hip hop). It’s what I call my “push music” (the kind of music that makes me want to push hard in my workouts).

Not only did the #BCBabes Sherry, Kristin, and Melissa celebrate with me, but also a few other Streakers. It was a fantastic ride. I then kept picking random (rock) rides to keep adding miles for our team. I was hoping to get at least half of my pledged miles on Saturday, but felt good and finished with 66 miles for the first day.

I had 34 miles left to reach my goal of 100 miles for PeloFondo. I joined Sherry and Melissa for Ally’s Country Pop Live Ride at 9 am, then picked the next two music classes suggested on the PeloFondo schedule and a Dave Matthews Band Ride, before ending with Eriks Blink 182 Ride which I specifically picked for the fast beat. My preferred cadence is around 90.

I rode 3:55 hours on Saturday and 2:10 hours on Sunday and contributed a total of 103.5 miles to our team effort. We had 67 Streakers365 riders, the team goal was 2000 miles but we collectively rode 3813 miles and we came in 16th out of 116 teams!

Have you participated in a team event like this?