Being a Centurion

In the not-too-distant past, if you had mentioned the word 'centurion' to me, I would have gotten wildly excited, pulled out the shot glasses and gotten into competition mode. Many of my good friends from the time of pre-running, pre-cycling and pre-triathlon Egg knew about my competitive streak from this epic drinking game.


100 shots (of anything; beer, cider, wine if you're feeling especially hardcore) in 100 minutes. Usually this is combined with a song change every minute too, until somewhere in the 30s or 40s where everyone is too far gone to remember to change it and full concentration is required on the whole timing bit.


Now I don't want to brag but I was a bit of a centurion champion. I don't ever recall actually getting to one hundred but I remember being the last man standing (or crawling, leaning, gurgling in the corner) and feeling enormously successful and triumphant.


These days I am sure that I would not be beating any of those aforementioned friends as I'm very much out of training. I am also sure that drinking anywhere near that amount of shots would definitely not fill me with feelings of success and triumph. It would be more along the lines of nausea and severe grumpiness of waking up hungover.


So, the new centurion challenge is of course, a much healthier one. The century ride. Commonly thrown with nonchalance into conversations by avid cyclists or triathletes: "So, what did you do this weekend?" "Oh I did some hill repeats on Saturday then a century on Sunday". This time last year I'd overheard such conversations and wondered what on earth I was doing in the company of these clearly completely mental people. 


In May I'm planning to do an event that is 329 miles over 3 days, so I need to be doing 'a century' most weekends. Yesterday was my first foray into the 100 mile world, I was helped along by several different cycling buddies throughout the course of the day and by copious amounts of jelly babies. It was actually far less painful than I had envisaged.


However, on getting home and typing my stats into the training log, I realised (as I had been working in kilometres) that I had come in at 99.2 miles. Noooooooooooooooo! So I can't even call myself a centurion yet. What an epic fail! 


..til next weekend!