Who knew that riding 100 miles would be tough?

As we came up to a hill, I had been keeping up with my friends—all of whom are noticeably in better shape than me or at least have done the ride before—for the past few miles.

“I’ll see you guys in 13 miles,” I said, not kidding myself to think that I could make it up the hill with them. And the next rest stop was 13 miles away.

I didn’t stop, with the exception of the rest stops, so I would say that the ride was overall successful. It was a century, 100-miles around Cayuga Lake, to raise money for the Southern Tier AIDS Program (STAP). What was more likely to happen, me crashing my bike, didn’t happen either.

See, I tend to crash my bike a lot, so the idea of me biking for so long was something, as my roommates pointed out, which could have been problematic.

But everything was fine. My tires didn’t blow, I came out of it with out any scratches and still functional, for the most part. The only thing was that I had grease stains on me from my bike chain.

It would be one thing if the stains were on my inside right leg, because that part of the leg is what hits the chain. But I had them on the outside of my right knee and the outside of my left leg.

“I’m really curious how you got those,” a friend pointed out at one of the rest stops.

I started paying attention to how I was biking, but at no point did my left leg cross over the bike to the right side and rub up against the chain. And that seems like something I would notice.

Though, realistically, if that’s the oddest thing that came out of the ride, I’m lucky, considering that I have never had a normal biking experience.