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Monday, January 12, 2009

Harpoon B2B Ride 2009

Got an email notice over the weekend for the start of the open registration for the 2009 version of the Harpoon Brewery to Brewery bike ride. This is a 148 mile 1-day ride from Harpoon's brewery in Boston, MA to their brewery in Windsor, VT...with beer and food at the end. Now that's my type of ride!

Open registration starts at 7:00 AM on this Thursday, 1/15/09 (2008 alumni registration started last week). Here is the registration link:

2009 Harpoon B2B

Apparently this is another very popular New England area event ride (like the NBW's TFCE). To be honest, I had never heard of this ride until I was told about it during the TFCE last September. The next day I looked it up on the web and immediately signed up for email notices pertaining to the event. This year's B2B ride will be held on Saturday, June 20.

As far as 1-day rides go, the B2B is obviously much more difficult than the TFCE. It's approx 50% longer (148 vs 102 miles) and makes NO claim to be flat...after all, most of the ride is in New Hampshire! They also request that you do not register if you can't maintain a 16 mph average pace over the duration of the route...and they specify a 10 hour time limit for finishing the ride.

This ride is awfully, awfully appealing to me because it obviously would be a lot of fun and most definitely would be a challenge with the 10 hour completion target. I've been thinking about doing it ever since I learned about it...but I think I'm going to pass on it this year. There are a lot of other event rides in the New England area during the upcoming season and if I can prove to myself that I can handle a hilly century ride with ease, then my award for 2010 will be the Harpoon B2B. Of course, as with all challenges, I could be talked into it!!

Images courtesy of The Harpoon Brewery.

5 comments:

sarah said...

I like rides with a 'carrot' at the end! Btw, long summer rides in Tiverton, RI are always good as you can stop at Gray's for ice cream after =)

The re-awakening of an Athlete said...

I wish that Colorado offered these types of long rides.

We have lots of races (under 60 miles), climbs, crits, foundation events (usually the maximum is 100 miles a day), but rarely is there offered more than 100 miles.

The only time I get to do over a hundred miles is if I bike to the event from Denver. Or I just plan to ride over a hundred in a day. And that is not bad since it free to ride a hundred all by myself!

btw - First time visitor to your blog

sarah said...

Have you had any luck finding time to go to Village Bicycle for a computrainer ride? It's worth a bit of a drive. I already have plans to go back and Jeff's going to try it this time too.

Lost Sheep said...

Brewery to brewery...now that sounds like my kind of ride! Not much of that kind of thing going on in Manchester, UK.

Up in Scotland they do distillery rides, but that's a little too far for me to go, just to get legless on a ride!

sarah said...

I know how much time home improvement projects can eat up! Hope it's going well! It's a good time of year to get those sorts of things done.

They have easy group rides on the computrainers so you could do one of those even if you haven't been on your trainer much.