I failed

[jobob]

The longest ride I have done so far was a 30, but there were a lot of hills and I thought it would be easy to do a sixty flat. How could I have trained to have been able to tolerate the heat?

Your only "failure"
-- and I'm only using that term because you insist on using it and I'm with everyone else, I sure as heck don't consider what you accomplished a failure, hence the quotation marks
-- is that, based on what you told us, you may not have prepared adequately for this event.

Like everyone else said, you have to train yourself to get up to these kinds of distances -- a metric century is a long ride!! -- and if you're riding in the heat you have to ride a lot in the heat to get your body accustomed to it. And to know what kinds of foods work best for you in the heat, and how much electrolyle you need to consume. Et cetera. Tx Doc's post above had excellent suggestions.

And heat can affect even well-trained people in a pretty unpredictable manner.

I wrote in very glowing terms about my friends melissam and dachshund in another thread, and the super-tough ride they did in the heat yesterday (which I might add they had to train for a good long time to be able to do).

Now, where we live in the San Francisco Bay area, it doesn't get super-hot very often -- plus our idea of super-hot might not hold a candle to your idea of super-hot (bad pun, sorry). For one thing, it generally doesn't get very humid out here. Certainly not like the east coast's version of humid!

That said, we had one guy on that training ride yesterday who had to bail out about 2/3 rds into the ride. To put it simply, the heat got to him. He is by no stretch of the imagination a quitter, he has done many strenuous bike rides (and run marathons!!) in the past. He had trained well leading up to this ride. But once in a while stuff happens and our bodies don't cooperate the way we want. He was bummed to have to end his ride when he did, but he's also experienced enough to know that sometimes that is the very best option (and at times, the only sane option).

So all I'm saying is, it happens to the best of them. Please don't beat yourself up for not finishing the ride. You'll learn from it, and if you want, you'll do another, and hopefully you'll be better prepared for it and it'll be a breeze, comparatively speaking.