I couldn’t have written it any better myself. Besides, with all of the compliments he payed towards me and Carla, how could I resist?
Kris and I arrived at Jason’s house around 5:00 on Friday. We were met by Carla, his charming wife; Jason and Anne were at the airport picking up Robert. Their house is lovely, large and light and open and meticulously clean in the way that makes slobs like myself both amazed and nervous, not quite sure if it’s OK to set a drink down or disturb an artfully arranged magazine. I slipped off my shoes, surmising from Carla’s bare feet that this was the custom, and immediately regretted it as ten hours of road funk wafted up from my shamefully exposed toes. I found an excuse to examine the back yard for a bit and observe the cows grazing in the meadow over their back fence.
Robert, Anne and Jason returned shortly and from there out it was a flurry of activity, a hundred details to sort out and dinner to serve and bedrolls to set up, a run to Target for the Fig Newtons I forgot and a quick five mile ride out to a local lake to warm our legs. It was 10:30 before we managed to find our beds; waking at 2:30 didn’t seem quite such a brilliant idea now. Luckily Robert decided the couch looked comfy, leaving me the lush and enormous air mattress Carla provided and I slept like a heavily sedated rock.
2:30 was nonetheless a rude hour at which to arise and it was a bleary and ugly crew that gathered around the kitchen table. A little of Robert’s rocket powered Jamacian coffee and Jason’s pancakes quickly took care of that, blessed be they both. Things naturally didn’t go quite as smoothly as planned but we managed to get on the road at roughly the planned hour. I carefully loaded my vital supplies into my jersey pockets in the back of the dark van: peanuts in the left pocket, fig newtons and bag balm in the right, gu and clif bars and wallet and phone in the center. Nervouslly I checked and rechecked that I had everything all the way to Seattle. Luck favours the
prepared and is at least indifferent to the obsessive.
The start was a zoo, thousands of people milling about. Robert still had to pick up his ride packet and I was sure there was simply no way we’d make the start time, but a miracle occurred and we five rolled across the start line as they were literally counting off the seconds until they closed it. It was an enormous relief: all the logistics and planning and details were done now. Nothing remained but turning the pedals for the next twelve hours or so, and I knew I could do that.
The roads were pretty rotten for the first stretch, narrow with scanty
shoulders and crowded with cyclists. Fortunately most of our compatriots
seemed at least tolerable riders; I guess the double century doesn’t really attract the rank beginners, so most everyone knew how to control a bike and take a corner and so we rolled along without much incident. The predawn air was chilly enough that I was grateful for my arm warmers but even at 4:30 there was plenty of light. The others seemed happy to be on the road as well and there was a fair amount of chatter, talking about the songs we had stuck in our heads and such (apparently Jason once has the Laverne & Shirley theme song stuck in his head for two years - and he claims to only know one line of it, poor bugger).
Soon enough we came to broader suburban roads and the pack thinned out a bit (though with 9,000 people on the road we were never alone all day). There were an inordinate number of stop lights and the scenery was tres industrial park but it was still early and we made good cheerful time. The first rest stop was a terrifying mass of humanity but we managed to refuel and get going again. The miles were ticking off without incident.
At about 40 miles we came to “The Hill”. The race packets speak of this with awe; “Be brave!” they admonish. It’s a mile of 7% grade. We Utahns, who are familiar with actual mountains, found the whole thing rather farcical. I tried to behave myself and save energy but Jason and Kris took off like rabbits while Anne and I ground steadily up behind, enjoying our triples.
Shortly after Kris got a flat. We all gathered around while he fixed it up, surely feeling no pressure from four sets of eyes on him. He couldn’t find a cause, which is quite worrisome. Eventually he just put a new tube in (and had the foresight to patch the old one) and hoped for the best.
A few miles later on a rather horrid stretch of road where traffic was
roaring by at 50 and we had only a narrow little shoulder to huddle on he flatted again. It seemed we had a problem, especially when with even more careful examination we *still* could find no cause. It turned out to be a blessing in disguise, though, because while Robert and I waited with Kris, Jason and Anne went on ahead where they encountered the Railroad Crossing of Howling Despair. This was a set of nasty deep tracks crossing the already sketchy roadway at a shallow angle, just eager to grab the wheel of an unsuspecting cyclist and fling them to the ground. The organizers has rather optimistically tried to cover the tracks with a bit of carpet, but it just wasn’t getting the job done and riders were falling like ninepins. Jason and Anne, waiting for us, had sufficient time to watch the mayhem and call us stragglers with a warning to take the tracks with great care.
So in the end Kris’s second flat did us a favour and his patched tube held up all the way to Portland. Sometimes luck is just luck, I guess.
After that Jason was eager to make up time. He’s a fireplug of a man and
strong like ox, so once we were off that awful highway and onto a
pleasant bike path he began pulling at 24, 25 miles per hour. It was all I could to to hold his wheel and I knew I was putting more energy into it than I should, but damn if it didn’t feel good to fly along like that! And besides, none of the others were complaining, and *I* certainly wasn’t going to be the whining nancy. I mean, if Anne could ride at that pace… well, I am not the most competitive man in the world but I *do* still have a pair of balls on me [1]. So along we flew and we were at the halfway point before I knew it.
After a pretty leisurely break we took off again at a rather diminished
pace. I needed to recover from the sprint and was toodling along at 17, 18 and the others had the good grace to take it easy with me and not call me any rude names.
The next fifty miles were downright pleasant. I was very comfortable at my diminished pace, the scenery was good and the roads spacious and open. We got to see the world’s largest egg in some small dorp in rural Washington. It was indeed an impressive bit of eggery and Anne, Jason and I posed for pictures, hamming it up like a bunch of spandex retards.
Then we came to the bridge over the Columbia into Oregon. The ride
instructions made a big deal of the bridge: “extreme caution” was advised and with four lanes of traffic howling obliviously by I was inclined to take them seriously. So I rode the bridge like Grandma with a basket full of eggs and nitroglycerin on the front of her bike, slow and pokey. Consequently I ended up alone at the bottom. Certain I was behind everybody else, I started to pick up the pace, trying to catch back on. For the next fifteen miles or so I increasingly hammered it, picking off one rider after another ahead of me. I eventually paired up with two other riders, a little stronger than me, but we got a nice rotating paceline and were hauling along at great pace. But still none of my compatriots were in sight. Jason must be pulling them at Mach 3 again how that they’re rid of me, I thought to myself. When I came
to a little rest stop I pulled in disheartened and started calling people to try to figure out where they were. I left a message for Jason and then called Anne. “I’m at this little rest stop, a small red building…” she said. I looked in front of me: small red building. I looked behind me: Anne, not ten feet away. She was just getting in with Kris. Somehow I had managed to get in front of everyone else and we’d become quite scattered.
We regrouped soon enough and set off for the last 30 or so miles.
Unfortunately I was feeling a bit ragged now after pushing the previous hour or so and even though we had a lovely tail wind and the pace wasn’t that hot I was in danger of falling off (in my defense, it was a long, gradual uphill drag all the way to Portland). So I latched onto Jason’s tail with a single minded concentration and sat there suffering for an hour or so. I suspect others weren’t feeling that hot either - there certainly wasn’t a great deal of chatter now. Once or twice I began muttering out loud the song stuck in my head - alas, it was “Go, motherfucker, go” by Nashville Pussy and like poor Jason with Laverne and Shirley, I only knew one line. You can guess how that one line goes.
With about fifteen miles left I was really thinking of falling off the
group. There was no danger of not finishing, but even the rather moderate pace we were doing was just killing me. In a brief fit of sanity I thought of Gu. I hadn’t been eating as I should the last couple of hours, maybe it could help. And oh, boy, did it ever! One shot and in literally a minute I was back in the pink of health, cheerful and raring to go. Amazing what a little sugar and caffeine will do for a soul.
I knew the boost was probably only good for half an hour or so, max, but we could see buildings now and I had one more Gu in my pocket. The day was as good as won, and when Jason took off like a startled monkey on the last climb of the day, maybe 150 yards of steep, I chased as best I could and enjoyed doing it.
The finish line was loud and somewhat disappointing. The ride over, now a hundred logistical details were rearing their heads again. Food to get, hotels to find, goodbyes to say. I think the thing I enjoy most about distance cycling is the simple purity of purpose. There’s nothing to do, nothing to worry about, except moving the bike forwards. It lends itself to a beautiful clarity. At the end of this one I was sad to be done, even though not half an hour before I’d been suffering. Humans. What you gonna do? We just won’t ever make sense, not even to ourselves.
So thanks to all, fellow riders and support folk alike. It was a good day.
See y’all at RANATAD 2010.
Kevin
[1] rather tired and achy ones at this point, I might add.
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