The long ride
I had my head down.
I was turning over the peddles.
The secret to distance riding is not effort, or even fitness, it’s turning the peddles over.
I looked back over my shoulder and didn’t see the other guys.
Sometimes when I get in the zone, I gap them.
We were 70 miles or so in and I felt fine, I just wanted to be finished.
There was a fork in the 2-lane road here and I had my suspicions that we would go left, but I couldn’t be sure, so I coasted to a stop and waited for them to catch up.
As they pulled into site the heavens opened up again and it began raining, pouring those sheets of summer rain.
They cranked by and merged left, using their momentum to leave me lonely. I stood up in the peddles and pushed my old bike back into motion, accelerating hard through the downpour to catch up.
I began laughing comically, shrieking really, like a witches’ maniacal laugh, as I clawed through the water in hot pursuit.
Ah-bah-ha-ha-ha!
A middle finger to the rain gods.
Then out of an open second story window from my right came a rejoinder to my laugh.
A witches’ laugh poured out into the rain as I screamed by, joining me in my hilarity, a cheering fan of stupidity.
A manic echo.
The laughter of inmates escaping from the asylum at last.
And that we were.
…
Thursday, I rode a century, which is 100 miles by the way, with my old running buddies. It wasn’t a big deal. I’ve ridden longer rides and races. As I told someone else “I’ve done way stupider things than this.” But is was great to get out with my friends and have an adventure in these times of home confinement and injury.
Brian, Frank, Tim and I have been running together off and on for the past 20 years. We met training for the Boston Marathon and looking for company on those long runs. We’ve been out on the rodas and raced together around New England.
But we’re all getting older.
At some point in 2019 we started biking together instead. Frank had his second hip done. Brian was taking some time off from the marathon monkey and I managed to injure my knee going into 2020.
Between us I think we have over 50 Boston Marathons.
Brian was a bike guy when he was younger, before he switched to marathoning. Frank is a touring biker who does a week-long cross-country ride with the guys from his band every year. I’ve been dabbling in triathlon for the last two decades. Tim had been riding his bike to work.
Over the course of this spring and early summer we would meet early in the morning on most weekends and do a long ride adventure. 20, 30, 40 or even 50-mile jaunts out to a diner somewhere for breakfast.
Somewhere along the way they decided we should do a 100 mile ride.
A couple weeks ago they decided it would either be this Thursday or Friday depending on which weather day looked better. A week out they decided Thursday.
The weather, as it usually does, did not cooperate. As the day approached, instead of a nice day it was going to be a rainy day. There was much chatter around this but never the thought of NOT riding.
Like I said, we’ve done stupider things.
We gathered at Franks in the morning, did some final tuning, took some pictures and set off. I made sure to apply a liberal amount of Squirrel Nut Butter to my undercarriage. It’s not fatigue that will make you miserable in these long efforts. It’s skin loss.
We were battling construction sites and rush hour traffic as we headed across the eastern side of Massachusetts, along back roads, towards the sea.
It didn’t take long for the rain to start. It wasn’t a cold rain, but it was a steady rain. I foraged a cedar house shingle about 6 inches wide out of Frank’s barn and bungie-corded it to my luggage rack as a fender to keep some of the water from spraying up my back all day. It worked pretty well.
Understand that the 4 of us are not cyclists per se. There is no tight peloton formation. We amble along at 12-13 miles and hour and spend most of the time chatting.
It turned into a bit of an adventure as my back tire kept going flat. I had 3 flats in the first 30 miles. The guys were threatening to call triple-A and send me home. It was strange because these were new tires and new tubes.
We stopped at a bike shop and got some more tubes. And we needed them.
After the third flat we stopped at another bike shop and had the guy look at the tire to see if he could find anything. He looked it over and didn’t see anything. I flatted almost immediately after leaving that bike shop. We went back and had the guy put a new tire on.
That fixed the problem.
Of course, all of this meant we lost hours out of the ride and spent a ton of time standing around in the rain changing flats.
Like I said, these were new tires, but I guess like everything else in Covid times the quality of that tire wasn’t up to snuff.
We proceeded a few more miles and Tim flatted.
This is a challenge because Tim is riding a old Fuji from the 80’s that we found on a ride one day. Someone was giving it away for free by the side of the road. We decided it was an upgrade from his Walmart commuter bike.
But, this bike is so old it does not have a quick release on the wheels. You need a wrench to get these off. Tim didn’t have the right size wrench with him. Luckily I always carry a patch kit, so instead of swapping out the tube we were bale to patch it in situ for him.
After that we made it to our halfway point in Rockport without incident. We had lunch and went to head back a few hours behind schedule. It had stopped raining and I was drying out a bit.
When Frank went to get back on his bike the seat fell apart. Another 30-40 minutes while we waited for him to figure that out.
Finally, back on the road, Frank makes us pull over so he can get some lube from a Walgreens.
We made a brief stop at Frank’s niece’s house. Turns out her husband is a serious biker. I took him up on the offer of a salt tablet.
After that we went into a interesting canal path section. With the rain the single path mud was slick as ice and Brian did a nice slow-motion tumble. That made us feel better because he was the only one who was unscathed so far.
After that we were just turning the peddles over and cranking back through rush hour traffic and more pouring rain.
We made one last pit stop somewhere in the 80’s because Frank wanted to get some Gatorade. Nutrition-wise, I brought a couple plums with me. I had some coffee in the morning and a nice Greek salad for lunch. Other than that I was relying on my fat stores.
I was starting to get a bit calorie poor when we made that final stop and I accepted a Lara bar from Tim. My stomach was getting a little rumbly and that definitely helped.
Our next challenge was that the sun was setting on us. We had only been riding for 8 hours but had managed to work another 5 hours of down time into that.
We would not be deterred. We muscled our way into Lowell and arrived at the Navigation brewery just as it got dark. The tipsy patrons were rather entertained the see the four of us bedraggled men wander in and order beers. They couldn’t believe we were sitting at 99 miles.
Meanwhile, Frank called his wife and had her bring over a headlight for the last 3 mile jaunt in the dark through Lowell over to Chelmsford.
Fortified by a cold pint, Frank took the lead with his headlight and Brian brought up the rear with his taillight sandwiching Tim and I in the middle. We wended our way through the city streets and back into Franks Driveway for a total of 103 miles.
So, you could say it was a challenging day. Or, you could say it was a perfect day.
8+ hours of peddle turning salted into 13 hours of experience.
Wouldn’t trade that day for any other.