It was not without some trepidation that Laura and I embarked on the Active Transportation Alliance's Four Star Bike Tour yesterday. After all, we had to get out of the RAGBRAI kitchen last month because we couldn't stand the heat. Who know how we would fare on this route?

Actually, I was fairly certain we'd do fine. The Four Star Bike Tour, which takes its name from the four stars on the Chicago city flag, offers a 62-mile tour of various Chicago neighborhoods and western suburbs, none of which are particularly hilly. And since we wouldn't be likely to encounter any triple-digit temperatures, we figured this ride would be a good way to restore our cycling confidence in ourselves.

What we didn't count on, about 26 miles into the ride at not yet 10 a.m., was the early arrival of the torrential rains that were predicted for the afternoon. The rain did ease up or stop from time to time, but there were also stretched where it rained so hard we could barely see. We were navigating by a combination of route map and green stars painted on the street. With the rain so heavy it became almost impossible to use the map, and it was very easy to miss the street markers.

There was also another dropped-chain incident with Laura's bike that required the application of an Allen wrench to fix, and the occasion bit of backtracking, but we persevered and made it through in about six and a half hours. Along the way we saw some of the toniest neighborhoods around, and some of the poorest too. As a study in contrasts without borders, it was instructive.

We arrived home waterlogged and mud-spattered, having learned that it's still possible to push on when you're carrying an extra twenty pounds of water weight—in your shoes alone.

Laura quipped that she was docking the Four Star Bike Tour half a star because of the rain. All in all, though, not a bad day in the saddle.

Wet, dirty feet


Crossposted from Inhuman Swill
[ continued from yesterday ]

Laura loves my Manhattans. I make them in the proper, original fashion, with rye and not bourbon. I always keep a bottle of Templeton rye on hand (though Bulleit rye is a fine choice too), along with Dolin sweet vermouth, Peychaud's bitters and Luxardo cherries. I make a damn fine Manhattan, if I do say so.

Hmm, what could we possibly make tonight...? Laura wasn't always a fan of the brown-liquor cocktail. I'd been drinking Manhattans and old-fashioneds for a few years but never managed to infect her with a taste for them. But then our friend Scott Smith foisted one of his Manhattans on her, and it was all over. The primacy of the Templeton Manhattan was cemented when we attended a documentary about the distillery's history at Mayne Stage in Chicago.

Like I say, I always keep these ingredients on hand. Always. So when Laura texted me last Thursday afternoon to ask Will you make me a manhattan tonight?, my response was an automatic Hell yes.

I picked up Laura from her train late that evening, went to the liquor cabinet, and pawed my way through the bottles. Puzzled. Where was the Templeton Rye? Where was the good vermouth? What on earth was going on? And how would I ever recover from the wounded, damaged look my wife gave me when I broke the confounding news that I couldn't deliver on my promise?

What on earth does this have to do with RAGBRAI, you may be asking yourself. Well, it dawned on me then that when our New York friends rolled back through Chicago on their way home from Iowa, I had made Manhattans for the whole gang. #RAGBRAI turned @fablam and @jplang into the living dead. #jimnasty I'd used up all the rye and all the vermouth. In the meantime I'd failed to make a run for replenishments, and now it was too late to make it out to a good liquor store.

Laura was on the verge of never speaking to me again when memory offered me a sudden RAGBRAI-related glimmer of hope. "Wait!" I exclaimed. "My Target bottle!"

On our original drive west across Iowa to the start of RAGBRAI, Colin had picked up a bottle of Old Overholt rye for round-the-campfire consumption. That night he poured half the contents into an aluminum water bottle for safer transport as we rode. I had an extra aluminum water bottle too (Target-branded), so I volunteered to stash the rest of the rye in mine. When Laura and I left RAGBRAI early on Day 3, I offered my bottle to Colin. "You guys take it," he said. "You may need it." And indeed, Laura and I consumed much of it in our hotel rooms over the next two nights on the way back to Chicago. It wasn't Templeton, but at least it was handy.

Frantically I grabbed for the aluminum bottle, which after two weeks was still sitting out on the kitchen counter. "I think there's enough," I said, hefting the bottle. From the liquor cabinet I managed to dig out an older bottle of Martini & Rossi vermouth. Like the rye, it wasn't outstanding, but it would do, particularly when mixed with a little extra cherry juice from the Luxardo jar. The evening was saved. Thanks, RAGBRAI. At least you did one thing for me.

Oh, and happy birthday to me. What's that? Why, yes, I would like a nice Manhattan tonight, thanks. It's so thoughtful of you to offer.


Crossposted from Inhuman Swill
[ continued from last week ]

In retrospect, we probably could have come up with a solution that didn't involve throwing in the towel completely. We could have ridden each of the next two days until noon, then called for the support wagon and sat out the triple-digit afternoon heat. We could have just sat out those days entirely and picked up again on Thursday morning in Marshalltown.

But none of those compromises were within comprehension in our ragged states that afternoon as I laid out to Laura the math I'd run in my head, the risks of heat stroke or something worse, the exit strategy I'd worked out for getting us home, and most of all the fact that I just didn't think I could do another day under those extreme circumstances. And she agreed with me.

Bike arch, Lake View, Iowa Once we'd decided we were leaving, there was no looking back. We quaffed more beer and stuffed ourselves with tasteless, wonderful carbs from the Glacier Bay buffet, then pedaled another five miles or so through Lake View in search of Team Nasty's campsite for the night. As we set up our tent, turkey buzzards were circling overhead. No doubt they were hoping to scavenge garbage from the influx of campers, but at the time it struck us as ominous confirmation that we were making the right decision.

It was impossible to get a decent cellular connection from almost anywhere, so I took my iPad and hiked over to the public library in search of wi-fi. We wanted to get rental cars and hotels nailed down quickly. The tiny library was like a refugee camp, with maybe forty people taking advantage of the air-conditioning, some even sleeping on the floor between the stacks. Mobile speakeasy The line for the computers was long, but the wi-fi was abundant. I managed to secure us a Chevy Malibu rental for the next day from Fort Dodge to Cedar Rapids, and a Jeep Liberty the next day from Cedar Rapids to Chicago. I found us a couple of hotels, too, and prepaid for our stays.

By way of salvaging our vacation week, I shot an email to Templeton Rye to see if I could make arrangements for a tour the next afternoon, as long as we were going to be in the general vicinity of Templeton. (We are both big fans, and in fact later that evening we ran across Templeton's Mobile Speakeasy in town. It was just closing up for the night.) After that, I planned for us to stay in Cedar Rapids through Thursday night, when the RAGBRAI riders arrived there for a free Counting Crows concert.

I would describe our evening as lame-duck Nastys as muted and mournful. A large percentage of our team wandered out together and found a nine-dollar potluck dinner at a local church. We were issued group numbers and asked to wait in the crowded chapel until we were called. It took about forty-five minutes to get seated, Waiting for supper during which time a few members of our group picked up hymnals and started a quiet, impromptu choir recital which a few other folks joined. Dinner was worth the wait, though—far tastier and more generous than the offerings at the Glacier Bay buffet.

While we were eating, a copy of that day's Des Moines Register made the rounds. The first six pages were mostly devoted to stories about the heat wave, and about how dangerous it was for people to undertake any kind of strenuous activity outdoors. The sole exception was an article about what fun all those cyclists were having on their way across Iowa!

For better or worse, it didn't rain that night. Laura and I were awakened around 6:00 am by the sounds of people breaking camp. It seems the rest of Team Nasty, who had awakened the previous morning to find Laura and me mysteriously vanished, were now taking a page from our playbook and hitting the road early. It felt weird to not be joining them. The siren call of the morning road was seductive and tempting, but we had already lashed ourselves to the mast of a departing ship.

Our bikes are done I'm not sure how much there is to tell. Our support van very kindly drove us, crammed in with the luggage, and our bikes to the Fort Dodge airport, which was not very far off their route to Webster City. At one point on the trip there we crossed an overpass below which an endless river of cyclists flowed to the south. It was hard to watch them dwindle behind us and disappear from sight.

We picked up our Malibu at the tiny Fort Dodge airport, which contained little else besides an X-ray machine and a Hertz counter. Our bikes barely fit in the back with the front wheels taken off. Templeton Rye had emailed me to say that they couldn't run any tours that week because all their people were at RAGBRAI, so we did our best to amuse ourselves in Fort Dodge throughout the afternoon and evening. (Ted, by the way, is a horrible, unfunny abortion of a movie, but I gave it four stars for the air-conditioning alone. And it's more fun to watch when you're the only two people in the theater and can talk as loudly as you want.) We found a place for dinner with good local beer, then drank rye in our hotel room and watched bad TV.

The next morning, Wednesday, we drove to the Cedar Rapids airport, packed our bikes into a far more roomy Jeep, and headed into the city to find brunch and see The Amazing Spider-Man. Post-#RAGBRAI euphoria with @chavoen @colinpoe @bodysoulrest #jimnasty We were bored out of our skulls by that point and had abandoned the idea of staying through Thursday night for the Counting Crows show. We cut short our hotel stay and made it back home to Chicago on Thursday morning—which incidentally was Laura's birthday. We went out for sushi that night in our very own neighborhood. It was good.

And that's the story of how RAGBRAI kicked our punk asses. But, as Colin told us, there aren't a lot of people in the country who could have accomplished as much as we did in those two days of riding, especially in that heat. And boy, when our New York crew came back through Chicago that Saturday night, did they look beat up and badly handled.

I still hope to ride the full route one of these years. But next time I try, I think Laura will be the smarter one and will opt for the yoga retreat from the start.

[ to be concluded ]


Crossposted from Inhuman Swill
[ continued from yesterday ]

A clap of thunder dislodged me partially from sleep in the wee hours of the morning. Because it was such a warm night and there was no rain in the forecast, Laura and I had gone to sleep without the fly sheet over our tent, leaving the mesh open to the air. But now I could see that the fly sheet was in place. As I blinked, a flash of lightning cast someone's shadow onto the fabric of the tent. I remember thinking, "Oh, it's so nice of Colin to take care of our tent," before lapsing back into sleep.

I slept fitfully after that, as did Laura, since the tent was now stifling. At one point I realized that she had tied back the door in the fly sheet on her side of the tent so that the rain would fall on her face and help keep her at least somewhat cool. I did the same.

I was chagrined to wake up at 5:00 am (when my alarm went off) and learn that, in fact, the lightning shadow on the tent had belonged not to Colin but to Laura. Since I didn't wake up, she had installed the fly sheet all by herself, not to mention dragging our bags to shelter and snatching down the clothes we'd hung over our bikes to dry. We broke down our tent and packed all our stuff away as quietly as we could in the sleeping camp. We dragged our bags over to the support van, hopped on our bikes, and headed out.

It was Monday, July 23. Our first stop in downtown Cherokee was the one shop open on the main drag selling coffee, fruit, pastries, and granola. We tanked up on caffeine, bolted some food, stashed extra supplies in my pannier, hit the latrines, and hit the road.

The time was 6:20 am, which seemed like plenty early to help us beat the coming heat, but the sailing was anything but smooth. As we joined the streams of bikes headed for the road out of town, we realized that hundreds if not thousands of riders were all trying to get underway at once. Police had blocked off one lane of the main road and were keeping the flow of bike traffic constricted there. The crowd, stretching miles into the distance, was riding practically shoulder to shoulder, in many cases almost too slowly to stay upright. Someone riding outside the cordon was admonished by the police to stay inside the cones for his safety. "What makes you think I'm safer in there?" the rider asked.

Within a couple of miles, we turned a corner and were able to spread out across the whole width of the road, but the crowd was still pretty thick, and we had a nasty hill to climb right away. Laura lost her chain shifting gears halfway up the hill and had to make the dicey passage to safety on the shoulder. I struggled to the top of the hill where I waited for her, watching the road bikes fly by and realizing somewhat belatedly that a hybrid like mine was probably not the best choice for making this journey.

Then again, road bikes had their hazards too. It was somewhere on the back half of that first segment that I witnessed a horrific accident. At an intersection of two roads up ahead, the police were alternately blocking the bike traffic and the crossing car traffic. As we all slowed to stop, I looked directly to my left and saw a fast cyclist hit his front brake too hard. He flipped right over his handlebars, smashing his face into the pavement. His bike fell on top of him, followed an instant later by a tandem that couldn't swerve fast enough. A pileup ensued that Laura and I both, thankfully, missed being part of. (Laura was trailing a ways behind me and reported that the aftermath of the accident looked like a real mess for the people trying to pick it apart.)

Hanover's old-timey sawmill Laura and I took advantage of the gradually spreading crowd and relatively cool temperatures—high seventies to low eighties—to crank out all the miles we could. We barely paused in the first town of Aurelia, sneaking around it to avoid the thick crowds on the main thoroughfare, then spent as little time as we could grabbing more food and water in Hanover.

(Hanover, by the way, an unincorporated town with a reported population of 3, was a good example of the circus that descends on every step along the route. Vendors alone had to have swelled the population a hundred times, and maneuvering through the crowds gathered to pet a baby calf or watch an old-time sawmill in operation was a slow proposition. Oh, and my shop teacher father would have cringed at the way no one operating the sawmill, and no one gawking, wore eye protection.)

By our 8:15 am arrival in Hanover, we were nearly a third of the way through our route for day, and I was feeling very good about our prospects. 9:30 am found us entering the town of Schaller, halfway done. And by 11:00 am, when we stopped for a good long rest in the shade of a gazebo outside Nemaha, we were two-thirds of the way there. But the heat was rising, the air was thickening with humidity, and we had really begun to slow down. We rested in Nehema for probably twenty minutes before setting out again.

We were careful about drinking plenty of water and eating regularly, but even so the fifth segment of the day was tough as hell to get through. Laura called out for a stop when she saw a Gatorade sign halfway along that leg. The bottles of G2 we bought from an enterprising gentleman in the shade of an awning in the driveway of his farmhouse were just the perfect degree of ice-cold. Laura asked him how much it would cost to let her climb into his cooler for a while. "Considering that the ice cost me seventy-five dollars," he said, "I'd have to say seventy-five dollars."

By the time we limped into the town of Sac City, five-sixths of the way to the end, the mercury was well on its way toward triple digits, and we were both wrung out. Drenched in sweat, overheated, wobbly. Laura asked one of the locals where the best place to find some air-conditioning would be. The woman directed us to a nearby pharmacy. (I think the name of the place was Oasis Drugs, but that might be a heat mirage in my memory.)

We lingered there in the cold air of the drugstore, finding excuse after excuse to stick around. We browsed the aisles for small products we could buy. We took turns sitting down in the automated blood-pressure machine. We spoke with the pharmacist. We spoke with the cashier. We did everything we could to avoid going back into the heat for as long as we could.

But we had to. It was still 9.6 miles to the end of our day's route.

Immediately outside the drugstore was a long, steep hill which also happened to be the route out of town. As we limped back to our bikes, we couldn't believe what we were seeing—people still actually able to ride up that hill. I certainly couldn't. We pushed our bikes up the sidewalk to the crown of the hill, then mounted up and joined the flow.

I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that biking that final leg of our route was the hardest thing physically that I've ever done. I wasn't sore, exactly—one amazing thing about our time on RAGBRAI was that we took care of ourselves well enough that neither one of us ever experienced excessively sore muscles—but I was worn out, and the heat made ever motion three times as difficult as it should have been. No matter how much water I drank, I always seemed to need more immediately. Every time I saw a sprinkler that had been turned to spray into the road, I steered through it. Laura was told by someone with a bike thermometer that the temperature above the road surface was 114 degrees. We later heard reports that the road temperature had exceeded 120 at times. We heard reports that the thin tires on some people's road bikes had simply exploded from the heat. (Chalk one more advantage up for hybrids!) Several times we had to merge right to let ambulances pass. At one point I saw a team of EMTs at the side of the road tending to a man in a neck brace on a stretcher.

Here's the thing. The weather reports we'd seen before the trip showed temperatures in the high nineties for the first three days of RAGBRAI, maybe grazing 100 a time or two, after which temps would slowly ramp down to 89 or so by the end of the week. But this was the second straight day with high temperatures around 105 or higher, and the updated forecast now called for two more days of the same.

We took frequent breaks, though one of those breaks was mandated by Laura's chain falling off again on a tough slope. (In fact, this time the chain jammed itself tight between the derailleur and the frame, and it took me a few minutes of trying to dislodge it.) But two main thoughts kept me going through that last leg. First was the anticipation of food and beer. At the five-mile mark, we saw a huge sign for Glacier Bay Bar & Grille (and every mile thereafter). The very name promised coolness and rest, and we determined that this would be the destination we bent our paths toward the moment we reached our sleep town of Lake View.

Laura attempts a smile after a grueling day The second thought was a result of a disquieting realization I'd been grappling with throughout the day. Our current leg was 62.0 miles in length. The next day's route would be 81.2 miles, or nearly 20 miles longer. We were already pushing seven and a half hours on the road. I couldn't see a way, with weather just as hot if not hotter, for us to finish the next day's ride in anything under ten hours. Even if we managed to hit the road by 5:00 am—not by any means a certainty—we couldn't hope to finish until after 3:00 pm, and would probably finish much later. I was on the verge of collapse. Laura was on the verge of collapse. So I gave my permission to entertain what seemed, in the company we were keeping, to be a wickedly transgressive thought.

I told myself that if I could just make it to Glacier Bay, and if Laura were amenable, I would find a way to leave the ride and get us home early.

It worked.

Glacier Bay was located on the near edge of town. At 1:45 pm, we dumped our bikes and hobbled on wobbly legs into a huge wooden building that wasn't as cold as we had hoped but by God was cool enough. I bought us drink and meal tickets and staked out a table while Laura went to the bar to fetch us beers. The best option was Budweiser, but it came in those new aluminum bottles and was so cold that it could have been captured directly from the runoff of a melting beer glacier.

When our beers were half gone, I turned to Laura and said, "I have a proposition for you."

[ to be continued ]


Crossposted from Inhuman Swill
[ continued from yesterday ]

We woke up on the morning of Sunday, July 22, not nearly as rested as we had hoped to be. But at least the heat of the morning meant that our tent was already nearly dry after the night's thundershower.

Our hosts provided coffee and delicious pastries, not to mention bathrooms where we could suit up and apply our No-Ad 85 SPF, our Body Glide, our Chamois Cream, our Monkey Butt. We struck our tents, and Laura and I helped pack Team Nasty's gear into the support van that would meet us in that evening's destination town, Cherokee. Two members of our subgroup, Barbara Lynn and Jenny, hopped into the two SUVs to drive back east across Iowa to the yoga retreat where they would spend the next week. Team Nasty jersey, as worn by @chavoen #RAGBRAI #jimnasty Laura, at more than one point during our months of training, had nearly made the decision to join the yoga party and leave me to bike alone. Part of her may have regretted the decision as we mounted up on our bikes and hit the road.

Colin, veteran of two previous RAGBRAIs, had explained in advance how to expect the days on the road with Team Nasty to proceed. They were a sleep-late, stay-up-late kind of team, getting on the road after the morning rush was over, and lingering for food and beer in each of the towns along the route. "You never do eighty miles in a day," he said with authority. "You do a series of eight ten-mile rides with plenty of recovery time in between."

Still, having seen the weather report, Laura and I weren't convinced that was a strategy that was going to work for us. The rest of the team was faster cyclists than we were, and neither of us particularly relished the idea of slogging through a full afternoon of triple-digit temperatures. We had resolved to leave as early as possible each day, although between everything going on at the campsite that morning and our unfamiliarity with the routine we didn't actually get underway until 8:30 am. We did get on the road before the rest of the team, but our start time was still more than two hours later than what we'd been shooting for.

That was fine at first. It was exciting to be on the road with dozens of other cyclists around us. On our way through town, little kids would rush to the curbs and hold out their hands for a slap as we passed. Out in the countryside, farm families had set up umbrellas and chairs to cheer as they watched the riders pass. Hand-lettered signs posted along the route promised cheap breakfasts in the upcoming town, or $1 water, or Gatorade or ice cream, or roadside Slip 'N Slide stops. No hill was insurmountable. Every downslope was exhilarating.

Only in America. Or Holland. Our first town, about ten miles along the route, was Orange City, one of those Dutch towns that celebrates it's Dutch-ness with copious tulips and windmills and wooden shoes. We grabbed a quick coffee and a water refill there on the crowded streets and continued another four miles to Alton. That's where signs had promised us a $5 breakfast of all-you-can-eat pancakes and bratwursts and scrambled-egg croissants cooked by firemen. Delicious.

It was another seven miles to Granville, and I believe it was early on that stretch of road that we saw what we presumed to be our first victim of heat stroke. A whole pace line of cyclists in identical jerseys who had passed us earlier were pulled off at the side of the road. One of them was kneeling, red-face and gasping, while others poured water over his head. (It was either heat stroke or a baptism.) A few minutes farther down the road, we all moved over into the right lane as an ambulance passed us heading back in that direction. It was the first of many ambulances that day and the next.

After Granville, we hit the slow 14-mile stretch to Marcus. Most days on RAGBRAI are laid out so the route runs about ten miles between towns, but not Day 1. I started making it a practice to buy water from roadside stands every chance I got, one to go straight into my insulated bottle, one to stash in my pannier for later just in case.

Something we would see in many towns It was not quite noon when, with relief, we spotted the water tower in the distance. (We had learned that a water tower in the distance indicated we were nearing a town. That or an American flag hanging from the extended ladder of a fire engine.) We were entering the broiling portion of the day, and a couple of miles later we were rolling into Marcus, a town singularly devoid of shade. We ate corn on the cob and watermelon and rested a while. Several times already through out the day we'd been passed by the young teenaged members of Team Nasty (Laura dubbed them the Nasty Boys), who seemed to have boundless energy, but it was in Marcus that we saw our first fellow adult Nasty. We didn't stick around long to chat.

The final segment of Day 1 was the brutal 17-mile stretch to Cherokee. Shade was rare, and the temperature was now over 100 degrees—and even higher on the road surface, as some folks with bike thermometers assured us. About a mile past the last good water stop, with about nine miles left to go, I stopped at the top of a long hill to wait for Laura. Often I would get moving faster than she would on downhills, and I'd wait for her to catch up so we didn't get separated. But this time, she didn't catch up.

Growing more nervous and agitated, I waited at that turn in the route for about ten minutes. I checked my phone for text messages, but the AT&T service in rural western Iowa is ridiculously bad. One of the Nasty Boys rode past and I flagged him down. "Have you seen Laura?" I asked. He hadn't.

Finally, unsure whether she was hurt or having mechanical problems or had somehow gotten past me without my noticing, I began the dicey proposition of backtracking along our route. I went all the way back to the water stop without finding Laura, which made clear to me that she'd gotten past me without my noticing. I had no choice but to set out again.

It was maybe twenty minutes later that I found her. She was waiting for me well ahead of where I'd stopped, frantically flagging me down. "My fault, my fault!" she assured me. When I stopped at the top of the hill, she had passed me and yelled that she wasn't going to stop there, but hadn't paused to confirm that I'd seen or heard her. When I didn't catch up, she assumed I was either looking for her or was hurt. The Nasty Boys passed her at one point and let her know that, yes, I was back there hunting for her. So she waited.

All this put us quite a ways behind schedule, and the final seven miles were horribly difficult. Two miles short of Cherokee, I was so worn out from the heat that I endured the ribbing of spectators to pull over and take a ten-minute break under a clump of trees. For much of the day I'd been in the lead, but this was where Laura began to pull further ahead of me. Hell, everyone was pulling ahead of me. It was like riding through hell.

Finally I dragged myself up the last hill before town, where a long, long downhill between leafy trees awaited. As I picked up speed and raced through that final mile, my bike picked up so much speed that my pedaling couldn't keep up. It occurred to me that if I turfed at that speed, I would break something, if not everything. But with the wind in my face, it was the grandest moment of the day.

Laura and I had completed the second shortest day of the ride, grand total of 54.4 miles. And it was already 3:00 pm.

Camp We were the first ones to reach the camp site that our support drivers had found for the team. All we wanted was to get our tent pitched (which we did), to get a shower at the adjacent city pool (which we did, though it was crowded and uncomfortable), and then get some food. But that last goal proved elusive, as the rest of Team Nasty rolled in over the course of the next two or three hours. It was evening before Laura and I managed to overcome the group's inertia and assemble to posse to head into the busy town center for food.

As we sacked out in our tent later that evening, well before the rest of the group turned in, tired and sunburnt, we resolved two plans of action. First, with a 62-mile day ahead of us, we would leave before sunrise the next morning without fail. Second, we would find food and beer on our own when we arrived in the next sleep town and not wait to make it a group outing. That had turned out to be like trying to steer an oil tanker.

[ to be continued ]


Crossposted from Inhuman Swill
I know you've all been holding your breath for the past couple of weeks, waiting desperately to hear how RAGBRAI turned out for us. Herein lies a tale.

RAGBRAI, as you may recall, is a seven-day bike ride across Iowa that takes place every year at the end of July. Laura and I had been training for months, and more than once during that time we had to talk ourselves out of bagging the whole adventure and selling our bib numbers to hardier folks. But our friends who would be riding with us assured us that, despite the predictions of very hot weather, we would do fine and have a great time.

Team Nasty (in part) So it was that we were ready and waiting when those friends, having driven through the night from New York City in two SUVs, arrived at our place in Chicago on the morning of Friday, July 20. After they had rested up for a while, we loaded up our gear, strapped our bike rack to the back of the Jeep, and hit the road.

The seven of us stayed that night in three hotel rooms in Dubuque, Iowa, about three and half hours from Chicago. We had an early birthday dinner for Laura at a very fine restaurant in town, though the tenor of the evening was one more of forced hilarity and final meals than of pure celebration. A band was playing in the town square beneath the clock tower later, and we joined the party for a while before retiring.

The next morning, Saturday, July 21, we continued west. I was impatient to get started with the ride, and excited. We crossed most of Iowa in daylight, moving from U.S. highways to narrow county roads. Throughout the day we began to pass converted buses painted in bright colors ("Team Bad Monkey," "Team Love Shack") Team Love Shack with ranks upon ranks of road bikes in racks welded to the roofs. Clearly these were teams with far more commitment to RAGBRAI than we had. It was fun to honk at them and have them honk back, but I also found their very existence intimidating.

We reached Sioux Center, Iowa, the start town, in late afternoon and soon found the house where Team Nasty had arranged to spend its first night. Team Nasty is a group of about two dozen cyclists mainly from the DC and NYC areas who've done RAGBRAI together a few times before, and that's the team our little subgroup was part of. The house belonged to relatives of one of the team members, and we all pitched our tents in the back yard.

Shelter We rode our bikes into town to get some food and beer—not as easy as it might sound, given that the small town had swelled with 10,000 riders and their support teams—and to wander around the RAGBRAI expo. Then, full of that Iowa specialty, the giant breaded pork tenderloin sandwich, and corn on the cob, we headed back to our tents.

The forecast promised nothing but hot weather for the next several days, but that didn't prevent all of us from being awakened by thunder in the middle of the night. Our back yard campsite turned into a surreal scene of silent zombies lurching around dragging their gear into the shelter of tents and porches before the downpour began.

Welcome to RAGBRAI.

[ to be continued ]


Crossposted from Inhuman Swill
I'm not sure when or why we first started thinking it was a good idea. Probably nearly a year ago, when we were visiting our friend Colin and the ride seemed fun and impossibly far off in time.

I'm talking about RAGBRAI—the [Des Moines] Register's Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa. Yes, across Iowa. Four hundred seventy-one miles across Iowa, to be exact. In seven days.

Laura and I have been training for this since April, though not quite as successfully as I had hoped. The RAGBRAI training schedule suggests logging 1,500 miles in the run-up to the ride. My personal goal was 1,000 miles. I've made 756.

I've vacilated between euphoria, terror, anxiety, and zen acceptance over the past four months of training. I felt great when Laura and I completed a 70-mile training ride at the end of May. I felt horrible when I bonked last week at mile 66 of a 75-mile training ride. (Laura did fine that day.)

Now I have some trepidation, but mostly I feel a passive acceptance of the fact that we're on a conveyor belt that will take us to the start line in Sioux Center, Iowa, and there's nothing we can do about it. Everything will be fine.

Our teammates from NYC are here, and we're loading up the cars and bikes. From Sunday through Saturday, we'll be riding an average of 67 miles a day, and camping out in tents at night. I'll try to check in once a day.

Wish us luck.

The RAGBRAI crew tanks up in Chicago before hitting the road


Crossposted from Inhuman Swill
milepost 0

a bike towing a dog with its hindquarters on a cart

a totem pole

a line of hand-holding kindergartners being urged by their teacher in French to move quickly across the path

statues of chesspieces

volleyball players ripening like wheat in the sun

a golden retriever running full-tilt to the edge of the lakewall and leaping far out over the water

so many drinking fountains, but never when I want one

a red-winged blackbird blocking my access to its drinking fountain until I'm standing right there

a cellphone-talking hipster's Smart Water bottle and Starbucks coffee cup blocking my access to a drinking fountain until I'm standing right there

a sexy blonde runner next to me at the multi-spigot fountain moaning so loudly between slurps that I have to put it out of my mind and ride away thirsty

Navy Pier

an gray-haired man on a bike who knocks a younger cyclist into some tourists on that crowded bridge over the Chicago River and doesn't stop to apologize

the Field Museum

the Shedd Aquarium

the Adler Planetarium

a flying saucer parked atop Roman ruins, or rather Soldier Field

a guy who looks just like Starburns from "Community," down to the top hat, but with normal sideburns

an Orthodox woman walking with conviction in the 90-degree heat

geese that never flinch no matter how closely I pass them

a beached yacht rocking on the shore, emergency trucks all around

a Chicago Police boat searching the water

a man walking backward up a hill

a hundred feet of the pathway ahead covered in drifted sand

the Museum of Science and Industry

a broken fountain spraying water thirty feet

the turnaround at milepost 18

the same man an hour later, still walking backward

the Chicago skyline like a tiny sapphire city

my wife, her mouth stained orange from an impulsive snow cone




Crossposted from Inhuman Swill
A couple of weird things happened yesterday. The first came relatively early, as Ella and I were out on our Sunday morning walk. Laura and I usually walk Ella together on Sunday mornings, but Laura had a cough and a fever so I was walking Ella alone. We try to walk her for a couple of hours on weekend mornings, to wear her out for the rest of the day. I took Ella on a long loop to the Lake Michigan shore (about a mile and a half from our house) to run around on the sand, then to a big adjacent park to chase squirrels.

At the doggie zoo We were on our way back home after nearly two hours out when Ella communicated to me that she would like to explore the alley we were passing. She did this by stopping at the mouth of the alley and looking down it pointedly. At this stage in our walks, I'm usually eager to get home so my custom is to tell her no and make her keep walking. But we had plenty of time that morning and I'd made her leave the park before she was quite ready, so I relented.

Ella spent a lot of time sniffing around a group of black plastic trash bins in the alley before she'd let me move on. Her fascination with squirrels is rivaled only by her fascination with rats, so I kept a close eye on her. We continued through the alley and then back up the next block where a squirrel with a peanut in its mouth taunted us from a tree behind a fence. Soon we were back on our original route home, but Ella tugged me into the next alley we passed. She made a beeline for another group of black plastic bins and darted into a gap between them.

I saw a little shadow with a naked tail flash through the gap. Ella struck, and when she drew her head back a rat the size of my fist was wriggling in her jaws.

Several things happened very fast all at once, or in such rapid succession that I couldn't tell any differently. I let out a low, loud, gutteral yawp of surprise and fear. The rat let out a squeaky shriek. Ella released the rat. The rat flew through the air, flailing all its limbs, and scurried away behind the bins.

I dropped to my knees to check that Ella was okay, that she hadn't been bitten. (Of course she hadn't—she would have yelped, I'm sure.) She was fine, if you ignored the look of utter disappointment and contempt she leveled at me. Ella has been chasing squirrels and rats and rabbits and even the occasional opossum or raccoon for all of her eight and a half years. This was the first time she had ever caught one.

And I yelled like a scared puppy and made her drop it. "Oh, Nice Bill," she seemed to say with the contemptuous expression she turned upon me. "Are you ever on my whatever-smells-so-bad-even-I-won't-go-near-it list now."

I swear to God, she pouted all the way home.

The other unsettling thing yesterday was something I saw while I was out biking. Laura and I are training for one of the crazier things we've ever attempted—RAGBRAI, a 7-day, 470-mile bike ride across Iowa this July. I'll post more about that another time, but suffice it to say that I've been doing my best to adhere to the recommended training schedule with increasingly long rides along the Chicago Lakefront Trail. Yesterday I was supposed to ride 25 miles, but since I'll be working in California for the next several days, I decided to push it to 36 miles instead, my longest day yet this year by far.

That was fine, but as I was rolling south on the outbound leg of my trek I saw a police SUV parked on the grass between Lake Shore Drive and the bike trail. Off to my left, a small yacht was beached in the choppy surf, rocking back and forth. Down the slope, a police officer was talking to two men who looked, at least from a distance, to be in shock.

I passed the scene, then pulled over and watched the yacht rock for a minute or two, waiting to see if anything else interesting would happen. I figured that two unlucky or foolhardy boaters had tried to get a little too close to shore and had run aground. I shot a brief video and continued on my way.



I reached a good turnaround spot a couple of miles later, at the 63rd Street Beach. We live way up on the North Side, and I had come 18.5 miles from home. Definitely time to go back. (Especially since my phone battery died while I was taking pictures there, and I wouldn't be able to text Laura for the rest of the ride to keep her apprised of my whereabouts.)

So I headed back north, into the wind (sob!). As I approached the site of the boating accident, I saw a Chicago Police boat not far offshore. Two officers in lifejackets were making their way like commandos toward the prow of the boat. The first one there picked up some kind of long boat hook and readied it over the water. I couldn't see anything in the water. Apparently they couldn't either, but this made me worry that someone had been lost overboard in the accident.

Virgin America - I feel like I'm taking off ... for the future! There were at least three police vehicles parked near the boat as I passed. I didn't stop this time, and I have no idea what happened before or after I happened on the scene. I haven't found any news reports about a boating accident. I suppose I might find something in the police blotter if I knew where to check on Everyblock.com. I keep thinking about that boat, though.

Anyway, I made my 37-mile round trip in about three hours. I'm a little stiff this morning as I sit composing this on my Virgin America flight to Los Angeles. More on this trip later.


Crossposted from Inhuman Swill
Writing
Is a lot like
Riding a bicycle

Not because it's so easy
To get back up on

But because
Sometimes
You're
Flying along
And you go farther
Than you intended to go

And you have to
Turn around and take
Yourself home

And it's all uphill
And the wind is in
Your face


Crossposted from Inhuman Swill
Biking on Bryn Mawr Avenue,
clear sky, afternoon sun,
I pull over to the curb
for the ambulance
hurtling my way.

But it turns on Clark,
and as I pass through
the intersection I see
the gapers gathered,
the body in the street,
face down, lying twisted
like a crash-test dummy.

I have to look.
But I can't look.
I make myself not look,
face forward into traffic,
lest I become the thing
I gaze upon.


Crossposted from Inhuman Swill
Spotted in Chicago, and photographed by Laura's iPhone, at the corner of Diversey Parkway, Racine Avenue, and Lincoln Avenue:

Chicago doesn't fuck around with bike safety!

And then, for good measure, they break your kneecaps.

April 2014

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