shunn | Entries tagged with endurance

[ 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.)

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.

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.

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.

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'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.