I Ride 300 Miles on a Bicycle in 24 Hours
(I Meet Myself In Person)
When I was 32 years old … a long, long time ago … I was a
member of a bicycle racing team. Kind of
a racing team, we did race (each
other mostly) and we did have a team name (which I have forgotten – some French
water bottling company). I was the
oldest guy on the team by about five years.
We had been racing (each other – did I say that already) for
about two years and one of us got the bright idea to ride a triple century. A Century Ride on a bicycle is a
hundred miles, in one go, all at once, on the same day. If you’re in good shape and experienced, this
can take, give or take, six hours.
Depends on the terrain and wind, among other factors.
As a team we had already done a goodly dozen century rides (races). So a hundred miles in the saddle at one go
was not a big deal to us, at that time.
We were very young – we were passionate about bicycles and riding them. What can I say.
This was when I was living in Arizona, right in the middle
of the Phoenix Valley. Now the Phoenix
Valley is huge, maybe as large as the state of Rhode Island. However, the valley is surrounded by
mountains – really big mountains. Some
of them very steep mountains. Grades of
seven to ten per cent grades (which is
actually very steep for a road) and they can go on for miles.
Now on this day, on this triple
century ride (300 miles) we gave ourselves 24 hours to complete it or we
were getting into support van (known
as the sag wagon – because when you
are racing bicycles and you carp out … maybe, you sag? Get all saggy??)
This ride included climbing uphill
to the Kitt Peak National
Observatory. Which is located on the Tohono O'odham Nation Reservation and just happens to be 8,675
feet above sea level. And this is … oh,
a good 7500 feet above the Phoenix Valley floor.
This is all part of the
Mojave Desert, which on the east side, appears
to be flat – very flat – part of this natural wonder. You wouldn’t think there would be this much
of a huge difference in elevation as
you stand anywhere within the hundreds of miles surrounding Kitt Peak. Doesn’t look like any kind of a mountain, or Peak.
It looks flat as a table.
As you leave Tucson going
towards the observatory the climb begins.
Twenty-two miles of it. A deadly
slow, soul grinding climb that doesn’t even give the bicycle rider any sense of
accomplishment. I have ridden in
Colorado and the steep mountains of New England. On mountainy mountains, even though it
really hurts, burns the thigh muscles and cramps your back into a horseshoe
over the bike, you can see the
grade. You can see you are on a mountain climb and it gives you that sense of accomplishment,
which keeps you pushing with all you have on the pedals.
Melt it all down and this
is what is happening with this little jaunt on two wheels: you leave Phoenix
and for about 200 miles you physically drain your body totally against a
mountain you can’t see. Lord help you if
you also run into a head wind. Then …
and then when you crest the peak, you
can’t even see that you are cresting
the bloody thing!
One of my teammates
encapsulated the experience, “You know you are grinding in your lowest gear
when somebody is walking alongside
you and they are passing you!” Now that’s discouraging.
We did make it, however,
and began the descent. What would seem
to be enough of a daring feat, that is riding a bicycle for two hundred miles
up a mountain, is not enough though, on this task. This incredibly naïve challenge we had set
for ourselves. Oh NO! Now we had another
100 miles to ride after that climb.
We had figured it be a 100
miles downhill though. We hadn’t seen
the mountain going up and now we
couldn’t see anything vaguely resembling a downhill. It looked just the f---ing same – flat! A gain of 7500 feet in altitude and other
than being really shortwinded – nothing!
WTF!
And that was when we did
run into a headwind! So, this was a
desert, in that there were no trees, nothing at all to break the wind, just wide open spaces of nothing.
Nothing that is, but a
strong wind right in the face.
Here is the cast of
characters. Me, short, skinny (at that
time) and the oldest (as I said). There
was my best friend, let’s call him Mike, who was very tall and even skinnier
than me and a full on type 1 diabetic.
Then there was Joe. Joe had a
definite beer belly because Joe definitely drank wa-a-ay too much beer. Even so
he was an incredibly strong rider. Then
we had Benny, barrel chested with chicken legs.
Strange physique for a bike rider.
Those lungs gave Benny a huge edge on the mountain climbs even if his
legs didn’t look like they could keep up. And there was Josh, the youngest, who
was still in college and was a varsity gymnast.
Even shorter than me, Josh was … like … 100 per cent muscle. Small, but possibly the strongest rider on
the team.
And Officer John. John was a cop (Police Officer) and even
though not the strongest rider, it’s always handy to have a cop along on any
kind of dumb thing like this. Big Ken was the giant on the team. A good six six and so strong he had actually
broken the pedal cranks off bikes.
However, on a bicycle, being big tends to mean weight and the more weight
you have to push against the wind and up-grades the mathematical math starts to
reverse the advantage you might have in other sports – like the shot put. But if you wanted to get out of a headwind
for a few miles, Ken was the guy you wanted to get behind.
The only reason to know the
team members is that once we did get to the top of Kitt Peak, the team began to
break up into groups. And you need to
understand that after a 200 mile mountain climb it is the brain that makes the greatest difference. We had stayed together on the climb. We had set out in the late morning planning
to be on the climb in the dark. Figuring
that riding at what we had hoped would be lightening speeds on the downhill, we
wanted to have daylight. Just safer that
way, we had thought.
End of part ONE …
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Dale Clarence Peterson © 2014
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