Orny's Cycling Journal

This spring hasn’t offered any warm days, at least not at the coast, where a very chilly sea breeze kicks up any time the temperature threatens to break out of the low 50s. So when Tuesday looked to be the only favorable day all month, I took a PTO to do my first century of the year.

The timing was doubly important because next weekend is forecast to be rainy, and I usually try to get one century under my belt in early May. The weekend after that I will be out of town, and the following weekend is the Tour d’Essex County, my first organized century of the year. So it was pretty much now or never.

I also wanted to see how the new bike felt on its first hundred-mile ride. Overall, I felt really comfortable on the bike and it performed quite well. With that acid test under my belt, I think I can safely say that I’m quite happy with my purchase, although there’ll be a more specific review forthcoming.

For a route, I chose to solo the ride out to Littleton, then down through Harvard, Hudson, Sudbury, and back (GPS log). The last time I rode this route was an attempt at a solo century last June, when I was dropped by my buddies and struggled mightily in the summer heat just to get home (GPS log). On that ride, I returned to Boston with 95 miles, but was completely unable to undertake another five miles to complete the century.

This year I took it easy and stayed within my pace. Although my average speed was below 16 mph, in many ways I still made better time than I did on that 2012 ride, and I was also able to ride the first 45 miles without a single rest stop. However, my strength was definitely flagging in the last quarter of the ride. Of course, one’s first century of the year usually is all about the pain.

The weather wound up being near perfect, starting in the high 50s in Boston, but climbing into the 70s and 80s the further I got from the coast. While a strong sea breeze did kick up in my face on the return leg, at least the temperature stayed in a pleasant range.

So it was a really nice ride, and at least the first 50-60 miles was pretty relaxed and comfortable. Those last 30 miles, though, made me very glad to have my first century of the year behind me!

And now I can take a couple rainy days to recuperate, while knowing that I should have little to no problem completing the Tour d’Essex County at the end of the month.

For cyclists, spring is the time to put in some base miles to get your fitness and stamina back up. It’s a time when your riding ramps up from pretty much zero, increasing to what might be 100 to 200 miles per week.

Of course, on April First you can’t just jump on the bike and ride 200 miles. It’d be a recipe for injury, since your body isn’t ready for that. Instead, you need to increase your workouts gradually. The rule of thumb for both runners and cyclists is to increase your mileage by no more than 10 percent per week.

I’ll come back to that in a sec. Now let’s switch gears.

I’ve always been discouraged by how quickly one loses fitness. Stop weightlifting for two weeks, and your body reverts to its old sedentary self. Stop cycling for a month, and your performance and stamina drop like a stone.

But that’s not the whole story. I’ve been cycling for 13 years now, and each year my body has grown more and more used to riding long distances. While ramping up is still an arduous, painful process, I begin each year with a little more of a head start, at least in terms of my ability to do long miles.

Let me show you what I mean.

2013 has been a very haphazard spring for riding. If I told you how many miles I rode each week (starting in March), it would look like this:

0

22

39

54

64

26

20

192

For the first four weeks, that looked like a fairly okay progression, with mileage increases of 77%, 38%, and 18% (adding about 20 miles per week).

But look what happened next: two really lax weeks, followed by a sudden jump to nearly 200 miles. That’s 300% more than my biggest week this year, and 740% more than either of the previous two weeks! And the best part is that I don’t feel particularly crippled afterward.

So much for the Ten Percent Rule I was telling you about!

But one year doesn’t prove anything. Looking back, last year (2012) was even stranger. With only one 16-mile ride under my belt, my second ride was 57 miles. Coupled with two commutes, the progression went:

0

16

102

which translates to an instant 638% increase in mileage in week two!

Next let’s look at 2011. After a couple 20-30 mile weeks, I basically took a month off and then jumped into a 63-mile ride:

8

27

22

0

0

0

74

Oof. That’s a 336% increase, following a month of not riding at all!

Was 2010 any better? Nope. First ride of the year: 70 miles, with no ramp-up whatsoever. Zero to 70? What percentage increase is that? I’ll tell you: that’s an *infinite* increase in mileage, baby!

Obviously, I couldn’t have done anything like this when I first started cycling, but after years of riding, my body expects—and has adapted to be able to handle—big miles, even after an off-season of complete idleness.

Although that’s not the whole truth. Back in 2009 I bought an indoor trainer from a friend and started working out on that each January and February. Of course, I never did a lot of miles on the trainer, but it’s likely that my indoor workouts made it a little easier to pull big miles once the weather permitted my transition to outdoor riding.

But if you ask me, the Ten Percent Rule is probably a good idea for new cyclists, but it’s not the law. Winter training and the body’s ability to adapt year after year render an experienced cyclist immune to the rules that govern the feeble efforts of mere pedestrians!

Unfortunately, while I might have built up massive reserves of endurance, I’ve never developed the other two main factors in overall cycling performance: speed and power. So I can’t sprint and I can’t climb very quickly, but I can ride at a pretty brisk pace for millenia.

And so it goes…

Last fall, when I kicked off my search for a new bike, it was clear what I wanted: something just like my old bike, but better. The “Plastic Bullet”—a 2006 Specialized Roubaix Expert—had served me very well over the years, and I had nothing to complain about, save that it was showing the signs of age. Because of that, the new version of the Roubaix was at the top of my list when I started thinking about a new bike.

However, a lot has changed since 2006. There are a lot more bikes out there, and I didn’t want to stick with the Roubaix if there was something better to be had. So I decided to shop around and ride a bunch of bikes, exploring new technologies like disc brakes, electronic shifting, SRAM shifters, and so forth.

I tried everything out and enjoyed the process. I test-rode eight bikes, with a collective price tag of $32,300. I learned that I hate disc brakes, SRAM shifters, FSA components, integrated seatposts, and pretty much all bikes manufactured by Trek. On the other hand, I really liked Shimano’s electronic shifting, the Cervelo R5, and Giant Defy Advanced.

But above all, I learned that the Roubaix still seems to be the best all-around bike for me. It fits me and my style of riding well, does a great job absorbing road vibration, and strikes a good balance between ride-all-day comfort and ride-all-out performance.

To make a final decision, I had my LBS bring in a Roubaix that was nearly identical to the one I was looking at. After test riding it, I went home pretty well convinced that I’d be buying the exact same damned bike I bought back in 2006: a Specialized Roubaix Expert. I’d still have to special-order it though, because dealers simply don’t stock bikes my size.

An hour after that test ride, I received an email from the shop, indicating that the following week Specialized would be offering a manufacturer’s discount on that bike: a 20 percent price cut, or a $1,000 savings! Needless to say, I jumped at that. A long two weeks later, I took delivery.

So how is the new bike different from the Plastic Bullet? Aside from being newer, there are really only two significant ways.

One is the Shimano Di2 electronic shifting. I’m pretty excited about that, but I don’t need to say too much about it here, having already written about it in one of my test ride roundups back in September.

The other is that while both bikes are primarily clear-coat over carbon fiber, the new bike has red and white highlights (ironically, those are my high school colors), rather than blue and silver. So the blue tires are gone, and I’ll have some extra work coordinating accessories to match the new color scheme!

Which brings me to the real question: what to name it! This is also a little two-part story.

First, it’s my second Roubaix. To honor that, let’s call it Roubaix-2, or just “R2”.

Second, its most interesting feature is the electronic shifting: Shimano’s “Digital Integrated Intelligence” or Di2.

Put those together and you get the new bike’s moniker. Allow me to introduce you to R2-Di2! The reference to the iconic Star Wars robot is intentional, and appropriate for a bike with electronic shifting. It even makes cool robot noises as the servos shift the derailleurs to change gears!

Having only received it Tuesday, I haven’t got much to say about its riding characteristics just yet. I’ve still got to get it properly fitted and add a bunch of accessories to it before I share any pictures. So it’ll be a few weeks before I have a lot to share, but be patient; those’ll all come in due time.

Of course, saying hello to R2 means saying goodbye to “R1”: the Plastic Bullet. After seven years and 22,000 miles—including seven Pan-Pass Challenges and dozens of century rides—we’ve unrolled an awful lot of road together. It’ll still see the tarmac from time to time—on rainy days or city errands where I don’t want to break out the new bike.

But as of today, she’s second saddle. It’s time to start making a new history of travel adventures with the R2. Stay tuned!

Yes, Virginia, Lance Armstrong doped.

Beyond that egregious violation of sporting ethics, Lance Armstrong also ruthlessly strongarmed teammates to cover up his systematic criminal activity. He attempted to bribe both international and US anti-doping officials to cover up his cheating. He repeatedly and shamelessly lied under oath, then venomously lambasted—if not outright sued and tried to destroy—anyone who dared question his selfrighteous integrity.

These are facts.

Lance Armstrong is a thief, a liar, a cheat, and an amoral fraud, and he has been that way for his entire professional life.

Quelle surprise.

Why in the world is this still news to anyone, and why does anyone care? He is completely irrelevant to me as a cyclist, and he continues to be a huge and unavoidable liability to those of us working to raise money to eradicate cancer.

Can we please stop giving this walking foreskin a spotlight and the international publicity platform he craves and so undeservedly profits from?

Among the bikes I test rode a while back was the Volagi Liscio, which despite having a cool name wound up being very disappointing. But the main thing that differentiated it from the other bikes I’ve looked at is that it had disc brakes.

Disc brakes have been standard on mountain bikes for a while, but the technology never made the leap to speed-oriented road bikes. One obvious reason for that was a big weight penalty. However, several manufacturers have come out with new versions that could conceivably work on a road bike without weighing it down to a crawl.

In fact, some industry pundits have proclaimed that it’s only a question of time before disc brakes completely replace rim caliper brakes as standard equipment on all road bikes. For advantages, they claim that disc brakes offer better performance in wet conditions, and modulate better—that is, they aren’t as suddenly “grabby”—as rim brakes.

For those reasons, I was anxious to test ride a road bike equipped with disc brakes. What I experienced caused me to swear off disc brakes forever.

Now, I can’t attest to wet-weather performance, since I didn’t ride in the rain. Whatever! It’s not an issue for me, because I try to avoid riding in the rain… especially on my primary road bike!

As far as weight goes, it’s difficult to judge. The Liscio was heavier and more sluggish than other bikes I’ve tested, but I couldn’t pinpoint whether that was due to the extra weight of the brakes or in combination with other factors. Certainly, though, there’s some penalty for that excess weight.

As far as modulation goes, I’d put it like this. If I were to rate stopping power in terms of percentage points, rim brakes have about four settings: 40% stop, 65% stop, 90% stop, and emergency over-the-bars 100% stop. Not a lot of modulation between settings, but great stopping power.

I didn’t really notice much more modulation in the disc brakes. After all, how many different levels of braking power can you perceive? But the kicker was that after all that talk of “better performance”, when I grabbed the brake in an emergency stop, the disc brake simply couldn’t stop the bike. In terms of percentages, it felt to me like the disc brakes offered the following levels: 20% stop, 30%, 40%, 50%, 60%. And that’s where it topped out: at their best, disc brakes only offered 60% of the stopping power of regular rim brakes.

So the choice here seems to be this: you can have lightweight brakes that work great everywhere except in the rain, or you can lug around heavy brakes that are very predictably only 60% effective in all conditions. That doesn’t sound like a formula for universal acceptance to me!

So disc brakes get two thumbs down from this rider. Cycling is dangerous enough as it is, and I can’t imagine why anyone would buy a road bike with brakes that don’t work.

My 2011-2012 cycling season has come to a close, and it’s time to look back and reflect on the year gone by and think about what next year holds.

This year I rode 3,000 miles, which is exactly the same distance I rode in the previous year. On the other hand, that’s a little below my usual average, thanks in large part to spending my weekdays working for a living. I also fell just 500 miles short of surpassing 40,000 miles since I took cycling up again back in 2000, but that’s a milestone that will fall soon enough. (charts)

In 2012 I only did five centuries (Tour d’Essex, Outriders, Mt. Washington, PMC, and Maine Lighthouse Ride), and fell just five miles short of a sixth when I overheated and opted not to finish a solo ride in June. That too is below my usual pace of seven or eight rides of a hundred miles or more.

On the other hand, I went into this year with an intention to enjoy myself more by doing some new and different rides, and in that respect I really succeeded. In addition to the aforementioned Tour d’Essex, Mount Washington Century, and Maine Lighthouse Rides, I also did my first ride with the Kennebec Valley Bike Club, and fulfilled a longtime dream in going to California to do the Buddhist Bicycle Pilgrimage. (If you’re interested in the BBP ride report, you’ll find it here, in my regular blog.) And I have to say that I really enjoyed every one of those five new routes, so the experiment was an unalloyed success.

And I can’t say I missed the two familiar rides that they displaced: the Climb to the Clouds and the Flattest Century. Overall, I enjoyed the new rides, and felt it really added a lot more interest to my riding. My only regret is that my riding buddies weren’t able to join me on several of those rides, and it’s not quite as fun when you’re riding alone.

I did, however, get to ride with my buddy Jay during this year’s Pan-Mass Challenge, which was our last ride together before he moved to Florida. That made this year’s PMC extra special. And I raised over $11,000 this year for cancer research, treatment, and prevention at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, which puts me in good shape to reach my lifetime goal of $100,000 in 2014.

So while 2012 didn’t feature huge miles or dramatic turns of events, it was both interesting, fun, and very satisfying.

This was also probably the last season for the Plastic Bullet, the Specialized Roubaix that has been my primary ride for the past seven years. Ironically, after sitting idle for a week while I was in San Francisco, the lower set of headset bearings rusted solid, freezing my steering and requiring a trip to the bike shop to have the entire headset replaced. It’s just another instance of the old girl showing her age.

Which brings me around to my predictions for the upcoming 2012-2013 season.

I’ve begun the process of test riding new bikes, but there’s still a lot more evaluation to do before I pull the trigger, and unless the weather improves, that may not happen until spring. I am taking the time to ride just about everything I can put my hands on, so you can expect to read more about that in the future.

As I mentioned above, I should crack the 40,000-mile barrier shortly, too. That’s quite an achievement, I think.

I definitely expect to return to some of the new rides I did this year. Those were fun, and hopefully I can convince my buddies to tag along.

But that’s going to be the big question for next year; Jay was really the social center of our group, and now that he’s gone I’m not sure our riding group will survive. My other two buddies, Paul and Noah, are both married and living in the distant Metrowest suburbs, and neither of them ride the PMC anymore, so we may not synch up very often.

That could be a problem for me, because it may be hard for me to find transportation to most of the major rides in the area. So even if I have the desire to ride, next year might look a little bit different than recent years, when there was usually someone to beg a ride from.

But we’ll see. For now I’m content to use the remaining fall weekends to test ride potential new bikes, which is a luxury unto itself. Then next spring I’ll hopefully be ready to hit the road with renewed enthusiasm and a zippy new machine.

That should make 2013 another interesting cycling season. I’m looking forward to it!

Not really. But over the past couple years, a strange thing has happened: people have come up to me and introduced themselves while saying that they read my cycling blog.

In both the 2011 and 2012 Pan-Mass Challenge rides, a fellow rider looked over at my name tag and announced that he’d read my stuff.

Then last week I was boarding a flight from San Francisco to Boston, and one of the passengers looked at my PMC backpack (which also has an old name tag) and said the same thing: that he read my stuff. Given that I was in San Francisco, that really took me by surprise.

I suppose it’s not surprising that other PMC riders would come across my blog. I’ve posted a dozen long ride reports, lots of photos, and several videos, and I maintain a page full of hints and tips for new riders. I’ve probably got more PMC-related content on the web than anyone.

But if I read someone’s blog, I usually don’t remember their name or keep an eye out in case I run across them on the street. It’s kind of humbling that anyone would wade through my voluminous ramblings and still think enough of it to remember my name… and say hello!

Mind you, it’s flattering; but it’s really unexpected. I usually write mostly for myself, but if anyone has a better cycling experience as a result of my observations, then I’m very happy to have helped.

So if you’re one of those strangers whose curiosity brought you here, I’d like to take a second to say thank-you; I’m delighted to share this road with you. And if there’s anything you’ve particularly enjoyed or want to hear more of, don’t hesitate to comment.

Thank you for reading!

Maine Line

Two weeks ago, I brought my bike up to Maine and did a short ride with the Kennebec Valley Bike Club. I rode out Route 202 to East Winthrop and met up with eight others and set out on a 30-mile trip around Cobbossee Pond.

The group were mainly fifty-ish, so the pace was pretty relaxed. It was also a mixed group of masters racers, recreational riders, and commuters, so the group didn’t even pretend to hang together. The disorganization was made worse by a ride leader who assumed people knew the route, and who left everyone behind in her hurry to finish the ride and get to something else she’d planned for that afternoon.

The morning was misty and clammy, and a line of showers came through briefly and wet the roads down before the clouds broke up. The route began pretty hilly, but leveled out after a while, and I was pleased when we passed through the beautiful little village between Woodbury and Sand Ponds and stopped at the general store in South Monmouth, the turnaround point.

The group was friendly enough, and I spent a fair amount of time talking with the ride leader, since as the fastest rider of the group she was closest to my pace. I pretty much confirmed my belief that beyond Portland, Maine’s pretty much a cycling wasteland. It’s a shame, because the area would be wonderful, except there are no bike shops, and it takes a few solid LBS’ to establish a local bike culture.

The KVBC group were good enough to ride with, although this ride was pretty short and pretty relaxed: good for end-of-season tooling around, but not much for serious training. Still, as the only thing going, I might visit them again next spring, if circumstances allow.

Das Hub

There’s not a whole lot to say about this year’s 50-mile Hub on Wheels ride. A line of showers came through overnight, so it was a little moist at the start, as well as in protected areas like within the Stony Brook Reservation. But the sun was out by the time we took off, and temperatures ranged in the 60s, so it was about as good weather as I’ve ever had for this ride.

Overall it was pretty satisfying, and the best part was that I got 50 miles in and was back home before 11am!

The only disappointment is that none of my riding friends have ever done this ride. I think they’d be surprised, both at how challenging and how scenic it can be.

Now it’s time to pack up for a weekend of mid-90s-degrees riding in Sonoma. The ride report for that will appear in a larger post about the trip in my regular blog, but I’ll be back here again shortly to talk about the end of my 2011-2012 season and a look forward to 2013.

It’s been a couple weeks, but I figured I should capture some notes from my first weekend of shopping for a new bike and doing test rides. Maybe this will be useful to you, maybe not.

On the process:

As the buyer, you’re in the driver’s seat. Take your time and check out everything the marketplace has to offer. Put the new innovations to the test. Ride a lot of bikes from all over the spectrum—even stuff you have no intention of buying—and have fun doing it. There’s a lot of good bikes on the market and it can be hard to choose between them, but in the end, something will speak to you.

The one thing to be careful about on test rides: remember that you’re evaluating the bike, not the fit or the gearing or the saddle or the derailleur adjustment or the wheels, because all those things can (and will) be changed. So what’s left? A little of this and that: road feel, frame fit and finish, handlebars and stem, weight…

On the SRAM gruppo:

SRAM wasn’t a player when I bought my last bike, and everyone crows about how great their gruppo is, so one of my first goals was to put it to the test.

What I found didn’t impress me. Their stuff’s light, but I think it’s poorly designed. My main complaints revolve around how their shift levers work: push halfway and you shift into a harder gear; push further and you shift into an easier gear; push farther still and you shift into a second or even a third easier gear. Great idea, right?

Wrong. First, when I jumped multiple gears I found it hard to calibrate whether I was downshifting two or three cogs. That can be annoying when you’re searching for just the right gear ratio.

Much worse things happen if you are on a steep ascent and go to downshift but only manage half a throw, which actually causes you to upshift into a harder gear! And if you already happen to be in the largest cog (easiest gear) and try to downshiftpast that, SRAM only blocks the far throw of the lever; it’s perfectly happy to accept half a throw, which again causes you to upshift: exactly the opposite of what the user intended. And that’s my definition of “bad design”.

Another thing I’m used to doing with my Shimano setup is shifting both front and rear simultaneously. By upshifting one while downshifting the other, I am able to make a smaller jump between gear ratios than if I just shifted the front chainring. On Shimano it’s easy, because you can throw matching levers; but on SRAM, it’s confusing, because you have to remember throw one lever halfway and the other one all the way.

So even though a lot of people juice over SRAM’s gruppo, I found a lot to dislike about it. Combine that with SRAM brakes’ weaker stopping power, and I’ve pretty much ruled them out right from the start.

On Shimano’s Ultegra electronic gruppo:

Another thing I wanted to try out was Shimano’s brand-new enthusiast-level electronic shifting. I’m not a huge fan of technology for its own sake, especially when you have to pay a big premium for it. On the other hand, a lot of people have been pleasantly surprised by the electronic Dura-Ace components, so I figured I’d ride these for myself, even if I was unlikely to spend money to have battery-powered servos to do my shifting for me.

The bottom line is that it’s just as slick as promised. The shifting was quick, smooth, effortless, and intuitive. It was nice… but I had expected it to be nice.

What I hadn’t expected were some of the implications. Because the electronic shifter cable isn’t under tension like mechanical cables, there’s no risk of a shifter cable ever snapping, which has happened to me two or three times on long rides. And since it’s not under tension, a new shifter cable doesn’t stretch, so there’s no need to go back to the bike shop to have derailleur adjustments done after a tune-up.

Not that you’d ever have to anyways, because the electronic shifters automatically adjust to keep the chain centered on the cogs. That means you’ll never have chainskip or balky shifts or need any adjustment of your drivetrain. Even if you do the most ridiculous crosschaining, the system adjusts the derailleurs and chainline to avoid the loud complaints that a mechanical setup would experience.

In other words, you wind up with a completely reliable, nearly foolproof, and maintenance-free drivetrain that you don’t have to think about at all. That has nearly sold me on Shimano’s Ui-2 gruppo.

The only things holding me back? It’s heavier than a mechanical gruppo. It’s a hell of a lot more expensive. And I have questions about its vulnerability in a crash scenario.

Definitely worth looking into if you’re in the market.

On Trek’s Domaine:

Another thing I wanted to try was the Trek Domaine. Trek is known for making Lance Armstrong’s bikes, but this brand new model is their first foray into the endurance bike market, which expects a fast bike with a longer wheelbase and more upright riding position.

Now, I’m biased against Trek. I’m usually not a fan of the favorite, whether it’s Lance Armstrong or Trek as the 300-pound gorilla in the mass-production bike market. But I wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt and ride this bike, since it ought to be a worthy entry into a fairly specific market.

It was also hard to get over Trek’s strident enforcement of how the name should be pronounced: doh-MAH-knee. As a designer, if you have to browbeat the user on something as basic as what your product is called, you’re probably doing it wrong.

I actually rode two Trek bikes—the other a Madone—and on both of them the chainstays flared out so wide that I found my heel kicking them on every pedal revolution. Both bikes were surprisingly heavy, too. The Doh-MAH-knee, despite being a comfort bike, did nothing to smooth the ride over rough pavement; it transmitted every shock, bump, and vibration from the road straight into the rider’s body.

I rode the Doh-mah-knee in the hopes that this new model would show me something that would overcome my natural aversion to Trek as a household name. While their bikes were okay, there was nothing outstanding about them that would lead me to choose them over more established and better performing endurance bikes.

The only thing that almost impressed me was Trek’s “Project One”, which basically allows you to choose what components your bike comes with. That’s a huge benefit over most bike companies, whose models only come in one or two configurations. But even Project One only lets you select from a very tiny spectrum of approved alternatives, so their vaunted configurability is actually not much more than a nominal advantage.

So don’t expect to see me riding up on a Doh-MAH-knee any time soon.

September’s riding was a little different this year, and in some ways that’s a good thing.

The obvious difference is that Jay’s not here anymore, having moved to Florida a couple weeks ago. That meant no Labor Day cookout after a morning ride up Mount Wachusett, and no NBW Flattest Century in the East.

The Flattest Century (which of course is not actually the flattest century) has always been a pain in the neck. Over the past four years I’ve struggled with flat tires, a hurricane, crackhouse lodgings, and riding the entire 100-mile distance on my folding travel bike. Last year, after being violently ill the night and morning before the ride, I dragged myself through it, then pretty much vowed not to do the ride again.

Instead, I wanted to try another ride that happened on the same weekend—the Eastern Trail Alliance’s Maine Lighthouse Ride (MLR)—another coastal century that starts in South Portland and promised coastal views and nine lighthouses. It sounded like a great way to do something new and make a break with the Flattest ride.

On the other hand, none of my remaining riding buddies bit, so (having no car) I had to arrange my own transportation. Since the ride was only a few miles from the Portland train station, I figured Amtrak would be better than renting a car. On the plus side, I’d have the opportunity to ride as easily as I pleased, having no buddies around to keep up with and hours between when I finished and my 8pm train back to Boston.

So Friday afternoon I left work, stopped at home to grab my bike, rode to North Station, and hopped the Downeaster. We pulled into Portland a little after 8pm, and I checked into a hotel room right next to the Regional Transportation Hovel.

Now, the downside of not renting a car was… Since I didn’t have any place to lock things up, I could only bring as much stuff as I was willing to lug along with me on a 100-mile bike ride. So I didn’t bring any clothing beyond my cycling kit. So I’m sure I got a few odd looks as I walked down to the CVS and picked up some drinks, then to Espo’s Trattoria, where I grabbed a “funky chicken” pizza: BBQ sauce, chicken, onions, and hot peppers. Tasty!

As I munched on the pizza in the hotel room, I watched the weather with no small degree of anxiety. In recent days, the forecast had fluctuated from party cloudy with rain late in the day to a complete weekend-long deluge. Between my discomfort with the weather and the travel arrangements, I also mused about ways I could be more comfortable with the uncertainties of life.

When my alarm went off at 6am, conditions weren’t great. Temperatures were okay, but it was very humid, with a clammy, misty fog and a leg-tearing 30 mph wind. At least it was coming from the southeast, so it would be at our backs on the second half of the MLR.

I set out from the hotel and rode five miles through a deserted downtown Portland and across the mile-long Casco Bay Bridge into South Portland to Southern Maine Community College, where I checked in and was one of the first people to gather at the starting area.

Having a few minutes to kill, I walked out the 900-foot granite breakwater to Spring Point Ledge lighthouse and back again. I also got a nice photo of a trawler motoring past the lighthouse, and the event photographer got an excellent shot of me (right) as I waited for the official depart.

Shortly thereafter we were off, but not for long, since our second lighthouse—tiny little Bug Light—was less than a mile away. After a brief stop there, we picked up the South Portland Greenbelt for a 6-mile ride out of town. With a couple hundred riders, the path was quite crowded, and a bit dangerous thanks to the poorly-placed bollards that appeared at every intersection, but it made for an easy roll-out and warm-up.

Finally we picked up some local roads for a while, but it wasn’t long before we reached the Scarborough salt marsh and the 2-mile crushed gravel path that traversed it: not a great option for road bikes, but the only option we had. Still, it was nice riding across the tidal bogs.

Then it was back on blessed tarmac again, where I hooked up with a paceline going slightly slower than I was as we rolled into Old Orchard Beach. Now, Maine is a hole, but all the rest of Maine looks down on OOB as an even worse hole: a cheap, kitchy, squalid copy of any low-budget seaside “resort”, swarming with French-Canadian tourists. And yeah, it was about that, although having never visited there in my adult life, I found it somewhat interesting. That was the location of our first rest stop, which I hit at 8:51am.

Pulling out of OOB, I caught a gentleman in a Pan-Mass Challenge team jersey for Brielle’s Brigade. Four weeks earlier, he’d ridden his first PMC all the way from the New York border, but the team’s young hero and inspiration lost her battle with cancer just weeks after the ride. He and I chatted for a while on the run into Saco and across the river into Biddeford. When he shipped his chain at the foot of a big hill out of town, I rolled on and left him behind.

Except for the brief stretch at Old Orchard, the entire outbound leg was a ways inland, so there weren’t any real ocean views. I reached the second rest stop in Arundel at 10:07, having covered 36 miles. I’d been facing a ridiculously strong headwind, but it hadn’t seemed to effect me much, and the fog had thinned out a little bit. I noticed that I’d lost a handlebar end cap somewhere along the line, which seems to be a common annoyance for me.

I pulled out of the rest stop with a group of about eight girls, and we would leapfrog one another for the next 50 miles. After a short jaunt down into Kennebunkport, I reached the coast and made the halfway turn northward. I passed the Bush compound, which was, of course, arrogantly flying the Texas flag over Maine territory. Then I passed an ambulance and rider down, which was a reminder that cyclists are subject to life-threatening injury at any moment during a ride.

The sun started peeking between the clouds, but the wind grew even fiercer, sometimes helping, but more often not. The coastline was quite beautiful, with a raging surf churned up by distant Hurricane Leslie crashing against the rocks. Much of the second half of the ride followed the same route as friends of mine take during their Seacoast Safari for Cystic Fibrosis ride.

At 11:11am I had completed 57 miles and arrived at the rest stop at Fortunes Rocks. My legs were tightening up, and they’d felt a bit crampy all day due to the high humidity. The sun had disappeared again when I rode on through Biddeford Pool, where I looked around for more lighthouses. Then back down that hill and through Saco, where I briefly ran across a huge group of people from another charity ride before our paths diverged.

I found myself back at the Old Orchard rest stop at 12:12, having covered 73 miles. There were 22 very hard miles—including going back over the crushed stone path through the Scarborough bog—between there and the final rest stop in Cape Elizabeth, where my father once ran the Chamber of Commerce. When I finally reached mile 95 and stopped there at 1:46pm, I flopped on the ground near the food table. A thoughtful volunteer looked down at me and actually said, “I was thinking I’d offer you my chair, but you’ve been sitting all day and probably don’t need it.” Yeah, thanks lady.

The sun had finally burned through the clouds, and I took some extra time to recover from that long sustained effort, where I’d really been tapped out and my knees had complained. The rest definitely helped, because I felt much better on the final segment back to South Portland.

Before I left, I also noticed that the magnet that records my pedaling cadence had fallen off my crankarm, so I’ll need to replace that sometime soon.

Coming out of the rest stop, we zoomed down a big hill to Two Lights in Cape Elizabeth, but then had to turn around and climb right back out again. Just a few miles further we entered Fort Williams Park to visit the last lighthouse: Portland Head Light, which is one of the most photographed lighthouses in the world.

By then the number of out-and-back portions of the route had gotten me thinking about comparisons to the Flattest Century, which winds around up and down coastal peninsulas in a desperate attempt to rack up 100 miles before the end. For MLR it was more a question of how many times we actually doubled back on ourselves (if you care to count, we backtracked eight times).

Just a short distance beyond Portland Head, I found myself back in South Portland and arriving at the SMCC campus. I completed the ride at 2:44 with 106 miles (five of those were the commute from the hotel to the start). The actual ride took about 7:15 in clock time, which is pretty respectable given the number of lighthouse stops and the fact that I wasn’t pushing myself. My average speed was only 16.1 mph.

After checking in, I decided to head right back across the bridge to Portland, just in case the promised rain came abruptly. I stopped at a convenience store and stocked up on recovery food and took up residence on a bench in Deering Oaks, a beautiful little park in the neighborhood where I lived until the age of eight. My train wasn’t until 8pm, so I had five hours to kill. I spent three of them resting, watching the park’s water fountain, the seagulls whirling overhead, the squirrels panhandling, and the clouds screaming across the sky.

As the sun lowered and the September afternoon cooled, I headed back to the train station and hung out there until the train departed. Fortunately, there were only two other people in the business class car, because I’m sure I smelled pretty ripe in my cycling kit.

Despite all my fears, I had completed the ride and gotten out of Portland without getting wet. But the fierce line of thunderstorms I’d been dreading finally blew through the area while I was on the train. Ironically, a leak developed in the train’s ceiling right next to me, so I did wind up getting rained on for a few moments before I changed seats.

Fortunately, by the time we got to Boston at 10:30pm the storm had passed, and although the roads were wet, I managed to get home without undue discomfort. It had been a long but rather successful day.

In the end, I really enjoyed the ride. The people were friendly and the route enjoyable, and (continuing a three-time theme for my 2012 season) it made a really good change of venue from the all-too-familiar Flattest Century.

It also was memorable as my fifth and probably final century of 2012. And it is entirely possible that it was the last century that I’ll do with the Plastic Bullet which has served me well for so many years. If so, it was a pretty memorable way to close that bike’s long history.

Prelude

Epic rides deserve epic ride reports, so here’s the tale of the 2012 Mt. Washington Century…

The story begins with last July’s Climb to the Clouds ride. For at least the past three years, my Pan-Mass Challenge training culminated with that century ride up Mt. Wachusett a couple weeks before the PMC. But that ride isn’t well run, and last year my buddies and I reached the breaking point (ride report). As we sat around recovering from a brutal ride, all four of us concluded that we never wanted to do that ride again.

So this year I proposed a different ride that occupies the same spot in the New England cycling calendar: the Mt. Washington Century. It took very little convincing that a different ride would be more fun than yet another disappointing Climb to the Clouds.

The bonus is that this isn’t just another ride; it is an epic 108-mile ride over three named passes in the White Mountains. The route accumulates more than a mile of vertical by traversing the well-known Kancamagus Highway, Bear Notch, Crawford Notch, and Pinkham Notch. Billed as “New England’s most challenging century”, it circumnavigates most of the Presidential Range, including Mt. Adams and, of course, Mt. Washington, which is the highest peak in the northeastern US.

Preparation

In anticipation of the most difficult route I’d ever attempted, I spent a couple weeks doing hill repeats on the biggest hills in the area. On July 3rd I did four ascents of Great Blue Hill… and, of course, four high-speed descents, which I would also need to be ready to tackle. And on July 8th I did six trips up Eastern Ave to Arlington’s water tower… again with six screaming descents down the Route 2 on-ramp. While I wasn’t sure I was ready for 108 miles of mountains—especially after my self-destruction on my attempted Harvard century two weeks earlier (ride report)—I figured I was as ready as I was ever going to be.

I also wanted the Plastic Bullet to be ready, and it needed help. After a recent cleaning, my shifting had started skipping around. It had been more than a year since my last tune-up, so on Tuesday I brought it in and had them true the wheels and replace the chain and cassette. Seemed like a wise idea, right? Let the shop make sure everything was in good order for the big ride.

On Wednesday I biked to work, and the shifting was just as bad, if not worse. It was bad enough that after work I rode directly to the shop and asked them to fix it up properly. But as soon as the tech touched it, the shifter cable snapped at the shift lever: a problem that has happened to me two or three times in the past. When it happens, your shifter locks into the hardest gear and there’s nothing you can do about it. In short, had that happened during the Mt. Washington ride, I would have been absolutely screwed. I had really lucked out.

Getting There

The day before the ride, I left work at 4pm and met my buddy Noah drove me from my place out to Jay’s in Waltham. Rather than try to fight Friday rush hour traffic, we followed the first of several insightful suggestions I offered: get Thai from the restaurant around the corner. Everyone loved that idea… even me, who’d already eaten Thai for lunch for two days in a row. Hey, I figured it was good veggies and carbs! So that was my first good call.

Hanging at Jay’s, the sandbagging began. It was clear that each of us had some level of anxiety about the ride. Paul hadn’t ridden in a while. Noah hadn’t ridden much all year. Jay was surprised to learn that the ride’s site had lied about how much climbing was involved, proclaiming 4800 feet of vertical instead of a more realistic 6000'.

We also took a moment to acknowledge that this would be our last major ride together as a group, with Jay moving to Florida next month. We’ve had a great run together, and I think everyone’s sad to see it pass. On the other hand, doing the White Mountains would be a fitting and memorable way to go out!

The 3-hour ride up was pretty uneventful, and we arrived at the hotel Jay had booked at 10:30pm. That’s when the fun began: the woman at reception couldn’t find our reservation. Jay whipped out his laptop, but all he could come up with was some followup spam that Marriott had sent him. Apparently their central booking agent had added him to their spam list, but never bothered to make our reservation! Thankfully, by the time all was said and done, the local manager gave us a two-bedroom for a ridiculously low price; another crisis averted!

Departure & the Kanc

After grabbing some stuff from the hotel breakfast, we hit the road to the start: the Tin Mountain Conservation Center just outside Conway. We were already running later than Noah or I wanted, since it promised to be a very hot day. We signed in, got all our stuff together, and finally rolled out at 7:30am. The first mile featured a screaming descent which we all knew would be a kick in the teeth on the way back.

Within a mile, we turned left onto the Kancamagus Highway, arguably the most famous road in New Hampshire. It was a bright, beautiful morning. The road was smooth and steady. The mountains towered above us, the evergreens covering the hillsides offered fragrant shade, and the granite boulder-strewn bed of the Swift River ran along the road, keeping us company as we climbed toward its source.

My buddies stopped to stretch for a while, but I was eager to keep moving, so I went on ahead alone. The Kanc climbs gradually but steadily, but I kept a comfortable pace, knowing that I’d need lots of strength in reserve for the peaks that lay ahead. Still, I kept my buddies at bay until shortly after making the left turn onto Bear Notch Road. The Kanc had ascended about 800 feet in 12 miles.

Bear Notch

On the course’s elevation profile, Bear Notch looked like the easiest of the three ascents, with more gradual, easy climbing. And that’s pretty much how it turned out. It never seemed to get steep for any sustained period of time, and I climbed alongside my buddies, who had finally caught me. It was cool that three of us were together when we passed the event photographer, who captured us.

The climbing we’d done on the Kanc (800 feet over 12 miles) had put us more than halfway to the top, so the actual climbing on Bear Notch Road really only amounted to another 600 feet over 4 miles.

Then, without really expecting it, we were over the top and coasting at 35 mph down a winding, wooded road. Thankfully, the road surface was beautiful, and we zoomed down almost without touching our brakes, admiring the mountain and valley vistas that opened up on our left.

After a long descent (over 1000 feet in 5 miles)—but still too soon—we were dumped into a little village called Bartlett, where the first rest stop sat in a public common. We all had big grins on our faces as we recounted our experiences to one another. So far it had been a wonderful day, and the temps were still in the low 70s.

Crawford Notch

We rolled out and turned left onto Route 302, a somewhat busier road. Paul and Noah caught and passed me, but Jay hung with me as we fought an unexpected northwest headwind—the only time that happened all day.

Again, the ascent was long and gradual but very manageable (550 feet over 12 miles). As we got close to Mt. Jackson, we stopped for a photo opp at the Willey House pond, close to the source of one of my favorite rivers (the Saco).

We caught a slower paceline just as the road started kicking up at the summit. Jay and I debated passing them, but that soon sorted itself out, as some of them distanced us while others went backwards. The last two miles or so was a real struggle, gaining another 550 feet, but that made it all the sweeter when Jay and I crested Crawford Notch together, yelling weightlifter Ronnie Coleman quotes at each other (“Yeah buddy!”, “Whoooo!”, “Lightweight baby!”, and the ever-popular and slightly-modified “Everybody wanna be a cyclist; nobody wanna climb these big-ass hills… I’ll do it tho!”). It felt like a victory worthy of celebration, and thus it was nice to share that moment with Jay.

The problem with Crawford was that there wasn’t any real descent afterward. The road leveled out and angled down just a hair, but not enough to really make a big difference. The road was also barren, having emerged from the woods, and the temperatures were into the mid-80s.

Fortunately, the second water stop materialized in a convenience store parking lot. Surprisingly, the organizers had run out of sports drink, and we had to go buy our own from the convenience store. That was the organizers’ one obvious shortfall: we shouldn’t have to pay for Gatorade out of our pocket on a ride we’d paid to do!

Going Round the Mountain

Jay and I left Crawford and continued north on 302. I pulled him for a few miles as we turned east by cutting across Route 115 to Route 2. Here there was a mix of rolling climbs and a few long descents, but nothing like that off Bear Notch. Jay pulled away but Paul caught up and rode with me for a while before he too moved on.

Then, shortly before we reached Gorham, I rounded a corner to find myself facing an immense wall known as Randolph Hill. In the distance, the road looked like it took off like a jetliner, soaring into the sky (in reality it climbed 200 feet in less than a mile). By this point, temps had climbed to 90 degrees, and there was little if any shade along the route. I poured the last of my Gatorade over my head and plodded up the brutally steep climb.

Fortunately, the third water stop was at the top of the hill, where I collapsed in the heat. Thankfully, the organizers had cold drinks on ice in coolers, and I shoveled ice into my water bottle for the next segment. I also had a couple sips of Coke, which certainly went down nicely.

It was at this point that my stomach started doing flip-flops. At the rest stops, I felt bloated and queasy, full of too much liquid, which I’d been pouring down my throat; but on the bike, I felt pretty good for the most part. This would continue for the rest of the day.

Mount Washington and Pinkham Notch

Jay and Paul left the rest stop shortly after Noah showed up. Noah was pretty cooked, but I rested for a few more minutes and we left the stop together. The good news is that the road continued to descend (650 feet in 4 miles) after the rest stop, and Noah and I rode together through Gorham, where we finally turned south onto Route 16 for the climb up to the base of Mt. Washington.

Route 16 was a really long, steady climb, but a bit steeper than the easy slopes we’d taken to approach the other notches. It was grueling, but I found it manageable, so long as I kept pouring water on myself. On the other hand, Noah was still struggling and fell behind quickly, although he stayed within sight of me much of the way up.

Eventually I pulled into the gravel parking lot at the base of the infamous Mt. Washington Auto Road. Again, no shade was to be found, but with the temp peaking at 95 degrees, I loaded up on ice and headed out with Jay and Paul, who quickly gapped me as the climbing continued for another 4 miles to the top of Pinkham Notch. Overall, that climb had ascended 1200 feet over 11 miles.

Then came the final payoff: a 15-mile, 1500-foot descent down from Pinkham Notch, into the woods and down to Jackson. My legs were so beat that I didn’t push the descent, but just rolled with it. Just as I was thinking I could go wade in a mountain stream, Noah caught up with me and left me behind, so I plodded on.

I eventually reached the town of Glen, where 16 rejoins 302 and again becomes a major thoroughfare. As I looked left, I saw a moderately-sized hill that just wasn’t going to happen. So I pulled into a Dairy Queen parking lot and rested for a few minutes before finishing the final two miles to the last rest stop. That was the only unscheduled stop I made during the ride; I hadn’t gotten off on any of the hills, but I needed to gather my strength before attacking that one just before the rest stop.

The Final Countdown

The last rest stop was a grassy lawn—essentially someone’s yard. I laid on my back and just gasped due to the heat. It was only 13 miles to the finish, so I would certainly finish it, but I needed another good rest first. I downed half a can of Coke, filled up with ice, and poured ice water over my head before following my buddies, who had left five minutes earlier in hopes of finishing within eight hours.

Again, once I was back on the bike things settled into place, and I made okay time. I wasn’t strong, but made steady progress. With all the climbing behind me, it was just a question of closing it out, and surviving that final mile.

The final segment—West Side Road—was a long but nice ride, although it felt like I was still climbing a false flat. Finally I came back out onto Route 16, and half a mile later passed the point where we’d turned onto the Kancamagus. I marshaled my strength and made the turn onto Bald Hill Road that led up a punishing ascent up to the finish at Tin Mountain (officially it gains 300 feet in 1 mile). It was as steep and difficult as anything we’d done, but I finally drifted into their driveway and hung gasping over the bars for a minute before signing in and meeting up with the guys.

Final tally: 108 miles in 8:15, with 5800 feet of climbing and an average speed of 16 mph. For the mappy junkies, here’s a link to the GPS log.

The After-Party

I tried to eat a bit as we sat outside the Tin Mountain cabin, but really only managed to down a couple chocolate milks. It was still too hot to let our core body temperatures drop, and we all were feeling the effects. But this is where my second grand pre-planning idea paid off in a huge way.

I knew it was going to be hot. I knew we were going to be near lakes and streams. I knew we were going to be four stinky, grimy, sweaty guys stuck in a car for three hours. So one of my pre-ride emails suggested that everyone bring swim trunks, and they had. We briefly discussed where to go, then went back to the truck and exchanged our sweaty kit for trunks and drove to the nearest possible water: the Swift River we’d ridden by on the Kancamagus at the start of the ride.

We quickly found a swimming hole others were using, pulled off the road, and picked our way down to the torrent. As I said earlier, the whole area was just a pile of granite boulders: the smallest being the side of a dog; the largest being as big as a tractor trailer. The water was absolutely blissful: cold yes, but not blisteringly frigid. We dunked in the deeper parts, then sat in the middle of the rapids and let the cold water flow over us. Jay clambered around and found a way to swim underneath a huge monolith in the middle of the river. Everyone agreed it was the perfect way to relax and cool off.

At this point, I saved the day again. Jay jumped into the water and lost his sunglasses in the torrent, but I was able to spot them, so that was gratifying. Less gratifying was learning that Noah had stolen a towel from the hotel, when we had earnestly promised them we wouldn’t incur any incidentals. That was the one sour note of the trip.

The road home included a stop at a donut shop that featured (for me) more chocolate milk and a blissful rest in a big overstuffed armchair. Then we hit the Wolfetrap, a restaurant in Wolfeboro, Paul’s home town, so that was kinda cool, and my huge burger and cornbread were precisely what the chirurgeon prescribed. That was also where I saved the day yet again, pointing out to Paul that—despite his claiming otherwise—he really was about to leave his credit card behind with the check.

We got that straightened out and hoofed it back to Boston, where I was anxious to begin my next task: recovery! It was still Saturday night, and I had all day Sunday to shower, relax, fuel up, and rehydrate.

Das Ende

I really enjoyed the Mt. Washington Century. I think it lived up to its billing as a very challenging ride, but it was also just an awesome day all around. The scenery—the rivers, the mountains, the woods—was just breathtaking. The climbs were long and steady which made them very manageable but they still packed some challenging sections, and the descents were long and smooth. Sure, with a newer bike I could have pushed the top speed on the descents, but it was just as nice to let gravity do all the work.

The Plastic Bullet once again did its job admirably for an old bike with more than 20,000 miles on it. After the cable was swapped out, I literally didn’t once think about the shifting problems I’d had earlier that week.

This was my third complete century of the year, which puts me about on pace with my previous two years, and it certainly puts me in good shape for the PMC, which is only two weeks away (as of this posting). I’d love to do this ride again, but I’m not sure whether that will happen, with Jay moving away and the group likely to fragment.

Which brings me back to the idea that this was the last major organized ride for Jay, Paul, Noah, and I. From the ride to the post-ride swim in the Swift River, this was a perfect day and a fitting way to honor our friendship and our mutual encouragement. It was epic.

And I’m so glad I was able to convince them to go for Mt. Washington instead of the Climb to the Clouds. After last year’s CttC, we were too exhausted, overheated, and demoralized to even stay for a post-ride swim in nearby Walden Pond. The contrast between that and this year’s relaxing dip in a wild mountain stream just underscores what a truly awesome time we had on the Mt. Washington Century, making memories that we’ll take with us for years and years to come.

Chapeau, boys!

Another summary of recent news to tell you about.

Cape Ann

Three weeks ago, there was the first beautiful, warm, sunny day in a long time, so I decided to take the train up to Salem and do my traditional 65-mile Cape Ann loop. It had a respectable amount of climbing, and I generally felt strong. (GPS log)

Having just ridden Cape Cod, which I really adore, I was also reminded how enchanting Cape Ann is as I rode past all the familiar postcard scenes: the rocky headland of the hidden village of Magnolia; Gloucester’s Hammond Castle and idyllic Buswell Pond; the huge rock and hidden crescent beach at Stage Fort Park; the old Gloucester Fisherman’s Memorial; the Rocky Neck artists’ colony; the elegant mansions and crashing surf at Bass Rocks; Good Harbor Beach, where my mother took her children; the touristy fishing village of Rockport; the granite quarry and slag pile at Halibut Point State Park; the tiny village of Annisquam and its wooden footbrodge over the Annisquam River; the hospital where I was born and the first house I lived in, both on Washington Street; the endless sand of Wingaersheek Beach; and Salem’s common and witch house.

The one odd bit happened at Wingaersheek. I brought my bike out onto the beach and leaned it against one of the huge rocks so I could keep an eye on it. After wading in the ocean and sunning on the rocks, I noticed that the tide was coming in. But Wingaersheek is a very flat beach, which means the tide comes in *fast*. In about 15 minutes, the water had advanced a good 30 feet, and submerged my bike up to the rear derailleur! Not a great way to treat your bike, especially when you’ve got to cross a sandy beach and ride another 30 miles with a very crunchy drivetrain!

But all in all it was just a great day on the bike.

… Which is in sharp contract to the next weekend. I had hoped to do a full century, which would put me in good shape for my upcoming Mt. Washington ride.

Harvard “Century”

I should have known better from the start. On the way out to Arlington I felt a bit slower than normal. After meeting up with my buddies Jay and Paul and Noah at Quad Cycles, I managed to flat on the bike path out to Bedford. Swapped the tube out, only to discover that my spare was just as bad. While I patched the original (thank god for self-adhesive patches), I managed to expose myself to a patch of poison ivy lining the path. Having completed repairs, I caught up with my buds, who had waited at the end of the bike path.

There’s a bike shop at the end of the path, and I’d planned on buying another tube there, so I wouldn’t be without a spare. However, my friends had invited another six riders—all fast guys—to ride with us, so I couldn’t very well hold them up longer than I already had. I figured that if I flatted, at least they’d be around.

So we set off, with me showing folks where to go. At least, that’s how it worked for a couple miles, until we got to the first turn in the route. I’d been setting a steady 18 mph pace on the front that wouldn’t fatigue us, since we had 85 miles ahead of us, but as soon as I rolled off the front, the next guy in line (one of my buddies) slammed it up to an unmaintainable 22 mph. Knowing none of us were going to finish a century at that pace, I just let them go, watching my promised spare tube go with them. Ironically, that friend who had picked up the pace and dropped me: he abandoned the ride within a couple miles and went home.

I figured we’d regroup again once the others noticed that I had dropped off, but that didn’t happen. I didn’t see them again until I pulled into the general store in Harvard, 25 miles later. I asked my two remaining buddies to loan me one of their spare tubes, and both refused, saying that they’d slow down and ride the rest of the way with me.

Can you predict what happened next? Yep, we started out again, and after a couple miles they kicked it back up and rode off without me, leaving me again out in the middle of nowhere, riding on a patched tube, without a spare. At least I knew the route, whereas those guys just kept going, leaving the route and continuing on with absolutely no idea where they were headed. At one point, two hours later, I was standing at a traffic light when two of the group rode past, perpendicular to my path. I called out to them and one of my buddies looked over toward me, but just kept riding along.

As the temperature hovered around 90, I started feeling nauseous and weak. It might have been that I uncharacteristically drank a Coke at the general store, or it might have been that I didn’t eat anything other than that and Gatorade. After another hour, I pulled into our customary post-ride coffee shop and just caught the rest of the group before they dispersed to go home. I was in a bad way, with 10 miles left between me and Boston. I limped along, trying not to vomit, being passed by little Asian girls on rickety utility bikes with grocery bags in their front baskets.

Unable to go further, I stopped and sat on the lawn at MIT, barely a mile from my house. After a long rest, I hobbled slowly home. I was just shy of completing a century, but I couldn’t possibly imagine riding another 5 miles, which was all I needed. I could have ridden around my neighborhood three times and been done, but it simply was out of the question. (GPS log)

It was probably the worst day I’ve had on the bike in a long, long time.

Hill Street Blues

Last week was July 4th, and on July 3rd (Tuesday) my employer let us out early. That gave me a chance to get back on the bike and get in my first round of hill repeats in preparation for next weekend’s Mt. Washington Century. So I found a route over to the Blue Hills and climbed the 400 foot Great Blue Hill access road. And did it again. And again. And again. The whole day I felt strong on the bike, and felt good enough to do my usual climb up Dorchester Heights, even after four Great Blue Hills (GBHs)! (GPS log)

What scares me is that next weekend’s ride contains three major climbs, each the equivalent of three or four GBHs, yielding a total of about 12 GBHs over a hundred miles. It’s billed as the most challenging century in New England; hence the focus this week on training with hill repeats.

Today I went out to Arlington Heights and did my usual pre-PMC hill: one trip up to the water tower from School Street, and five more via Spring Street and Eastern Avenue. (GPS log)

Hill repeats are great strength training, and they look great when you look at your GPS log’s elevation profile, but nothing’ll make you want to puke faster. As I told one friend, I was wheezing like a poorly-sealed steam engine, twitching like Max Headroom, and grunting like Monika Seles!

But hopefully all this agony will serve me well next weekend, when I attempt what might be the hardest ride I’ve ever done: I’ve got an appointment with the Kancamagus Highway, Bear Notch, Crawford Notch, and Pinkham Notch.

Stay tuned to hear how well *that* goes!

It’s June, so the cycling season has gotten serious. Here are the three most recent developments…

After opening the month with my first Tour d’Essex County (see previous post), last weekend I went to Maine to visit my mother. Except I did so by bike.

No, I didn’t ride the whole 360-mile round trip, but after taking Amtrak to Portland, I rode the 66 miles from Portland to Augusta on Saturday, then back again the next day.

Not that anyone reading this knows the area or cares, but my route basically follows Route 9 from Portland, past Bradbury Mountain in Pownall, crosses the Androscoggin at Lisbon Falls, endures some more serious hills going up to Sabbatus, then finally dumps Route 9 for the Litchfield Road and the Whitten Road into Augusta. It’s very hilly, and doubly hard when there’s the usual northwest headwind.

Still, it was well past time for my first back-to-back long rides of the year, and doing 136 miles over two days was good training for the upcoming Outriders ride.

On the other hand, I’d done the hills of Waltham’s Trapelo Road only two days before, and by the end of the Maine trip, my right knee was complaining pretty loudly. So I spent a few days off the bike to let it recuperate.

Item number two: yesterday was the 130-mile Outriders ride from Boston to Provincetown, at the far tip of the Cape of Good Cod.

I rode pretty strong, but started slowing down a bit after mile 80. My knee wasn’t happy, so I took it a bit easier on the hills and didn’t do any jackrabbit starts.

My buddy Noah came with, which was nice. He’s a strong, young rider, but he was undertrained, and had a bit of the bonk about the time we hit the century mark. Not only was this his first Outriders ride, but it was also his first time riding on the Cape, so I had fun taking him on the rollercoaster Route 6 Access Road and the CCRT and Ocean View Drive.

Despite our travails, we recovered and finished well. The ride seemed shorter than usual to me, and I felt better at the end. Part of that might be because it was a very cold day—about 61 degrees, with a stiff northeast headwind—but even so, nine hours and 130 miles makes for a very long, exhausting day in the saddle!

And, of course, this was my second century of the year, which keeps me on pace with previous years. Here's the GPS log.

After dinner and ice cream in Provincetown, we hopped the 8:30pm ferry back to Boston. I’m thinking perhaps next year I should host a pre-ride breakfast at my place, since I’m only a few blocks from the start.

The third item is that toward the end of Outriders I rolled over 20,000 miles on the Plastic Bullet, which has been my primary bike for the past six and a half years.

That bike’s been very good to me, and I don’t look forward to replacing it with a new, unknown quantity, but it’s definitely showing its age. My previous (steel hybrid) bike was retired with a little shy of 17,000 miles, so the PB has done a very admirable job. But as much as I hate to say it, it’s almost time to relegate it to "beater" status and find myself something new and shiny.

But first, we’ve got to spend another couple thousand miles together, doing my first Mount Washington Century and this year’s PMC, and maybe my first Maine Lighthouse Ride. So there’s still some more good times ahead for the old steed…

A week ago I did my first Tour d’Essex County, a century put on by Essex County Velo, and my first century of 2012.

In theory, my three riding buddies had planned to do it with me, but they all bagged out, leaving me without anyone to drive me to the start up in Manchester. And another buddy who lives out there declined my request for crash space.

That left me with one option: the commuter rail. That worked out okay, except the first train didn’t arrive until an hour after the ride left Manchester. So not only was I without my riding pals, but I wound up doing the entire hundred miles without seeing (or drafting!) another rider.

Putting that aside, I set out northwest from Manchester through some of the flattest, most scenic terrain I’ve ridden. Most of the first half of the ride was either shady woodland roads with no traffic (featuring occasional ponds and streams and people kayaking) or farmland (with trotting horses, cows, turkeys, snakes, groundhogs, cats, orioles, and cardinals).

By the time I was 20 miles in, I was absolutely covered with tree pollen. My jersey and shorts were yellow, and my shins we so caked with it that it was falling off in clumps.

The first third of the ride was against a mild wind out of the west, but not bad. It was supposed to come close to 90 degrees, but some high overcast and the shade provided by the trees kept me unaware of the heat; that is, until I stopped riding, when I found myself suddenly bathed in sweat due to the lack of any breeze.

After three hours of riding, I pulled into a bike shop in Newburyport that represented the halfway point rest stop. I was on schedule, but starting to slow. Although I was still half an hour behind the other riders, there were still some snacks left. I mooched some animal crackers and a strawberry before heading south along the coast. This terrain was much more open and more trafficky, but fine.

Five hours and 75 miles in, I stopped briefly at the rest stop in Beverly. The route had turned west again, so I’d had to face the wind for a while, this time more exposed than before. The directions had also gotten quite confused here, as the route crossed itself four times in the next 20 miles (the one other rider I met was clearly lost and actually stopped me to ask directions).

On the last segment it was clear that I was out of strength, but I made it over the route’s one significant hill and finished okay. I didn’t note my arrival time, but the GPS tells me it was 4:14pm, which made it a 6h 48m century, although it also was a couple miles short of a hundred miles, too.

One of the last riders leaving the postride cookout that I’d missed was Tsun, whom I know from my regular Quad rides. He hung around for a bit with a few other stragglers while I downed a cola and (yes, literally) hosed myself off.

After a while, I moseyed back to the train station, but not before a detour to Captain Dusty’s for a big ice cream. The commuter rail platform was jammed with people: a handful of cyclists, a ton of people who had spent the afternoon at Singing Beach, and people headed to Boston for the Celtics’ playoffs game seven against the 76ers. The train was jammed, but the MBTA has one car where half the seating has been ripped out and replaced with parking for dozens of bikes, which we filled.

As the train quietly wound its way homeward, I could only think of two things: how welcome a long shower would be, and how I was going to have to do a thorough and complete cleaning of the Plastic Bullet before taking it out for Monday’s Memorial Day Quad ride.

The one other thing I should mention is how fortunate I was to find ice (for free!) nearly every place I stopped, which included a country store in Boxford, the bike shop in Newburyport, and the bike shop at the finish in Manchester. That was key on such a hot and humid day.

Overall, it was an awesome ride. While the second half of the ride wasn’t as quiet, scenic, and ridiculously flat as the first half, that first half was really great. And the timing is great, too; the end of May is the perfect time for an early-season century, it doesn’t conflict with any other events, and it gives one something to do over the Memorial Day weekend, while still leaving enough recovery time to ride again on Monday.

A very enjoyable ride—even solo—and I look forward to doing it again. But next time I’ll have friends along, or maybe I can get a ride from Tsun or Lynda, or crash chez Allison. But even if I have to solo it again, the Tour d’Essex has definitely earned a spot on my annual cycling calendar!

And, finally, a link to the GPS log.

A quick summary of the 2012 season, since I haven’t written a damned thing this year…

In January and February I did nothing. Only a couple indoor trainer sessions. No desire. In March, I got out for a Quad ride and a couple commutes during a mid-month heat wave. 120 miles.

April started out butt, but I got a few rides in, including a nice, memorable ride from Worcester to Barre for a retreat (GPS log); and a memorable but-not-nice cold and rainy ride back. Plus a couple commutes and Quad rides. 240 miles.

In May, my desire returned and I really started training, which included 4 serious Quad rides (including going long or the hills of Trapelo and Page/Grove), 6 commutes, and soloing my first visit to the ECV’s Tour d’Essex County century (much more on that in a bit). 530 miles.

Now it’s June. I’ve broken 1,000 miles for the year and the Plastic Bullet is quickly approaching its 20,000-mile milestone. My desire is clearly back, and I’m feeling pretty strong, despite the long winter layoff. On the other hand, I’m still having some mixed results regarding age, strength, and stamina.

This is a big month, but today (Saturday) I’m stuck indoors thanks to a big rainstorm which also threatens to wipe out tomorrow’s planned long training ride. That’s bad, because I only have one more weekend to train before the arduous, early-season 130-mile Outriders ride to Provincetown. And the following weekend I’m thinking about doing the CRW’s 120-mile Cape in a Day ride! So if this weekend is a washout, I’m hoping it’ll be fair next weekend, so I can do 70 miles between Portland and Augusta on back-to-back days while visiting. On verra.

The one thing good thing about this rain is that it gives me time to get my PMC fundraising started. That, too, is an important part of the month of June each year. Bisy Backson!

So, to make time for that (and to complete my forthcoming writeup of the Tour d’Essex County century), I stop now. More shortly!

You’re drafting a buddy. He’s fighting against the wind, but you’re getting so much benefit from being in his slipstream that you don’t even need to pedal.

But you keep turning the pedals over, even if it means having to apply your brake at the same time. Why?

Because you know how annoying it is to be on the front, straining against the wind, but hear the ticking of the ratchet in the other riders’ freewheels as the freeloaders coast behind you.

A considerate cyclist prefers to simultaneously brake and pedal, rather than taunt the guy who’s kind enough to go to the front and pull into the wind.

There’s an article in the Jan/Feb 2012 issue of Bicycling magazine that makes an interesting point about bike facilities: basically, they aren’t.

As a beginning rider, Colin McEnroe took up the challenge of writing a column about his experiences with the sport as he ramped up over time.

It took him less than a year to conclude the following:

I’ve also acquired a set of mixed feelings about bike trails and lanes. The latter are strewn with piles of syringes, spent bazooka shells, and the carcasses of elves murdered by Sauron; you’re always about 30 yards from something you’ll have to swerve into traffic to avoid. Bike trails, meanwhile, are full of cyclists doing stupid things, like towing three skateboarders while wearing earbuds with Neutral Milk Hotel cranked up to 11. From a certain perspective, the worst place to ride a bike is any place with “bike” in its name.

I have to say that I concur with this sad state of affairs.

Boston and many of the surrounding towns have done a great job adding bike lanes. The difficulty is that they’re usually placed directly against parallel-parked cars: smack in the door zone, the most dangerous place on the road. The good news is that the number of cars and trucks that double-park often forces riders out of the bike lanes and thus out of the door zone, as well. And don’t get me started on the one foot wide “bike lane” that used to be the shoulder of Enneking Parkway.

Eastern Massachusetts is blessed with a wonderful collection of paved bike paths. The problem here comes from overuse. We have to share the path with oblivious walkers, joggers training for the Boston Marathon, sunbathing Boston University students, residents running their dogs off-leash, rogue Dept. of Conservation and Recreation maintenance trucks, kids playing ball, swerving skaters, and unsteady neophyte cyclists. Not that these things are bad; they just make our “bike paths” the most dangerous place one could possibly ride.

I’ve also heard some advocates preaching the panacea of “cycle tracks”: dedicated lanes between parked cars and the sidewalk, away from traffic. It sounds like a wonderful idea until you realize that it’ll be in the passenger door zone, with a curb that prevents cyclists from swerving to avoid a door. Never mind the fact that such a constrained space cannot simultaneously serve people who ride at speeds that vary from 3 to 30 mph.

This is why McEnroe’s column got a nod and a resigned sigh from me. Here in Boston, we’ve recently been given the mandate to create all kinds of bike facilities, but in the end none of them are of much value to cyclists. In fact, most of them present more frequent dangers to us than doing what we are legally expected to do: ride conscientiously in the standard roadway facility.

If the uselessness of dedicated bike facilities is obvious to even a first-year rider like McEnroe, that raises a lot of questions about the inappropriate projects that bicycle advocates have wasted our political capital on.

It’s been a while, but I thought I’d do a quick writeup of the ride I did the day after Thanksgiving, since it was kind of memorable in its own way.

One of the things I wanted to do was test my Garmin Edge 800 GPS cyclocomputer, since it had been acting up since my last big ride, six weeks earlier. I’d given it a complete hard reset, but frustratingly, it wasn’t any better. It’s great when it works, but that’s only about 80 percent of the time. And for $700, I think it’s reasonable to expect better reliability.

Still, with the temperature in the mid-50s, I moseyed out Mass Ave. all the way to Lexington, because I wanted to pick up a Lexington Minuteman newspaper. Johnny H, one of my longtime riding buddies, had posted that he’d seen my photo in it, so I had to check that out firsthand.

After wandering around town a bit, I spotted a handful of cyclists pulling up to a coffee shop, and discovered that one of them was another old friend, Joy. I spoke to her briefly, then stepped inside a CVS and picked up a paper.

I came back out and parked myself on a bench with Joy and her friends while I leafed through the paper until I found the photo of me; the same picture that had graced the Pan-Mass Challenge home page for three months filled a quarter of the second page of the sports section. It was the focus of a thank-you message to PMC riders, although I’m still not sure whether it was from the paper, from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, the Jimmy Fund, or the PMC itself!

And if that ad appeared in a local paper in Lexington, it might well have also been placed in other town papers, although I haven’t gotten any information from the inquiries I’ve sent.

I said goodbye to Joy and rode down Waltham Street to Waltham (my first time down that road), and pulled into my riding buddy Jay’s driveway. I called him on my cell to ask whether he was home, and to open his back door for me. Since I hadn’t seen Jay in months, I figured this would be a good time to deliver something I’d been saving for him: a pair of size 12 PMC-branded flip-flops that I’d grabbed for him at PMC headquarters when I was there to pick up this year’s Heavy Hitter premium (a backpack). He was properly surprised and pleased, which was gratifying, and we chatted briefly.

From Waltham I took Linden Street and Waverly Oaks (another road I traveled for the first time) into Belmont, where I stopped at Belmont Wheelworks, arguably the best-stocked bike shop in eastern Mass. I was surprised to find it very quiet on the infamous “Black Friday” after Thanksgiving. I hadn’t brought a shopping list, but I did wind up walking out with two new tires, since my old ones were wearing out, and my preferred tires (Michelin Lithion IIs with blue sidewalls) are hard to find. So that was good, too.

As I approached Mt. Auburn Street in Cambridge, I had a brainstorm. I was only a couple blocks from Fastachi, a local nut roastery. Normally I wouldn’t stop, but since I was running errands I’d brought my bike locks, and it was Thanksgiving, so why not? I walked away with a mess of freshly-roasted cashews, hazelnuts, roasted corn, and some New Zealish licorice. Oh yeah, and some chocolate-covered caramels, too!

I hopped back on the bike, but hadn’t gone a quarter mile when I felt the tell-tale squidginess of a flat rear tire. Perfect! I popped the wheel off and removed the inner tube. Out of habit, I did what you’re supposed to do, which is run your hands around the inner surface of the tire to see if you can feel what might have caused the puncture, although usually there’s nothing to find, since I typically get pinch-flats. But this time I discovered an inch-long nail that had gone straight through the tire and into the tube. Glad I bothered to inspect the tire!

I installed my backup tube with the speed that comes from practice, and used my wonderful frame pump to fill it up to 100 PSI before mounting up and lumbering home, my bag filled to bursting with two bike locks, two new tires, a newspaper, a huge bag of roasted nut goodies, and a punctured inner tube.

It hadn’t been a particularly long or fast ride, but even despite the flat it was just a nice day on the bike, which was doubly good after a very discouraging Quad ride the week before.

Last year’s summary concluded with the assertion that 2010 was probably my best year on the bike, and that it would be all downhill from there.

Well, so far I’ve been right. After riding 5,000 miles last year, this year I could only muster 3,000. Much of that reduction was due to my rejoining the work force.

On the other hand, 925 of this year’s miles came from 40 22-mile round trip commutes to Quincy. The unfortunate part is that I really can’t do my commute safely in the dark, so it’s only a five-month affair from April to September.

Despite doing 40 percent fewer miles, I still did seven centuries this summer (only one less than last year’s eight), and brought my total 11-year mileage up to 36,500. I especially enjoyed my second Outriders and Hub on Wheels rides, and sort of enjoyed riding Jay Peak (despite the rain), but was discouraged by both the CRW’s Climb to the Clouds and the Flattest Century.

This was the year that my road bike—the Plastic Bullet—finally passed my old hybrid in terms of mileage. That’s a nice accomplishment, but it also means the Bullet’s getting old. It has a bunch of dings from careless mechanics and car racks, and a worrisome crack we discovered near the bottom bracket. She may not have much more than a year or two left in her.

One benefit of wage slavery is that I had the disposable income to replace and upgrade a whole bunch of equipment this year, including a new helmet, new SPD cycling sandals, a body composition bathroom scale, and a major overhaul of the entire bike. I replaced my rear wheel (again) after discovering large cracks in the rim. But most noteworthy was my purchase of a Garmin Edge 800 GPS/cyclocomputer, which I’ve enjoyed immensely (when it works properly).

This was a year of superlative highs and lows for my Pan-Mass Challenge charity ride. The Dana-Farber’s new Yawkey Center for Cancer Care opened, and I attended the dedication of the PMC Plaza that comprises the building’s main entrance, and also went to the Heavy Hitter banquet for the first time. But several of my riding buddies—Paul and Lynda and Noah—didn’t ride this year. My buddy Jay rode for the first time, but I only got to ride with him for 6 out of 192 miles. One first-time rider thought enough of my web posts to express his thanks while we rode through the hills of Truro; but when I got to Provincetown, I discovered that a spiteful volunteer had stripped ten years of souvenir PMC luggage tags from my bag. I rode in record form, but had to dodge sprinkles most of the weekend. I came close to raising $10,000 this year, but was unable to convince people to pony up the last $295 I needed. As I said, highs and lows.

It’s also worth noting a few things that happened online in 2011. I had a health and fitness question answered in RoadBikeRider magazine; I completely revised my cycling charts and statistics page; and I published a 10-part series of hints and tips for PMC riders.

But most noteworthy was that a photo of me leading a paceline was the largest picture on the PMC’s home page for months after the ride. It was an excellent shot, and I was deeply honored and delighted to be featured on the same page as Lance Armstrong, Senator John Kerry, and PMC founder Billy Starr. Truly something I’ll remember for the rest of my life, and a good way to cap a mixed year.

Now, at the end of the 2011 season, I find myself tired and frustrated. My performance has declined a lot this year, and some of my favorite rides were difficult slogs. I tried to keep up with my younger riding buddies, but pretty much rode all alone through every organized ride this year. Maybe my frustration will go away over the off-season, and I’ll wake up next spring with renewed desire, but right now it feels like I just need some time off the bike. I can’t say yet whether that’s four months off the bike or fourteen; we’ll just have to see when we get there.

I do know that I’m not likely to do Climb to the Clouds or Flattest Century next year. I’m more interested in riding for fun again. Perhaps doing some different events will renew my interest, although that means selling my buddies on the idea or somehow finding my own transportation to those events.

If I do ride, I’ve got three significant milestones coming up. Assuming it holds together, I should pass 20,000 miles on the Plastic Bullet, which is quite a nice accomplishment. And if I somehow put 3,500 miles down next year, I will break 40,000 miles since I took cycling up again back in 2000. That would be nice, but right now hitting stretch mileage goals is at the absolute bottom of my priority list. And of course there’s my 12th Pan-Mass Challenge, where I’ll surpass $75,000 in lifetime fundraising for cancer research.

But now that the season’s over, I’m done pushing myself. I’ll ride a few miles if and when I feel like it, and spend the next four months thinking about next spring, coming up with new rides and new ways to enjoy time in the saddle.

Time for an update on all the news since the PMC.

First was Jay’s annual Labor Day BBQ and ride up Mount Wachusett (GPS log). The ride was pretty fun; after the hill climb, we rode out to Comet Pond and back, but we didn’t stop because Jay was (as usual) stressed to get home before his party guests started arriving. The downside was that I started feeling horribly sick toward the end of the day, which was made all the worse because I was dependent on Jay for a ride home.

The following weekend was the Flattest Century, down in southeastern Mass. While okay, it’s never been my favorite ride, and this year it was made worse because I was sick again: this time *before* the ride. Despite a completely emptied stomach, I managed to finish the ride (GPS log), but it was a titanic struggle. Like CttC, I’m not sure whether I’ll be back for this one next year or not.

Then came Hub on Wheels, the city of Boston’s big organized ride. The weather was almost perfect for this 50-mile ride (GPS log). I only wish some of my friends would come out for this one, since it covers a lot of the parts of Boston that I love riding in, and most of my buddies never ride in town.

And a week after that was my final big ride of the year: a 115-mile jaunt with Paul and Noah that began in Wellesley, then ran southwest into Rhode Island, then crossed over into Connecticut before returning home again (GPS log). The upside was that I realized two longstanding desires: to do my first tri-state ride, and to visit the place known as Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg. The downside was that we had sporadic rain, and my GPS ran out of juice toward the end and stopped recording data. But overall it was a good way to get in the mileage I needed to close the year.

Details of that can wait, as I’ll do a whole separate post summarizing my 2010-2011 season.

One odd thing was how the last two rides ended. After Hub on Wheels, I came home, passed out on the bed for about an hour, then got up and went into the living room. I was doing something at my desk when I heard the characteristic sudden hiss of an inner tube bursting. When I investigated, I found a puncture near the valve stem. Thankfully, it hadn’t let go during the ride, but waited until just afterward, while the bike was just sitting idly in my apartment.

Then, after our tri-state ride I loaded my bike onto Noah’s car and we set out toward Boston. We hadn’t left the parking lot when we heard that same noise. Another tube burst, and again it was at the valve stem (although my rear tire, rather than the front). And again, it was just after I’d finished an important ride, when the bike wasn’t being used or even touched. Ironically, only five minutes earlier Paul had observed that we’d gotten through a 115-mile ride without anyone flatting…

So that’s how the last bit of summer trickled away. Stay tuned for my end of season summary coming up next!

Some interesting stuff that shouldn’t wait for the release of my 2011 PMC ride report.

First and most importantly is that the PMC home page features a photo of me putting the hammer down during last weekend’s Pan-Mass Challenge. I was absolutely floored, because in a field of 5,200 riders it’s rare enough to have one’s picture taken, much less selected for inclusion in the post-ride photo montage!

On top of that, there are so many things about that photo that blow me away. It’s actually a good picture of me, wearing this year’s event jersey. And the jersey’s properly zipped up, a pro move that I teased my buddy Noah about a couple weeks ago. It’s a picture of intensity, with a pained grimace on the guy behind me. I’m down in the drops, leading a paceline, both of which are somewhat rare events. I didn’t even think I’d seen any event photographers on the course! If you look carefully, you’ll notice that it’s the biggest photo in the whole collage, and I’m given more prominent placement and a larger picture than Lance Armstrong and Senator John Kerry! And damn if I don’t have nice legs, too!

So yeah, when my buddy Dave Long pointed that out, I pretty much flipped my shit. Huge moment of pride, excitement, and amusement. Hopefully I’ll be able to obtain the original.

Next items are a couple of new purchases.

The first is a replacement rim for my rear wheel. Two days before the PMC, I found cracks in the rim of the Ksyrium SL that I run. So at the last second, I went to Back Bay Bikes and one of the mechanics let me borrow one of his (personal) wheels to ride the PMC with. I guess that deserves a paragraph in and of itself.

But a few days ago I got my rebuilt Ksyrium back. You might remember that I had a warranty replacement of that wheel two years ago. While they would have done a second replacement, the wheel was two months out of warranty, so I had to foot the bill to repair it. But now she’s back and hopefully will last. I wish I knew why I’m so tough on rear wheels, tho; I’ve destroyed two Ultegra and two Ksyrium SL rear wheels.

I also received the new Shimano cycling sandals I’d ordered. I’ve used two identical pairs of sandals since I started riding back in 2000, and I wore them into the ground because they don’t make that model anymore. However, one of them literally fell apart after this year’s Climb to the Clouds, so I ordered a pair of Shimano’s current model: SH-SD66.

Any time you change anything related to the contact points between you and the bike—hands, shoes, or seat—you risk screwing things up. I’ve only taken a couple rides, but so far they feel good. The most noticeable change is that the soles are stiffer, which is good, since I could feel exactly where the cleat was on my old sandals. Of course, it remains to be seen whether that stiffness is permanent or just a factor of the shoes being new, but I’m hopeful enough to retire the old ones and order a second pair to keep in rotation.

Final item is an interesting article about what it takes to be a pro cyclist, and how integral suffering is to cycling, whether one be a pro or just a neighborhood speedster. You might be interested in the whole article, but here are a couple choice citations that resonated with me:

Everything about cycling is contained in that gesture, including its reigning truism: to race bicycles is to drink greedily from a bottomless chalice of agony. The sport and its heroes are only knowable, and then just barely, once you come to understand that suffering is cycling’s currency. And what that currency buys is the occasional—the very, very occasional—moment of exquisite glory.

The first thing you notice about professional cyclists is that, with few exceptions, they appear to live their internal lives in a heavily padlocked tomb of mental anguish. They are at once astonishingly young and improbably ancient, a result of the fact that they are paid for their agony. They are modern-day ascetics, working in the open-air monastery of the mountains of Europe, with helmets as tonsures, spandex as robes.

There is thus a detachment in their manner that suggests the real world—our world—exists to them only as storybook legend, trapped as they are in another realm, with no corollaries, no points of contact, no common ground. They experience their lives through the tiny aperture of cycling; the aperture is so small because the light is so fierce. They have felt and done things on the farthest shore of the possible.

The reward for being the best isn’t that one takes *less* pain; rather that one is able to absorb *more*. The nature of this process is revealed at the precise instant that we come to know ourselves completely: we learn how far we can push ourselves, and the true mettle of our character. But that knowledge isn’t properly intelligible, nor is it transferable. To mangle Laurie Anderson’s aphorism, writing about cycling’s meta-state is like dancing about architecture. It is a private knowledge, forged in pain’s stables, and belongs to men who are not served by articulating it.

There’s no outward sign that [the cyclist] is one of the best athletes on earth. If you came across him shopping for a Billy bookcase at IKEA, you’d assume he had just returned from an island survival challenge, which he lost. Badly.

Right now my life consists of work, cycling, fundraising, and occasional sleep, so my periodic updates this time of year tend to cover a lot of ground… like this one, which covers the past month.

July was a memorable month, but not for good reasons. Although I usually spend most of the Fourth of July holiday on the bike, with one of those days comprising a century ride, this year a terrible cold hit me Friday afternoon and kept me housebound the entire holiday weekend. Pure suckage!

The next weekend I had to go up to Maine, and convinced myself that I could get some training in by riding the 70 miles from Portland to Augusta. That ride wound up being really difficult, thanks to my lingering illness, a 25-35 mph headwind that hadn’t been forecast, and a mile-long section of muddy dirt road up and over a big hill in Sabbatus. But at least I managed to get some time in the saddle…

Which I needed, because the weekend after that was the CRW’s Climb to the Clouds, a very hilly century that goes up Mt. Wachusett, and is a traditional warmup for the Pan-Mass Challenge.

So CttC was just brutal. Combine my reduced training this year with oppressively humid 96-degree blazing sun and the CRW’s extremely limited idea of what constitutes a supported ride, and you can begin to imagine how difficult it was. Thankfully, I can say that my age wasn’t a factor, as my three buddies (all 17+ years younger) also concluded that they never wanted to do that ride again.

The ironic thing is that I spent half the day hammering, thinking I was chasing them, when actually I was ahead of them. Although I let them go ahead after the first 10 miles, they stopped at a water stop I skipped. I was surprised to see them ride past me in Princeton, where I stopped but they did not. So I got back on the bike and chased, unknowingly passing them *again* when they stopped at a convenience store. So I beat them over the mountain, and they only caught up with me after I’d spent 20 minutes at the next water stop, 53 miles in.

And as I predicted last year, the summit road was closed to us for the third year in a row, which was disappointing.

Toward the end of the ride, I was nauseous and unsafely overheated, and kept pouring water over my head to cool off. I stopped at the little Chinese grocery in West Concord and picked up their last two bottles of water, only to discover on gulping it down that it was seltzer! I sipped what my stomach could tolerate and poured the rest over my head and limped to the finish, where I pretty much just collapsed. But not before getting shit from the ride organizers for asking if I could have some ice. I was too destroyed to muster any argument when the guys decided to go home early rather than take the traditional postride dip in Walden Pond.

Definitely one of my worst days on the bike. There damned well better be some training benefit, after all that suffering!

And to make matters worse, my brand new $700 bike computer / GPS failed to record the quarter of the ride that included Mt. Wachusett and the following descent (GPS data). I had already left its heart rate monitor at home, because it had been malfunctioning. At least Garmin is replacing the HRM strap; hopefully the new one will last longer than the first one.

And then yesterday Boston tied the second hottest temperature ever recorded in the city’s 140 years of keeping records. Thinking I couldn’t get into much trouble in just one hour, I biked home from work in 103°F / 40°C heat. Against a convection oven-like 25 mph headwind, over three sections of stripped/grooved pavement along one of Boston’s biggest and fastest 6-lane arterials, and then stupidly up and over Dorchester Heights, just for fun.

That kind of heat will raise your heart rate 10 bpm no matter what you’re doing, and by the time I was done my heart was pounding and I was feeling very lightheaded. Kinda scary! Hopefully this stretch of intense heat will break and the weather will be more forgiving for the upcoming PMC ride!

And that brings me around to the tiny list of positive things that happened this month. First, Garmin did replace my problem HRM strap, and the new one seems to be functioning well; tho I probably will use it sparingly until PMC weekend.

Second, a question I’d sent in to the RoadBikeRider online magazine was published this week. The question was about how to fit a cooldown, stretching, shower, and recovery meal all into the half hour after stopping that is the optimal window for those activities. You can see the full question and RBR’s response here.

And, finally, the news that really matters: PMC fundraising. Once I finally started getting fundraising letters out, the money came in quite readily. I’ve surpassed the minimum and made the Heavy Hitter level for the sixth year in a row, and have settled at $7,200 for the moment, which is quite satisfactory, although there’ll be additional donations coming in over the next month or two.

Naturally, if you haven’t made your donation yet, please do so here.

And PMC weekend is only two weeks away. I’d normally be excited, but after the difficulties of the Maine ride and CttC and this brutal heat, I’m a little gun-shy about looking forward to riding. It hasn’t been a great year for any of my cycling buddies; just ask Lynda, who canceled her plans to do the epic 745-mile PBP ride; or Paul, who bought a pricey new bike only to have Jay destroy it by driving his truck over it on the way to the 150-mile Harpoon B2B ride that was supposed to be the highlight of his season.

The bad juju is in full force this year.

So we’ll see. There’s two more weekends before the PMC, and I don’t have anything special planned for them. Hopefully there’ll be a couple Quad rides and some hill repeats in there, and then a relaxing, rewarding PMC ride once the calendar turns to August.

Hopefully…

This is the tenth and final installment of my series of hints, tips, pointers, and advice for other Pan-Mass Challenge charity riders. These are the things I've learned during more than a decade of participating in the PMC.

Remember that the full list of posts is permanently available online at http://www.ornoth.com/bicycling/hints.php

Whether you're a first-timer or a longtime veteran, may you find these ideas useful, and I hope you have a wonderful PMC experience!

So far we've covered registration, fundraising, training, packing, and riding... All that's left is what to do once the event is over: Post-Ride.

• Write up a ride report when you're done. Not only will it preserve your memories of the ride, but it'll be of interest to your sponsors and other riders.
• Send a post-ride update to all your sponsors, letting them know how it went, what it was like, and that you might be asking for another donation next year...
• Be sure to look for yourself in the official event photos, which appear on the PMC website incrementally over the weeks that follow the ride.
• Also look for yourself in event photos posted to the pan_mass group on Flickr, and add your own photos to the collection!
• Post your photos to Flickr, videos to YouTube, etc., and tag them PMC, panmass, or something similar so that other interested folks can find them.
• Keep fundraising! You've got until October to chase down those people who promised a donation but haven't done so yet. Send out one final reminder as the fundraising deadline approaches.
• To cap the year, consider attending the check presentation ceremony, which usually takes place just after Thanksgiving.
• Around the end of the year, enjoy your copy of the annual PMC Yearbook, and share the link to the online PDF with your sponsors.
• Turn around and start all over again with the "Registration" section, because it's time to reserve your hotel room(s) for next year's ride!

My third century of the year was actually a double metric: the 130-mile Outriders ride from Boston to Provincetown.

I started pretty promptly at 6am and rolled out with the second group out of the chute. I hung with them for the first 30 miles, even taking a pull or two, but decided after the first water stop in Halifax to let them go and set my own pace.

For the next 100 miles, I solo’ed the whole ride, virtually never seeing another rider except one or two at water stops. The cloudy and damp conditions we started in gave way to hot, direct sunshine shortly before I hit the Sagamore Bridge in Sandwich, and beat down pretty hard at times during the 70-mile haul down the cape.

My legs lasted pretty well until Yarmouth, about 80 miles in. From there on it was a slog. Delirium set in about the time I reached Wellfleet; when I turned onto Long Pond Road, which kicked off a final 30 miles spent reciting “Oh Long John” to myself. At the time, it seemed to capture my situation very eloquently. I’d later end the day with a reprise when the return ferry docked in Boston: Oh Long Wharf!

Despite really struggling the last 30 miles, no one passed me except for two guys who skipped the final water stop while I was resting there. In the end, I arrived at 3pm and was the 12th finisher out of nearly 200 starters! And despite riding solo, by keeping my rest breaks short I cut a whole hour and a half off of last year’s ride.

Finishing that early left me five and a half hours until the ferry ride home. First I went down to the harbor and washed some of the sweat, sunblock, and road grime off. Then, having expended over 5,000 kCal, I had a big postride meal at Bayside Betsy’s. I returned to the finishing area to watch stragglers come in, and helped pack up the tents, chairs, and other supplies. Then, after a quick side trip to a convenience store, I was off to the ferry.

Overall, it was a nice day, even if I didn’t have any of my buddies to share the ride with. The huge miles of solo riding really took a lot out of me, and it took a couple days to recuperate. But it was nice to be one of the first to finish what will probably be my longest one-day ride of the year, and it was awesome being back on the cape again. I look forward to hitting Provincetown again in six weeks when I finish my eleventh Pan-Mass Challenge.

Here’s the GPS log.

This is the next to last posting in my series of hints, tips, pointers, and advice for other Pan-Mass Challenge charity riders. These are the things I've learned during more than a decade of participating in the PMC.

The full list of posts will be compiled and permanently available online at http://www.ornoth.com/bicycling/hints.php

Whether you're a first-timer or a longtime veteran, may you find these ideas useful, and I hope you have a wonderful PMC experience!

Having just returned from the Outriders ride from Boston to Provincetown, it seems appropriate that today I'm going to talk about the second half of the PMC, which covers much of the same territory: Sunday: Bourne to Provincetown!

• Sunday, wear whatever jersey you want. If you're riding with a team, they usually wear their team jerseys on Sunday. I usually wear the jersey from my first PMC.
• There's no organized start on Sunday; plan to leave MMA around 5am.
• Don't believe anyone who thinks that Cape Cod if flat. There are hills. You'll see. Especially Provincetown, Truro, and the Route 6 Service Road in Sandwich, which has rollers you'll want to shoot over, if you can.
• There are usually ice pops at the Brewster (Nickerson State Park) water stop.
• After you leave Wellfleet, expect a brutal headwind on Route 6 all the way to Provincetown. If there's no wind on Route 6, don't worry: you'll run into it when you turn back from Race Point. It's nice to merge in with a paceline for those segments.
• Don't be fooled when you see the Pilgrim Monument and the "Entering Provincetown" sign. There's still several more miles as you loop out to Race Point and back into town.
• When you make the turn at Race Point, zip up your jersey and keep your eyes peeled for the event photographers!
• When parking in the bike line at Provincetown, sling your bike over onto the far side of the fence to avoid having it buried beneath other bikes or having to park at the way far end of the bike line. Loop your handlebars over the fence to make sure it doesn't fall down the other side!
• If you're meeting someone in Provincetown, make sure they're on the road early. Route 6 backs up something fierce on Sunday.
• Be warned that Provincetown has notoriously bad cell phone coverage.
• Don't bring soap into the showers at Provincetown; they provide special biodegradable soaps, since the showers run off into the harbor.
• You can wade in the ocean near the causeway behind the bike line in Provincetown, if you want to cool off.

Look for my tenth and final posting next week, when I share my experience on what you want to do post-ride!