The Low Lows of Randonneuring Make for High Highs

 

          Not every challenging ride is epic. But near-epic rides matter too.

          I relearned this lesson on this year’s Small Town 300K, on May 21, 2022, an out-and-back from Indianapolis, where I live, to Seymour, about 90 miles to the south. This ride did not register as high on my scale of difficult rides as the time I rode through a tornado at the end of a 600K in Wisconsin or that time on London-Edinburgh-London in 2009 when the temperature dropped to the upper 30s in Scotland (in July), and it rained so hard that I could not see for hours.

          But it did register.

          The first unusual thing about this ride is that there were only two of us on it. I am the RBA, and developed the route almost ten years ago, and have ridden it almost every year since then. For various reasons, no one else in my club signed up to do this ride. Sarah Rice had driven down from Chicago the night before to do the ride. I had never met her before.

          Sarah turned out to be one of the more remarkable riders I have ever met on the road. She had only done a couple of randonneuring rides, but she had been a Category 2 racer, and has a string of criterium victories. And she is working on the support crew for Phil Fox’s Ride Across America (RAAM) race this summer.

          My first impressions of Sarah were of someone completely immersed in the world of cycling. She punctuated every other sentence with the exclamation, “Dude,” and she was full of details from her own racing and from Phil Fox’s upcoming ride.

          In addition, Sarah had the ability I have often encountered in serious athletes to talk about the physical aspects of the sport in frank terms. She referred to her seat-post bag as her “beetlebutt,” and she could talk about the virtues of different chamois dimensions, and how they affected one’s undercarriage, in very direct ways. Endurance sports require one to confront the body, with its strengths and weaknesses, ugliness and beauty, but my Protestant reticence prevents me from speaking so directly. I admire people who can.

          But, as we rode along, I learned that Sarah also has a Ph.D. in Biophysics and had been a professor in the medical school at Northwestern University. Five years ago, she left her tenured position to become a Physical Therapist. She seems mostly to have made this radical career transition out of a desire to help others more directly.

          One of the pleasures of a long ride, I find, is peeling back the layers on other people’s experiences and attitudes and discovering the complexity you might initially have overlooked.

          We were an odd pair on the road. I am an experienced randonneur, having done three consecutive PBPs (Paris-Brest-Paris), beginning in 2011, but I have never raced a bicycle. I come out of the plodding tradition of commuting and touring. My riding motto comes from friends in Seattle, “Relentless Forward Motion,” and I have never aspired to win a contest on the road.

          Sarah could have left me in the dust at any moment and finished the ride hours before me. I think she stuck with me because I knew the route, and because we knew there would be some challenges ahead.

          I knew in advance about the first challenge, but I wasn’t sure how to get around it. A bridge over a creek was closed for reconstruction 75 miles into the ride, and the official state detour took you onto Interstate 65. That wasn’t happening, and I thought there might be enough left of the bridge for us to get over it by bike.

          When we got to that point in the ride, however, two motorcyclists told us the bridge was completely closed, and they directed us on a three-mile detour. This part of Indiana is quite lumpy and circumventing a creek crossing means climbing up onto a ridge, with 18-20 percent grades. The detour was completely manageable, but it is not the sort of thing you want to do often on a long ride.

          After this detour, we had smooth sailing to the turn-around point, in Seymour. After we turned around, though, we watched the sky grow increasingly dark. The storm hit about 10 miles into our return.

          We did not ever get the sort of helmet-thumping rain that thunderstorms sometimes bring, but it did rain moderately for a couple of hours and there was some lightning. More importantly, though, we went through the kind of massive headwind that threatens to throw you off your bike until you shift your weight and adjust your direction. If I had not experienced what actual tornadoes look and feel like in Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, I might have thought this was one too.

          Eventually, we turned north, and the wind abated. From this point on, however, the road was strewn with branches and downed trees. At many points, we passed places where tree trunks had been freshly cut up to clear the road, with logs stacked up on both shoulders.

          When we got near the place of our earlier detour, a sizeable tree lay across the road, and a crew was working with chainsaws to clear it. Sarah and I managed to hoist our bikes over the tree trunk and its many branches {see first picture}.

          As we were climbing over the downed tree, I asked a member of the crew, who turned out to be conservation officer with the Hoosier National Forest, if there were any other way around the closed bridge. He told me that the only other way around the bridge was longer and hillier than the way we had come. BUT, he said, we could probably make our way through the construction site, as sandbags had been placed in the stream.

          And, so, that is what we did—we forded the stream. (See second picture.} At one point, Sarah put her whole shoe in the stream, and our passage was quite muddy. For the rest of our ride, we looked as though we had been through a moderately wet cyclocross race. But we made it.

            That was not the end of our adventure, however. About ten miles up the road, we came to a place at the top of one of the longest climbs where a tree had come down across the road and had taken down a live electric line. A police officer was stationed on the road to turn everyone away from the danger.

          Because I have a long history of making my way through apparently closed roads, I asked the officer if there were not some way to get around the closure. She said “no.”  She had a gun. We obeyed.

          And so we went back down the hill we had just climbed, and took a second detour of about six miles, which again entailed quite a bit of climbing. It was a beautiful road, but it was not entirely pleasant to do those extra miles. Again, though, we managed.

          During the detour, Sarah began to worry that we might not finish the ride in time. She said she was willing to cut her time in the two remaining controls to a minimum. And, she went on to say, even if we did not get credit for the ride, the experience would still be valuable.

          Because I knew that we would soon leave the heavily forested section of the ride, and would experience less road debris, and because we had nearly three hours in hand before the detour, I knew that we were not in any real danger of failing to finish the ride in time. Unless another massive storm came through.

          When we got to the next stop, in Nashville, the two overnight gas stations we have sometimes used for controls were both closed. Sarah spotted an ice cream place across the street that was open, and so we went there for water.

          It turned out that the ice cream place also had real food, and by this time Sarah had realized that we had plenty of time to finish. So, we sat down for our only real meal of the day. I had macaroni and cheese with pulled pork and Sarah had a chicken sandwich. Both were excellent.

          These are the moments I cherish most in randonneuring: You’ve endured some period of difficulty, and then enjoy some period of pleasure. I remember once riding through a difficult night in Germany and coming to a bakery in the early morning. The bakery didn’t open for another hour, but the baker saw us peering longingly through the window. She opened up the shop and gave us our choice of the wonderful pastries ready for the new day. It was delightful.

          In randonneuring, we journey from islands of stress and despair to islands of comfort and joy. And the comfort and joy we feel are all the greater for the stress and despair we endured.

          Life itself is like that too.

          The rest of our trip was uneventful. A light tailwind gave us a push home, and we finished with more than two hours to spare, pleased to have endured the trees and detours this ride had thrown at us.

          Beyond the usual lessons of perseverance in the face of setbacks, this ride also reminded me of the value of companionship. I belong to the “solitude is not loneliness” school, and, because I am at the slower end of the spectrum, I am used to riding hours and days on my own. And I generally enjoy that.

          But it is also good to get to know other people, and to see how they deal with the challenges of the road. Early on in the ride, I realized that I had lost a screw on one of my cleats, and this was making it difficult to click in and out. At the first control, Sarah opened up her beetlebutt and revealed a Russian-doll-like system of interlocking bags and boxes. She handed me a box containing various small parts, and enough spare screws for several cleats.

          Sarah told me that she was even better equipped for medical emergencies. She probably carries a defibrillator in her small beetlebutt.

          In addition, Sarah projects no fear, and she took each of the challenges of the ride in stride. Massive wind and lightning? No problem. Climbing over fallen trees and fording streams? Piece of cake. Unexpected detours with additional climbing? Let’s go!

          I, too, try to lead a life without fear, and this is one of the values I appreciate most in randonneuring. But it’s a lesson that one must continually relearn, and it does not always come easily.

          For this reason, it is always inspiring to see others model the kind of behavior we hope to achieve.

         

         

 

                

Flèche Report

Sagamores of the Wabash, 2022

 

For the Indiana Randonneurs team, “Sagamores of the Wabash,” the 2022 Ohio flèche was a wonderful blend of old and new. This was the fourth time we sent a team to Ohio under this name*; four of our six members are veterans of both the fleche and PBP and two are new to the sport.

Steve and Lydia Trott piloted a tandem, affectionately known as “Champaigne Storm.” Lydia and Steve did their first flèche and LEL on that same tandem in 2017, and they both finished PBP in 2019 on single machines. In recent years, Lydia has introduced randonneuring to northern Indiana, and has brought the club into the Gravel Age.

Kenney Smith finished PBP in 2015 and has been a member of all four of our flèche teams. Kenney is world-famous for his cycling adventures in sub-freezing temperatures, and for his bottomless box of spare parts. On a previous flèche, Kenney saved a team member’s ride by producing just the right-sized chain-link from this box in the dead of night.

I (Bill Watts) finished PBP with Kenney in 2015 and with Lydia and Steve in 2019. The four of us have had many adventures together and get along well with one another.

This year, we were joined by two new team members, Ted Krischak and Joe Van Denburg, both from Terre Haute, on the western edge of Indiana, along the banks of the Wabash River. Ted has single-handedly gotten the club’s electronic life in order and has already developed permanents and brevets for the club. In his relatively short time with the club, Joe has shown remarkable mechanical dexterity and an equally remarkable concern for the well-being of his fellow riders.  While this was their first overnight randonneuring event, Ted and Joe are both strong riders.

The six of us made a cohesive and good-spirited team. We had no mechanicals on our ride together—not even a flat tire—but we did have one significant challenge: the wind. The wind was out of the northeast and east for all of our ride, and we were riding east and sometimes north. For long stretches of time, the wind was at or over 20 mph, and it never fully let up. Even when the wind blew against our shoulders, rather than our faces, it was a struggle.

But this is also where the team shone. At our first control, fifty miles in, we made some rough calculations and realized that if the wind remained so strong (and it did!), we might not have enough time to finish. When we returned to the road, we instinctively formed a double pace line, protecting against wind that was at about 10 o’clock. After working together against the wind for a few hours, we had no real concerns about time. It was beautiful.

Our route for this year, as in past years, made maximal use of off-road trails. We took the Fall Creek Trail out of Indianapolis, and later joined up with the Cardinal Greenway, which runs from Muncie to Richmond, on the Ohio border. Once we got to Dayton, we entered Ohio’s wonderful system of connected trails, through Xenia and most of the way into Columbus. I especially enjoy trails on the fleche, as they take away the worry of traffic and allow you to enjoy more fully the company of others.

We did, however, have one moment of excitement and alarm. Just as we were about to enter the trail in Dayton, we saw a police officer take down the rider of a motorized trail bike with a taser. The rider landed on the asphalt with a loud bang and was immediately handcuffed and carried away. As we entered the trail, a police officer warned us to be careful. He said that motorcycle riders had taken to riding the trails at night  without lights.

For a few minutes, I worried that we were entering Mad Max territory, and that, at any moment, a motorcycle would slam into us in the dark. But our subsequent ride proved peaceful and uneventful. And, to its credit, the team took it all in stride.

Thus, we arrived in Columbus, a little tired and a little weary of the wind, but grateful for our time together and satisfied with our accomplishment. We were immediately embraced by the warm hospitality of Lucy and David Buzzee, and enjoyed meeting up with friends, old and new.

I rode my first fleche with David Buzzee on a team organized by Toshiyuki (“Toshi”) Nemoto in Ohio in 2014. I have long admired David’s enthusiasm for randonneuring in general, and for this event in particular. In 2018, he rode the event on another team with Toshi, and then was back at his home to greet other teams when they finished. David’s dedication to sustaining the fleche in Ohio is stellar.

But this year, I got an even better appreciation of the extent of David’s generosity. The transmission failed on the 18-year-old vehicle I left in Columbus to transport myself and the Trotts home. While we were discussing the logistics of getting ourselves home, David offered to drive the three of us and our bicycles all the way back to the start in Indianapolis. And he did. And that was part of the beauty of this year’s flèche.

During a time when pandemic, war and fascist movements roil our country, the fleèhe gave us a moment of tranquility, ease, and fellowship. Let us bottle that feeling and drink again next year.

 

*”Sagamore of the Wabash” is an honorary title conferred by the Governor on citizens of note in Indiana. “Sagamore” is an Anglicized version of a Native American word for “chief,” and the Wabash is a celebrated river in Indiana. The “Sagamore of the Wabash” award is Indiana’s version of the better known “Kentucky Colonel.”  While the Governor of Indiana has not yet recognized our team, we think he should.