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.