When he rolls over the line, some high school cheerleaders are clapping and pumping fists in the air.
“Good job,” the cheerleaders say. “Way to go!”
“Thanks!” he says and begins to well up with tears. He’s been riding 10 hours a week for 2 months getting ready for this day, and he sure enough took a pounding out there, but all that’s in the rearview mirror now. He made it.
He rolls to a stop and with much pain gets off his bike and looks at his cyclecomputer: 100.4 miles. A little extra distance, and his elapsed time is 6 hours and 32 minutes, almost half an hour better than even his grandest dream time.
He hears his name now and turns to the voice: Maria, his fiancée. She hugs him and says, “You made it! I’m so proud of you.”
Mark grins at her so hugely that his cheeks hurt. He loves her so much, which he tells her and hugs her and weeps with joy.
“Are you okay, Mark?”
“Hell yeah,” Mark says. He holds up his head and wipes his eyes and scans the busy scene in the finish area, the riders, the families, the band playing in the tent. “Next time, I’m going to do this in under 6 hours.”
The Century Rider
Ah, the axle around which our sport revolves, the bottom bracket around which our crank turns, the grease in our cable housings, the carbon fiber in our down tube, that most essential cyclist to the sport of cycling, that person you see with the Trek Madone and the yellow/gold jersey from an online merchant which we would like to mention but probably can’t—yes, folks, it’s the century rider!
Is that you? Probably is. Because almost without exception, that’s the kind of cyclist we’re talking about when we’re talking fanatical cyclists.
Now, it may seem to people immersed in cycling that the century rider is a cyclist not indeed worthy of definition, because we all know what one is, but just in case: A century rider is someone who trains for and participates in organized rides of 100 miles, which are called centuries, or rides of 100 kilometers, which are called metric centuries. The idea behind this pursuit is simple: Set a goal, the century event, and this serves as the excuse to ride a lot of hours every week in preparation for it! If you can find one thing wrong with riding a bunch of hours, there is probably something wrong with you.
The century rider can exist across a broad range of ages. You’re likely to see people from 13 years old to nearly 90 years old on the roads of a century, but within this range of ages, the century rider takes two distinct forms. One form treats the century ride as if it were a race, and this person is very uptight about the exact time and order of finish. This person may do the same century 10 years in a row and judge his or her overall happiness or sadness for the year in terms of the time posted. This same person may ride through a full century course and at the finish, if the cyclecomputer registers 99.1 miles, this person will ride laps around the parking lot till the computer reads exactly 100.
The other form of century rider participates in the same event but doesn’t give a hoot about elapsed time and stops at all the aid stations and enjoys the baked goods and free sports drinks and so on. Same event. Different mind-set. It is impossible to say which group has the more positive experience at the century. For one person’s brutal experience is the same as another person’s mellow day on the bike—and it doesn’t matter, really, because most century rides raise money for charity, so the more people toe the line, as it were, the more money the ride raises.
We have to thank century riders, too, which means we’re really thanking ourselves, because these tens of thousands of fanatical recreational cyclists are the good citizens who buy higher-end bikes and higher-end wheels and shoes and so forth, and the larger the market for these nifty items, the better these nifty items will be. And the cheaper they’ll be, too! Tell me what’s not to like about that?
the RAGBRAI Rider: DAVE
So many bikes on the ground that you can hardly see the grass.
Riders coming.
Riders going.
THOUSANDS UPON THOUSANDS OF US
Behold the naked man in Iowa!
This is day 5 of RAGBRAI—the famous 7-day mass bike tour from west to east across Iowa—and while Dave is only one rider among the 10,000-or-so riders participating in this tour, he is not the only naked cyclist enjoying a skinny-dip in this wonderful, bubbling stream in Iowa farm country. It’s midafternoon and shady here in the stream, with a few pleasant shafts of sunlight shining through the leaves and striking the glistening shoulders of cyclists, dozens of them. On the stream’s banks: cycling clothing in heaps. Beyond that, against the trees and on the ground, there are bicycles by the dozens. On the road a hundred yards away rolls the longest steady stream of cyclists probably the world has ever seen—thousands and thousands of bikes on their way across Iowa. It’s amazing. It’s astonishing. Here in the stream itself, the way Dave’s thinking, RAGBRAI might as well be Woodstock. Dave loves it! He feels so free.
That’s what he loves about RAGBRAI the most—the free feeling. He takes his time getting through the daily mileage, too, about 70 miles, because why hurry? Which is to say there are plenty of hammerheads on RAGBRAI, plenty of hard-core animal types on their bikes, people who rise at the crack of dawn and are done with their daily mileage before noon, but Dave says to hell with all that! He stays up late every night and drinks beer and meets people and macks on single women whenever he can find them. During the day, he rolls about 10 miles at a time and takes a break and then rolls 10 miles again.
And fancy that! At the end of a 10-mile segment, he has found a stream.
Near Dave stands another naked man—an older guy, very lean, with a wry grin.
The old guy asks, “How many years you been doing this?”
“This is my fourth year in a row,” Dave says.
“I don’t mean RAGBRAI,” the older guy says.
“Well, what do you mean?”
“I mean, how long have you been a naturist?”
“A naturist?”
“You know, someone who is comfortable without clothes.”
“You mean a nudist?”
The old guy grins and says, “Why, yes!”
Dave looks around and notices that in fact he and the older guy are the only people in the stream with their personalities hanging out. Everyone else is wearing a swimsuit!
Dave sinks into the water and feels an acute urge to get back on his bike and maybe pedal 20 miles before he stops the next time.
On the third day of the AIDS/Life Cycle ride, the 7-day AIDS research fund-raising tour that goes from San Francisco to Los Angeles every year, Amy rolls along in the pack and digs in her jersey pocket for an energy gel—and doesn’t pay attention to the rider in front of her, who brakes.
She slams into his rear wheel with her front wheel and tumbles into the ditch. She sees her bike next to her, front wheel spinning, spokes glinting in the California midday sun, and she takes a long breath and moves her arms and legs to see if she’s okay. She’s not hurt too badly. Forty-seven years she’s been around. She’s borne children and been married and divorced a couple of times and has lost jobs and found jobs and lost friends to death and found new ones who love life. A little tumble on her bicycle can’t stop her.
On the road, her friend Dale is yelling, “Amy, are you okay? Oh my God!”
Dale is in his forties, on the regular-beer side of a cycling build, and he’s been Amy’s best friend all through the training for this event and all through the event.
Amy says, “I’m fine.” She sits up and can see blood dripping from her right knee. “I think.”
Dale climbs into the ditch with her and asks, “Can you get up?”
Amy nods and extends her hand to Dale, who hoists her up and, ouch, her knee’s taken a decent whacking indeed. Dale helps her out of the ditch the rest of the way—each step is like a knife in Amy’s knee—and she begins welling up with tears. She has raised sponsorship money for this event for months—almost $10,000, money that will go t
oward AIDS research—and, like so many other riders on this tour, she has lost her share of friends to AIDS. So for Amy, this isn’t just a bike tour with friends and fun times camping in school gymnasiums. This is a seriously meaningful event, and for this reason, because she is in extreme pain and is thinking maybe her tour is over, she starts sobbing.
Dale holds her. “You’ll be all right, dear.”
Amy says, “I feel like I’m letting people down.”
Dale attempts a joke. “You’re not letting anybody down. You fell down.”
Amy does laugh a wee bit and takes a couple of steps. Admittedly, these steps would be awkward with cycling shoes on her feet no matter if her knee were trashed or in pristine condition. She says, “I guess if I can walk, I can ride.”
Dale says, “That’s my girl!” He goes into the ditch and extracts Amy’s bike and brings it to her and spins the wheels.
“The bike’s okay,” Dale says.
Amy takes her water bottle out of the bottle cage—odd: why didn’t the bottle fall out in the crash?—and squirts some water on her knee. Not too bad. She’ll survive. She has to survive. That’s the whole point of this tour, to survive and raise money and awareness so more people can survive.
She slings a leg over the top tube of her bike and pushes off and clips her feet in the pedals and starts rolling. She pedals a few strokes—not too bad.
“Let’s get our asses moving,” Amy says.
Dale rides up to her and says, “You’re an inspiration to me, Amy.”
“You inspire me, too, Dale.”
Thousands of riders are on the road, everyone here because they believe in the cause and believe, one day, there will be a cure for AIDS. Amy thinks, Hell yes, this is inspiring.
The Charity Rider
We have century rides, which most of the time raise money for fine charities, and then we have mass tour rides…
…which not only raise money but manufacture a sort of wholesome Woodstock-on-wheels environment for cyclists in numbers of 500 or 1,000 or 5,000 or even 10,000 or more who roll 70 or 80 miles a day and camp in fields or sleep on the floors of high school gymnasiums and in general have the times of their lives. These mass rides attract a special breed of rider, the type who enjoys the party that goes along with the ride as much as the ride itself. And by “party,” I don’t mean staying up late at the bar and doing shots of tequila (although some of that happens on the overnights of these rides, too). Instead I mean the partylike atmosphere: Huge numbers of riders rolling down the road together for days on end, people from different parts of the country making lasting friendships, people falling in love, all of it happening in a two-wheeled environment.
Now, it’s true that in a party atmosphere of hundreds and even thousands of cyclists, bad crashes sometimes occur, and sometimes other nastiness occurs—and certain hard-core roadie types (the official complainers of the cycling world) recommend staying as far away from the carnage as possible. But really, the carnage doesn’t exist, and you’re hard-pressed to find any cyclist with bad things to say about mass tours.
the Challenge Century Rider: KIRA
Expression is a combination of joy and pain. They want the ride to be hard.
Eyes up the road, looking into the next corner the way a hungry person looks at lunch.
THE MOTHERS OF ALL CENTURIES
Kira loves punishment.
Or that’s what she tells people when they ask why she’s out here every year riding the Hundred Hills of Hell Century. One hundred miles. Ten thousand feet of elevation gain. And that’s just one of the events like this that she rides. She loves the rough centuries, the ones with climbing, the double centuries, the double metrics, the ones that ask more of the riders than merely rolling from a starting line to a finish line. Her friends at work—she teaches economics at a community college—don’t get it. They ask, “Why don’t you do something a little less extreme?” Or they say, “You’re not in your twenties anymore.” She wants to say, “Yeah, I’m 45 years old, and my ex has the kids every other weekend. What do you want me to do on my weekends free? Hang out in a bar? Go golfing? Join a quilting society?” But she never says anything like this. She puts her energy into biking and not defending herself to people who don’t understand what makes her tick.
So she’s 72 miles into the Hundred Hills of Hell right now and is riding with a group of guys who seem to be approaching the ride with sanity—in other words, they stopped at the rest stop 10 miles back and filled bottles and peed and had a quick stretch. Lots of crazies on this ride don’t stop at all, the idea being to get a faster elapsed time in the end, but the thing is, if your bottles are empty and you don’t refill them, you will end up cramping and feeling like death. Sure enough, the group she’s in passes other riders one after another—people whose bodies are almost out of gas, slumped over the handlebar, moaning through their pedal strokes.
Kari has no problems at the moment and lets her feelings be known. “I feel great, guys! How about you?”
There are four of them, all strangers to each other, and they all say, “Yep.”
What she likes most about this group—and she notices this kind of thing week after week in these tough centuries—is that nobody treats her like the girl who can ride with the boys. They treat her like a cyclist who can ride with other strong cyclists. She doesn’t normally approve of the word empowerment, on account of it’s way overused, but what the hell: She feels empowered riding with these strong guys because, when you get down to it, this means she has amazing power, too.
One guy says, “This sure beats the shit out of golfing!”
Another guy says, “Or fishing. Can you imagine sitting on our asses in a fishing boat? On a day like this?”
Kira says, “Fishing? I don’t even know what fishing is!”
Everyone has a good laugh, and Kira moves to the front of the group and steps up the tempo just slightly, just enough so it hurts but still feels good. There’s more than 25 tough miles to go, and there’s no point moping all the way to the end.
Is this punishment? No way. It’s freedom.
the Dropped Challenge Century Rider: ANDY
Head down: Universal body expression that stands for “I’m blown.”
Two miles from now, he will blame getting dropped on the extra weight in the saddle bag.
For Andy, the Hundred Hills of Hell constitutes a benchmark for a whole year of cycling and training and sacrifice.
Everything in his life points to this event, the results of which indicate whether it’s been worth it to show that kind of devotion to his sport. But right now, with 15 miles left to go, he feels like his entire year of cycling is flushing down the toilet. He’s cramping everywhere, in the legs, the arms and neck and back, even his fingers. He doesn’t have a drop left in either of his bottles. He is having difficulty breathing. Worse yet, he’s acting like a jackass.
For the last 20 miles or so, he’s been riding with the guy who’s now 50 yards ahead of him on this long climb, but now the guy’s powering away from Andy, looking smaller and smaller up the road with each passing pedal stroke. What happened, the guy was Mr. Happy-Go-Lucky, talking about what a fine event this is and what a nice day-going on and on about it—and finally, Andy couldn’t take it anymore and said, “Listen, will you shut up and ride your bike? I’m riding for my personal best time here.”
The guy was quiet for a moment, then said, “It’s not a race, man. It’s just a century ride with some hills in it. If you want to get in a race, why don’t you get a goddam USA Cycling race license and start racing!” Then the guy rose from the saddle and stomped on the pedals and gapped Andy. Andy tried responding but couldn’t. He was cramping in about 10 places at once.
Now Andy feels desperate and stupid and alone. Down the toilet. Dammit. He’s put everything into this event: hired a fancy online coach and followed the coach’s training regimen to a T, a regimen so brutal it made life lousy for months on end. He’s been grumpy at home and overt
ired and thirsty and hungry and whining about nearly everything. His wife’s been sick of hearing about the Hundred Hills of Hell. His three kids have been tired of hearing about it. Even the people at work have asked him to please not mention the Hundred Hills of Hell or bicycles or bicycle parts or cycling clothing or ailments pertaining to cycling ever again. What’s the reward for all this humiliation and sacrifice? Some random dude in a bike-shop jersey drops him with no problem—and with only a few miles to go? What a waste!
Andy yells, “Sorry, man. I didn’t mean to be a jackass!” He hopes the guy will ease off the gas and ride with him again. But nothing. The guy keeps disappearing up yonder road without looking like he’s putting any effort into it.
“Shit,” Andy says.
Now a group of five cyclists passes him, and the last cyclist in line, a woman with long hair in a ponytail, says, “Excellent day for a ride!”
Andy doesn’t agree. So he doesn’t respond. A year wasted. Damn.
Challenge Century Riders
For some riders, a lot of a good thing is never enough.
Something beyond a mere 100 miles calls to challenge century riders not unlike the way the Sirens once called to Odysseus. These riders want the big one, the standard to which all other epic rides must compare.
What is the ultimate century? First, double the distance to 200 miles, and toss in 20,000 feet of elevation gain. That will about take the kick out of your legs, won’t it? More commonly, the ultimate epic centuries—or challenge centuries, as they are known—do something on the order of 100 miles with 10,000 feet of climbing. And of course the challenge century wouldn’t be truly epic without a truly epic name. Here are some classics: the Assault on Mount Mitchell, Mountains of Misery, Triple Bypass, the Death Ride, Horribly Hilly Hundred. Feel like signing up?
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