New Holland 200K

It was a hot afternoon. Even now, sitting in the house as the last light of the June sunset languidly eases into the horizon, my body radiates heat. It's as if the afternoon sun soaked deep into my flesh the way summer heat soaks into asphalt and concrete and then lingers before it finally releases into cooler evening air.

The morning started off cooler. We met just before dawn. The New Holland 200K is the last 200K of the Pennsylvania 600K that started the day before. Some of the 600K riders who arrived in the night would start at 5:00 am with those of us just riding the 200K.

On the last day of Winter: Lackawanna 200K

The first edge of sunrise lightens the sky. The surrounding woods slowly materializes from the darkness. Close to thirty randonneurs are here, ready to set out on the Lackawanna 200K. Bill, acting as ride organizer, gives the pre-departure briefing. Outside of the Hostel, sharp crisp air reminds me that it is the last day of Winter, not yet Spring.  It's been a long time since I rode a Pennsylvania brevet. My mind wanders. Standing here, in this familiar setting, on the landing outside the hostel as the dawn breaks, random memories of past rides seem to emerge with the daylight. I relive them without intervention, a raft of consciousness floating on a slow river of thought. Collectively, they carry me back to this time, this place. I have ridden before but each ride is different. Am I wearing the right layers? I don't want to be too cold or too hot. I just want to ride. It's time to ride. Let's go.

Hawk Mountain 200K - Digging the well

 "We dig the well of our personal reserve to the depth

and breadth of our experience"

My uncle Frank used to call it digging the well. Back in the 80's, when I was a teenager, uncle Frank introduced me to long distance cycling. He used the phrase to describe hard training, pushing back limits, the process of building of a deep reserve of strength and will to draw upon when things get tough, when you needed to go to the well.

The image stuck with me. I picture shoveling dirt, doing the hard work, again and again, to create a space to store that something extra to call upon in times of need. The well must be dug deep enough and big enough to meet the needs of the event. I also knew that an empty well is just a hole. To make it useful, you have to dig it far enough in advance so that, while you rest and recover, it can fill with the reserves that you may one day need. With the 768 mile Paris-Brest-Paris ride just over six weeks away, now is the time to dig the well.

PA 300k: Grace and Humility

A while back, when I began Randonneuring,  I was talking to the husband of a friend of my wife - which kind of makes us friends by some marital variation on the transitive property of equality but not the kind of friends who do stuff together when the wives aren't involved which is kinda odd when you think about it in detail - but, I digress. Anyway, I tell the guy - I will call him "the guy" to protect his identity and because basically his real name is really not what this is about  - I said to the guy - 

"Yeah, we do these long bike rides under a time limit. The shortest distance is 200k  - about 125 miles- and the longest is about 1200K -about 750 miles.

Now the guy was no couch potato. He had ridden a bike across the country and had lots of  real outdoor adventure trips under his proverbial belt. When I tell the guy about the sport, he replied with something to the effect of  

"Wow, you must have some real demons chasing you." 

That kind of took me aback. Because even then, I knew that ultra distance bike riding is one sport where the one thing you cannot escape is yourself.

That conversation came to me again during the arduous 300K that the PA Randonneurs put on yesterday. In the course of that ride, I came face to face with some unexpected realities. But instead of demons, I would call them angels. And each of them had a name.

2014 Fleche: A video

The annual 24 hour ride called the "Fleche" took place this past weekend.

2014 April 200K - a change in perspective.

Given a choice of climbing vicious hills or riding into hours of unrelenting headwinds, some Randonneurs will choose hills and some will choose headwinds.

But some will choose both.

Pennsylvania Blue Mountain 200K - Riding on winter legs.

The dawn of the first Saturday of Spring came crisp and cold with a hint of possible rain. The edges of the waning moon glowed softly through a thin cover of clouds. 

Thirty-four riders gathered in and out of the Milford New Jersey bakery, milling, queuing and circulating before the start of the brevet. The big turn out after an unusually cold and snowy winter brought some faces I hadn't seen since summer, others of friends with whom I rode over the winter and a few not yet met. A rush of excitement, a mix of eagerness and uncertainty, familiar and unknown, animated the morning. This felt like a beginning,  a new season, the start of things to come.

Coffeeneuring day four: Stream of color

Coffeeneuring day three: Finding Higher Grounds

After yesterday, I wanted a flat and easy ride. We went to Philadelphia and rode along Spring Garden Street to the hipster neighborhood of Northern Liberties . 

Schuylkill to Susquehanna

Saturday is laundry day in Lancaster county. Riding through miles of farmland, we see clothes hanging from lines stretched between homes and barns or sheds. Lots of black, single color, simple clothes snapping and whipping in the cold steady wind. They remind me of Tibetan prayer flags.

Coffeeneuring day two: Morning bagel run

Saturday, October 12, 2013

Before heading to NYC, we needed coffee and bagels -- a dozen, fresh, assorted bagels
for the trip.

A fine coffeeneuring opportunity. 

Coffeeneuring day one: "Junetober"

The third annual casual caffeinated cycle challenge called Coffeeneuring  (click for rules!) is underway. Once again my wife and I are stepping up to the plate mug.

 

Great Allegheny Passage 2013: 73 miles with 9 kids and 8 adults in 2 days= 1 fantastic trip!

I am the locomotive. Steady chugga chugging up the long long climb from Cumberland Md. to Frostburg, Md. on the Great Allegheny Passage.

The children riding in line behind me, the "cars" of the train, sing a loud and joyful cadence, as only children can, over the soft rolling crunch of the fine gravel path.

"Hey bay-bee"

My five year old daughter's voice, as pure and as sweet and as precious as the rainbows that slide on the surface of a soap bubble, responds - in a quiet voice tinged with excited expectation - from the trailer that I pull up the hill. 

"Someone's calling my name"

"Hey bay-bee"

"I think I hear it again"

"You're wan-ted on the tele-phone"

"Well if its not sister -then I'm not home."

"Hey sis-ter"

Now it's sister's turn. 

The song doesn't end. The call and response goes in circles, naming each rider, until every car in the train has had his and her turn, or two or three or more turns, as we ascend the long steady hill on a warm Sunday morning in July lifted by song and sharing.

New Holland 200k - Skipping rocks across time

Sometimes a brevet fools me into thinking that it is one event, one story to be told. Maybe because the rides have a start, a finish and lots of stuff happens in between. Maybe because my mind wants to follow the path of time, connect the experiences along the way and have them make sense. That is a trait of the human mind after all, to try to find some order in the chaos. 

But then something reminds me that just because things happen sequentially doesn't necessarily mean they connect in any other way. Real human stories have a way of skipping through time, like rocks bouncing on the surface of a pond leaving intersecting ripples as they pass. Sunday was one of those reminders . . . .

Blue Mountain 300K - River lessons.

April 21, 2013

The Delaware River, inky black under the pre-dawn sky, flows on our left. It speaks in a thousand whispered voices. It sings forgotten songs that play at the shores of remembrance. It echoes the vibrato of unstoppable, ancient power. It reverberates with the timeless sound of patience and persistence.

Of Ice and When.

January all but slipped away. Along with it, the opportunity to keep my R series streak going. Since my first brevet, not one month had gone by without my riding at least one 200k. Now, less than one month into the new year, life was getting in the way. I skipped the January 5, 2013 PA Randonneur ride to celebrate my wife's birthday. I organized a 200k permanent later in the month but had to bail before starting it to work that weekend.  Then it was my daughter's birthday. Then the forecast for last weekend of the month called for sub freezing frigid temperatures and snow. By that time, the last time I went for a ride of any substance was a 200k in early December - like six seven weeks ago. Since then nada. I felt off my game. Doubts about the distance alone grew, much less riding it solo in sub freezing temperatures. What to do? Let it go and start again in the Spring?

A.H.H. The sum of the parts

 

58 cm Rivendell A. Homer Hilsen (Toyo Japan)

Test ride

After adjusting the brakes and transferring the Edelux light from the Surly to the Homer, I stand back and look for what needs doing next. Then it dawns on me - the bike I assembled is ready for a test ride. Not done, but fully rideable.

Still dressed in my riding gear from my bike commute home, I pump up the tires, don my helmet and go back out into the night.

Work in progress

I am assembling a new bike. I know a lot of people call the process "building" a bike but I'm not comfortable with that term. It's a little to presumptuous for what I am doing. If I were cutting tubes, brazing joints, welding lugs, even lacing spokes into a rim, I might say I was building a bike. But I can't do any of that. I can order parts and assemble them into a working bike. That is what I am doing. Assembly. If I assemble IKEA furniture I don't tell people I built a couch. I just put it together.

Hawk Mountain 200k Permanent - The ride of the psycho chicken

On Saturday, I rode the Hawk Mountain Permanent with Chris from PA. He's working on his R12. 

This will be my third 200K in as many weekends, with a few 100's tossed in for good measure. After Friday morning's pre-work 100k, I'm a little tired but, the big ride in August is getting closer and it starts with lots of climbing. I want to be ready. 

Hawk Mountain has 8500 feet of climbing. That's why I chose it.