The Asterisk* ride (aka Montezuma's revenge)

Randonneuring offers many medals, but the R12 award has a special meaning. Earning it takes one year of monthly rides of at least 200K in length. Unlike a single event medal, the R12 awards consistency, perseverance - in short, commitment. Miss one month, and a year's worth of effort is lost. Other riders may be faster, more traveled, may cover greater distances but even a below average rider with above average perseverance can build a streak of R-12 awards that literally takes years to accomplish.

Living in the northern U.S. adds another level of challenge to the R- 12 as winter can close roads with ice and snow.

I have ridden at least one 200K rando ride every single month since my first randonneuring event in April 2010. This March would make 48 months straight - four years - without fail. But February comes before March and, weather wise, February in the northeast United States is no gimme. That was especially true this February.

In my part of the world, the polar vortex of 2014 brought arctic temperatures and layers of unrelenting snow. New snow fell on old snow and, in between the snowfalls, the temperatures dropped to single digits.

There were a couple of windows of opportunity. The Pa Randonneurs rode on February 1 and got the February ride done. I passed on the ride for a family event. Then there was my birthday weekend when the temps rose into the balmy 50s for a brief spell. I chose not to ride that day either. By the time the last week of February arrived, I had not been on a bike for over 5 weeks.

But I had plan. I had a work trip to San Diego in the last week of February. Just add a day, take a bike and *boom* problem solved. I would just ride my 200K in the Golden State where winter meant sunny 65 degree days. In fact, I would ride a 100K and a 200K! I made arrangement to ride a 100K permanent called Old Town to Carlsbad and two days later, the Montezuma to Mesa Express permanent. All together it would be 195 miles up and down the beautiful coast north of San Diego. Ha! Take THAT Polar Vortex! Life is good!

Since it was the first time I was going to fly with a bike, I decided to take the fixie. I figured that if a bike was going to get damaged by either my bad packing or someone's bad handling, the fixie was the bike I wanted to risk.

 {For those who may not know, a "fixie" or fixed gear bike has one gear. That gear turns with the wheel. If the the bike is moving the pedals are turning.No changing gears and no coasting - ever. To ride it is to keep pedaling. Always.} 

I hadn't ridden the fixie on a 200K since September but hey, the ride descriptions made the course sound relatively flat. No problem!

The first ride was just about as good as I imagined. Better in fact.

Dare to go farther. Dare to do more.

The popular biking blog Chasing Mailboxes DC, saw fit to include Iron Rider in a series of interviews on bike related bloggers. I am thankful and honored by the interest and the recognition.  If you like blogs about biking, running and getting the most out of life then you should definitely make Chasing Mailboxes a bookmarked site. I do.

For those who may be interested,  the interview is here: Iron Rider Interview (click for link).

Riding Grand Randonees The Olsen Brothers' Way - an in depth interview.

“The quality of any advice anybody has to offer has to be judged against the quality of life they actually lead.”  Douglas Adams 

While someone can properly call themselves a Randonneur by completing a 200K brevet, successfully completing a Grand Randonnee - a 1200 kilometer (750 miles) brevet - can be considered the crowning achievement of the sport. The quadrennially held 1200k Paris-Brest-Paris may be the original and ultimate Grand Randonnee but there are now Grand Randonnees across the United States and around the world. 

Of the small percentage of cyclists who are Randonneurs, an even smaller number complete a Grand Randonnee. Of that small number, even fewer complete two in a year. Of that tiny number a select few complete more than two.

Mark and Bill Olsen are two of the select few in the country who have ridden more than two Grand Randonnees in one year. In fact, between them, the Olsen brothers have successfully completed over 60 randonneuring distance rides.

In 2013 alone, they rode 12 Grand Randonnees, with Mark riding four and Bill completing all eight of the grand randonnees offered in North America.

Even more impressive (to me), the Olsen brothers complete these epic rides at a pace that allows them to eat, sleep and enjoy the ride. Bill has described his trips as vacations and bike tours.

I want to have that kind of experience on Grand Randonnee. So, having struggled to complete one 1200K, I was eager to learn how they are able to complete so many. Mark and BIll graciously agreed to answer my questions. What follows are their detailed and informative responses.  

First Friday Writing for Randos - What the research doesn't tell you.

{First Friday Writings for Randos - A monthly post that features pieces from other writers that touch some facet of the Randonneuring experience, even if that was not the author's intent. It's stuff that's best read out loud - slowly.} This month it's an excerpt from the Chasing Mailboxes D.C. blog:

Photo by MG

 Endurance: What the Research Doesn’t Tell You

By MG*

Seldom have so few done so much for so little.

January 31, 2014

The rowing seat slides along the monorail. I pull the chain. The flywheel accelerates and decelerates, its whirring increases, peaks and decreases. 24 strokes a minute, sometimes 26, sometimes 22. Each stroke pulls at the muscles of my overly tired back as my overly tired thighs extend my legs against the resistance of the machine. The minutes accumulate stroke by stroke by stroke.

It is the last day of the month long indoor rowing challenge. Back and forth - I have repeated this action over 50,000 times in the last 31 days. Pull and recover - over 35 hours pulling this chain. Today is the last day.

Off season training: amassing kilometers the hard way.

It started on a brevet. Chris N. (from PA) and I discovered that we both have trained on  Concept2 indoor rowing machines or "ergs" as the rowers call them. Chris used his over the winter to cross train. I have had one for over a decade, but since I started Randonneuring it's been off in the corner of "the man room" surrounded by bikes and bike parts - unused.

Chris mentioned the indoor rowing and I replied with my story about competing in the 2010 CRASH B World Indoor Rowing Championships. This may need some explanation. Indoor rowing is a sport. It may be the niche-iest of sports since it involves competing in a rowing distance event on a device that actually doesn't travel an inch or ever touch water; nevertheless, it is a hotly contested sport that has at its core the requirement that all of its athletes inflict intense anaerobic suffering upon themselves. So it that sense, it's kinda like bike racing.  

First Friday Writing for Randos: PBP 2007 by Jeff Tilden

{First Friday Writings for Randos - A monthly post that features pieces from other writers that touch some facet of the Randonneuring experience, even if that was not the author's intent. It's stuff that's best read out loud - slowly.} This month it's an excerpt from Jeff Tilden's account of his PBP Ride in 2007* . . .

I love the swoosh and the sway and the zoom of bicycling. I love to fly, to corner, to tilt like a gyroscope. It’s primitive and it’s simple and it’s elegant and it’s graceful and it’s powerful. The abject skilllessness of bicycling is its greatest virtue. It requires nothing. A four-year old can master it. A little balance, not much, far less than, say, being a spider. We know this as children, but we forget. We already have everything we need. The PBP is not the NFL. It is, instead, an incandescent union of form and function. Of past and present. Uniting us not with our grandparents as much as some animal 400 million years ago. Bicycling is primordial. We come from an unbroken line of winners, stretching back to the first day we crawled up out of the mud. Every one of our ancestors, all the way back, kept going long enough to beat predators, disease, starvation. Long enough to have a child. With really only the skill it takes to ride a bike. Like the rest of my species, I hale from Africa, and I was born to run through the woods. Or bike, if the woods are paved. A brevet is a race, after all. The human race.

 . . . We reek, but are unaware of it, like fish that don’t know they are wet.  We have been marinated in our own sweat.  Paul saw a café on the way into Fougeres 370 miles ago and has had his mind’s eye on it for two days.  He leads us there and we sit down to an outdoor picnic table feast of sausage crepes, heavy on the mustard, and frittes, heavy on the ketchup.  As we finish, Paul launches into what may be the second greatest pep talk ever.  I cannot do it justice, but the gist was . . .