c r i m i n a l e . c o m | martin |cycling

Yikes! These guys just don't ever quit. Here I am fussing about things like whether or not I have my most comfy shorts on and how much chamois cream to use and they just ride. And ride and ride and ride...

Here are the numbers:
   Distance - 400 km (248 miles)
   Start Time - 5 AM
   Finish Time - 11 PM
   Total Time - 18 hours
   Weather - mostly pretty decent but we had on & off rain from 6 PM on
   Food consumed

Imagine setting your alarm clock for 2:30 so that you can leave the house by 3 to get to Enumclaw by 4 to start a ride by 5. I know, it's a hard thing to do... Seeing as I had done a pretty good job of organizing my things the night before, I got out of house right on time.

No sooner did i get on I-90 than an officer pulls me over on the bridge. It seems I was doing about 70 and it was 3 AM... He takes one look at me, all the cycling crap in the car, the bike on the roof rack and asks, "Isn't it a bit early to be going for a bike ride?" You bet it is officer, too damn early. He smiled and told me to throttle it back a notch or two, this time of night they are really looking for speeders. After pulling away, I had to laugh. Here he is looking for people coming home from parties who have had too much to drink and I'm LEAVING home to start a bike ride.

With the Train Spotting soundtrack cranked, I head down to Enumclaw. Did I mention that with no traffic the drive takes no time at all? Well it doesn't. I pull into the Kings Motel at about 3:30 and surprise, surprise, no one is there yet. At about 4 the organizer shows up, I get to sign in, pay my entry fee and head back to my car for another round of Underworld - Born Slippy (I knew I needed to have a DAMN good song in my head when this thing started).

Astride my commuter bike (fenders are required), dressed in knee and arm warmers (I was optimistic), equipped with two head lights and two tail lights, reflective leg bands and sash (all required), I stare around at the other entrants. There was quite a variety of gear here. Everything from the titanium hot-rod to the recumbent to the one mountain bike with fat tires. [Oh, they were smooth, but they were quite fat. And he did NOT finish last, not by a long shot.] The Carradice seat bag was the most popular choice by far. My ride fell somewhere in the bottom half of the monetary outlay scale but hey, no one else had disk brakes!

With lights blazing, we head out up Hwy 410. What a beautiful sight! About 50 cyclists climbing a road, each with two or three tail lights looks pretty cool in the dark.

All it took was that one hill and the field was pretty spread apart. And here I noticed the first fundamental difference between 'racers' (or fast, recreational riders) and a 'randonneur'. Randonneurs don't really seem to care if they have a wheel to draft off of or not. To me, missing the train is inconceivable. I'll kill myself to get on. All day long I was blown away by this phenomenon. We'd pass people and they'd just wave and say 'hi' but WOULDN'T INCREASE THEIR SPEED. I suppose when you start getting up in distance, you really need to pace yourself and that's one thing these guys did know how to do. It was almost expected that you'd just ride through your bad patches and a good one would be just around the corner.

Soon, the gloves and vest and shoe covers were off. But that's as far as it went. Although pleasant, it never got hot. We did an incredible job of riding around the biggest rain showers for quite some time but then at about 6 PM, it started to rain. Just softly at first, and then a little harder... For the rest of the night, it was on and off rain. Mostly on. With the exception of one nice dry section just at sunset we stayed damp.

I must say, being with a tandem all day is pretty fun! You get to rest on the climbs and you get to FLY down the descents. All it took was a 1 or 2% slope and we would easily top 25 mph. Steeper than that and we were riding people off our wheel. Then again, maybe they were not TRYING to grab our wheel... (see above)

Amy & Robin, being close to the same height, can switch positions on the tandem. They each captained about 50% of the time. Amy got to drive on the ascent and descent from St. Helens up and down the Windy Ridge Road. That was GREAT! Back and forth, fast, fast, fast. Nothin' but the 12 baby. This was about the only chance for pictures. Another thing about randonneurs is they don't stop much. As Robin told me, "Slow and steady wins the race".

I learned this the hard way. We were stopped at some Chevron using the toilet and buying some food when I look around for my riding buddies they are nowhere to be found! Panic set in for a second when I imagined trying to ride the rest of this alone. Then I realized that I could just catch 'em! It only took about five minutes, whew...!

My spirits were pretty up most of the time. We talked a bunch and no one got in a bad mood or had a really bad patch. Sure, as time wore on the quantity of chatter decreased but I suppose that's just natural. About 50 miles from the finish my right knee started getting sore (it seems much better now while I'm writing this - I think it was just muscles) and 20 miles from the finish I started getting sleepy tired. But then - as anyone who has ever done RAMROD will attest to - we finally turned north onto Mud Mountain Road and saw the fairgrounds in the distance. Never have they looked so nice as this night.

At the finish they had hot pizza, cold beer, soda, cookies, chips and even a shower if you wanted. Man, I was feeling wired! After stripping off my soggy clothes and having some of said pizza and beer, I decided to head home. Ouch - those last 15 minutes were tough. It was hard to stay awake after the buzz wore off and that one (I didn't dare have more) beer kicked in.

Would I do it again? Let me just say that it's a good thing the human body forgets pain so quickly. If not for this characteristic we would long ago have been extinct as I can't imagine ANYone wanting to go through child birth actually KNOWING what was coming up. That said, this was very spur-of-the-moment and actually not as hard as I thought. So maybe I would. But only if I could have such good company again.

My bike

All the pictures I took

The original web page for the ride

The results