Crazy Season Part II

16 July 2008

Sunday was a big day for charity bike rides. The American Cancer Society raised over $1.3 million through its annual Bike-A-Thon, while the Anchor House for Runaways 7-day, 500-mile, Vermont-to-Trenton fundraiser started day one.

I don’t know what time Irene and Henry woke up on Sunday to start their trek through Vermont, but I got up at 4:40 a.m. so that I’d be ready for Mike B. and Cheryl to pick me up half an hour later. The ride started in Philadelphia and went to Buena Vista, deep in the NJ Pinelands.

I’d wanted to ride for Penn’s team, but they didn’t have one this year, so Cheryl hooked me and Mike up with the team she’s ridden for. It turns out that Dilsheimer’s team was the second-biggest fundraiser for the event. Dilsheimer is a real estate developer, which puts me in an odd moral quandary, given all the developments I battle in central NJ. But I’ve never been up against them, which is either because they’re not land hogs like Hovnanian and Toll Brothers, or they just don’t develop their crudscapes up here. Nevertheless, the guys running the team seemed like decent people, and they took our changes of clothes down to the ride finish for us, and promised to feed us, too.

4500 people biking over the Ben Franklin Bridge is something to see, but by the time I felt safe enough to take my eyes off the mob to pull out my cell phone, the crowd had spread out. We were near the front. I never looked back.

Here’s a small piece of the mob before the start of the ride:





In an attempt to motivate us, Philly style, the event MC’s blared the theme from “Rocky” through loudspeakers. Twice through. The effect, aside from a collective groan, was to hurry us over the bridge, out of hearing distance.

Here’s the front of the group on the bridge:



Here’s a view of the Delaware River, looking south, from the bridge:



Riding along Admiral Wilson Boulevard I felt obligated to describe to Cheryl and Mike what used to be here before then Governor Whitman razed the cheap gas stations, cheap booze stores, and buck-a-fuck motels in advance of the 2000 GOP convention. Gone are the days of count-the-whores. Now we could see the Cooper River instead.

We spent most of our time in Pennsauken dodging slower and inexperienced riders. The three of us stuck together, Cheryl or I leading us into gaps in the crowd. It was a bit like walking in Times Square or the touristy parts of London. Too many people going nowhere fast. We just wanted to get away from the unpredictability.

One good thing about getting only six hours of sleep before an early-start century is that you don’t really wake up until you’re about 25 miles into the ride. By this point we were beyond Cherry Hill and we’d left much of the fat-tire crowd behind.

Somewhere after our first rest stop we hooked onto a foursome going our speed. I asked if we could hang onto their wheels, and I said I’d help pull. Twenty miles went past in a blur. As we passed Atsion Lake on Route 206 the leader caught a faster couple and we sped along even faster. It was more work than I wanted to be doing considering the distance, but, on the other hand, we were covering more ground more quickly, and that counts for a lot in a century. A mile or so down the road something fell off the fast guy’s bike and he and his friend pulled off. Exclamations of relief trickled up the line. Cheryl said, “That’s it. That cooked me. I’m not doing the century.” We lost the rest of the group in the crowd at the next rest stop.

The third rest stop was just before the century split off from the metric. There was no more plain water, just water with hints of herbs I really didn’t want to be drinking, like lavender.

When Mike and I split off from the metric riders, we were the only ones crossing the road to the century route. Ahead of us was no one. We took turns taking five-minute pulls along a busy stretch of road. Whoever painted the arrows here was more than overzealous. Most arrows show up every half mile or so. These were every ten feet. Under some, spray-painted with care, were the words, “U R awesome!” and “Keep going!” and smiley faces.

I said to Mike, “You know, that double reservoir death march was perfect training for this.” He agreed that our ride from hell had whipped us into shape.

I’d also made him ride on the shoulder’s white line, like Chris made me do years ago, for the past few weeks so that Mike would be a steady puller in a pace line. “Those white line drills paid off,” I told him. He said something about cocaine but his voice went into the wind and I didn’t catch it all.

For seventeen miles we pulled each other into the wind. I waited to feel myself hitting the wall, making sure not to pay attention to the mileage with the hope that what I didn’t know wouldn’t tire me. But I hit the wall anyway, around 73 miles. Fortunately the next rest stop was at about 76 miles, so I sat down, ate, and popped more caffeinated Shot Bloks.

The cue sheet said we had about eighteen miles to go. Well, 94 miles is not a century. “We need to ride an extra six,” I told Mike. “I didn’t come all the way down here not to do a full century.” He agreed. He also agreed we’d catch hell from Cheryl for making her wait the extra six miles. I called her and said we had 25 more miles to go. She was relaxing, walking around, having already showered. She said she’d saved us some food.

We took off again, looking for the tailwind we knew we’d earned. The route put us on the first isolated roads of the day:





On our way back we passed only two other people, one of whom had stopped with leg cramps. I gave him a salt tablet while Mike fed himself. I took a tablet too.

At 90 miles I got a third wind. We doubled back and forth for the extra six miles and returned to the park much sooner than I’d expected.

We headed towards the team tents, looking for Dilsheimer’s. I found Howie in his team tent. A lung cancer survivor, he rode the metric with ¾ as much lung as the rest of us, and he did it at a pace that would make most of the breathing public jealous.

But we couldn’t find Cheryl or our team tent. We ended up calling her and she met us at the check-in tent. Good thing; we didn’t know we were supposed to check in. She led us back to a row of tables, empty save for a pile of sandwiches and cookies. One table away sat our bags of clothes. There was no Dilsheimer sign. It had been taken down when the team bus left the park at 2 p.m.

I said, “Nobody on the team but us did the century?”

“Nope.”

“Geez!” I said, in between inhaling halves of a mozzarella wrap. Mike engulfed two sandwiches in the time it took me to eat one.

Cheryl, in a hurry to get on home, hustled us towards the bike van and the waiting bus beyond. “I’ve been here since noon!” The buses were leaving every half hour and she didn’t want to have to wait for the next one. So much for a shower, let alone a toilet.

The bus was nearly empty, but the engine was on and the air conditioning running. I headed towards the back where, to my relief, there was a bathroom. By the door was a sign: “Bathroom for emergencies only.”

“Well,” I said, “I’ve just done a goddamn century and I have to pee and change my clothes. This is officially an emergency.” We declared an emergency for everyone who came back to use the bathroom.

We each took two seats: one for our stuff and one for our butts.

Eventually Howie and Dennis got on the bus, so we five Freewheelers had ourselves a little party. Sort of. Cheryl was getting madder by the minute as the driver, after more than half an hour, was not on the bus. “Come ON!” she groaned. “I’ve been here FOUR HOURS!”

Mike egged her on as the two of them deflected the blame for making her wait for us. They argued about who talked whom out of Cheryl driving down here by herself, about the long wait, and about those extra six miles. After a while I said, “There’s nothing we can do about this now but wait, so we might as well chill.” It didn’t help. “You’re not used to taking public transportation, are you?” I smiled.

I caught up with Dennis and Howie, neither of whom I’d seen in a very long time. Every so often Cheryl would groan from the seat in front of me, and Mike would smile, ready to jump in again. I tried to stop him. “Leave her alone, Mike. Really.” He grinned and didn’t listen. He was getting her and me back for all the times we’d busted on him, and he was loving every minute of it.

News trickled back that this was going to be the last bus of the day and it wasn’t going anywhere until everyone left who’d signed up for a ride home was on it and their bikes loaded onto the moving van in front of us. The bus filled up.

A guy in front of Mike overheard the two of us talking. “You guys did the century?” he asked.

“Yep,” we said.

“I hate you.”

“Why?”

“Because I did the metric and I’m beat!”

The bus finally got rolling. Before we even hit the highway Cheryl was asleep. By the time we reached Route 55 Howie and Dennis were dozing too.

Mike and I talked the rest of the way home.

As we crossed the Ben Franklin Bridge the moving van pulled along side us. What a relief, I thought. Three years ago, the only other time I’d done this ride, we’d waited over an hour in the city for the van to show up. Mike and I had been dreading Cheryl’s wrath were that to happen again. The van was passing us on the right just as Cheryl woke up.

“Cheryl! Look! Our bikes!” She turned to the window and then towards me and smiled. I said, “Good morning, sunshine.”

We walked our bikes back to the car, which I could have sworn we’d parked on 5th and Chestnut. But we were on 5th and Walnut, one block south of the no-ticketing zone. Philly parking cops being what they are, we had a ticket, but it was only for $26. I fished $10 out of my pack; this was my fault for being half-asleep this morning. Mike was just happy we weren’t towed, and that the car behind us that had minutes before we arrived hit a pothole and slammed into a SEPTA patrol car hadn’t hit us. As it was our car was surrounded by SEPTA police but they made room for us to leave.

I gave Cheryl a mug of coffee from my cooler. “I feel like a different person,” she said. We were all chipper now, eating whatever snacks we’d brought with us, me passing around a bag of cereal, all of us drinking water, content. We decided we should all go out to dinner at a local Italian place, so we all went home, showered, grabbed Jack, and stuffed our faces at Amalfi’s. Then we went for ice cream, of course.