#15

(swiped from http://www.sibike.org/ppp.html)



21 September

Sunday was the Staten Island Bike Club's annual Pumpkin Patch Pedal, moved up from unpredictable October to late September. A lot of Freewheelers say, "I'm not paying to ride the same roads we always ride on," but I'm not one of them. The roads are familiar, but the atmosphere is different. We get fed. We get way-cool long-sleeve T-shirts with goofy pumpkins and witches and skeletons riding bikes. And good water bottles, too.

I saw Matt "Pedal pedal pedal!" Rawls in the registration line. I hadn't seen him for maybe a year. While the rest of us stood around in shorts and jackets, Matt was dressed for December. "It's COLD!" he cried. "It's fifty degrees!"

"What? In another month you'll be praying for fifty degrees!" He was wearing fleece mittens. I kept grabbing them and asking, "What's this? What's this?"

"It's COLD!"

Every other year people dressed in costumes at the rest stops. This year I guess it was just too early in the year for costumes. Only one person made the effort, and we had to wait til the end for that.

I rode to the first rest stop with the Mikes, the Joes, Jen, Ira, and another guy I'd never met. But Big Joe, Jen, Ira, and the other guy peeled off for the metric, leaving just the four of us to do the century.

It was Mike B.'s idea to do the five-minute pull pace line. I was the timekeeper, since I always switch my computer to the clock setting on centuries anyway. Five minutes of work, five minutes of relative rest, five minutes in the sweet spot, and five minutes starting to feel the breeze. Mighty Mike M. wrote later, "So now we know that PPP stands for the Precision Paceline Pedal."

Things got a bit easier when a stranger on a fixie put himself in our paceline. Now we only had to work five out of every 20 minutes. Then we picked up another guy and got to rest for five more between pulls. We lost them both at the second rest stop but overtook the fixie ("Orange Man," Mike B. called him) again between the second and third. We never learned his name, which made my telling him his pull was over a little difficult: "Fixie, you're off!" from three bikes back doesn't really work.

He should know; he was the only one who got less tired as the day wore on.

We were moving too quickly for cell phone snapshots. There was one I really wanted to get, though: central New Jersey's answer to the Tour de France. Instead of a field of sunflowers, picture one bursting with yellow goldenrods. We take what we can get.

The final rest stop -- the one with the pumpkin pie and apple pie -- was at Clayton Park. Music blared from speakers inside a van. Rick Springfield's "Jessie's Girl."

I said, to nobody in particular, "I'll be damned if I do the rest of the ride with that song stuck in my head." (Now it'll be stuck in yours. Sorry 'bout that.) We had to wait until something good came on. Stephen Stills' "Love the One You're With" had me and Joe singing along, and it was okay to leave then.

On our way out Mighty Mike took pictures of us with the Pumpkin Guy.



That's Little Joe, me, the Pumpkin Guy, and Mike B standing. We don't know who the squatting fellow is.

We ended the ride with the same average we've had for the other four centuries I've done this year. It's not like it's always the same lineup, the same weather, the same wind, or the same terrain. But it's the same average, within one tenth of one mile per hour. Freaky.