20 September 2017
I: Route Prep
The first Ride for McBride was mostly unintentional. I hadn't planned on making it a charity ride until the week before, when Big Joe died. There were so many riders that I had to call in additional leaders, and Joe's family even showed up. A few months later the real Ride for McBride was created in the living room of Big Joe's house, and we've been handing out scholarships every year since.
In the first couple of years we would meet regularly. Then we settled into our duties and conversed online. For the past couple of years we've barely had to say much at all. I come up with the routes and the cue sheets. Little Joe is in charge of lining up the arrow painters. Jenna does the graphics. Judy makes copies of the cue sheets and insurance forms. Ira brings in rest stop supplies. Dave loads them in his van. A team of McBrides manages the kitchen at Tall Cedars. And Jared became the go-to guy for everything, our de facto leader, while he was finishing up his PhD in history. Somehow it all comes together every year.
The 50-mile route almost didn't. I'd mapped it to approach Mirror Lake in Pemberton from the west. Ridewithgps let me map through the northern end of Fort Dix. NJ Bikemap let me do it too. Less familiar with that area than I am with the eastern side, I thought I had a visual of it, a chain-link fence surrounding Air Force housing, SUVs, a playground.
I was wrong. At 5:00 p.m. on the Monday before the ride, Joe emailed me. Two of his painters had gone out to mark the first 25 miles of the 50 mile route, the only segment of all of the routes that hadn't been painted yet. They were ten miles in before they came face to face with the gated entrance to Fort Dix.
He caught me at a good time, as I had about twenty minutes to spare. I sped to my office, pulled the doors closed, and did the fastest mapping I've ever done, moving the route over and away from the gate, back to the east, approaching the lake from the north, and adding almost two miles in the process. Riders would go 30 miles before the rest stop, but that would have to do. I fixed the cue sheet, emailed it off to Joe, told Jared to hold off on printing until the painters were finished, and zipped back into the lab.
Joe painted from mile 10 to 30 by himself, and for that I am eternally grateful.
II: Short and Simple
Meanwhile, I was scheduled to lead a ride the day before Ride for McBride. I had no route in mind, knowing only that I wanted to keep things short and simple so that we'd have legs for the next day.
Jim met me at home, and Sean pulled in to ride with us some of the way. Jim was enamored with Sean's period-perfect throwback Masi, and they chatted for the four miles to Twin Pines.
We were met with a diverse crowd. Three of the riders (Ken, Jose, and Ed) would have been more at home with the hilly fastboys, and I wondered, with a critical mass of B+ riders, if they'd have the patience to stay with the Slugs or if they'd egg each other on and disappear off the front. I needn't have worried.
We had some of the Slug regulars: Aside from Jim and me, Ricky and Blake were there. Nevada was there, but Cheryl was saving her legs for tomorrow.
There was a new rider too, Sue, whom Chris had talked into trying the hills.
After a short discussion, I decided that we'd be better off going to Sergeantsville than to Lambertville if we wanted to avoid newly chip-sealed roads.
Without a set route in mind, I decided to go back to the sunflowers on Wertsville and Losey to see if I could get better pictures. I didn't, but it was worth a try. Doing it right would have required getting off the bike and walking up a dirt path to the edge of the field at the bottom of Losey. I didn't have time to do that; most of the group went ahead.
I didn't think about how we'd get home until we were about to leave Sergeantsville. We'd gone 27 miles without hitting chip seal, but I wanted to show Sue the Green Sergeants covered bridge and there would be fresh gravel for a quarter mile on Lower Creek Road. We went anyway, and even though the gravel was rough, the road was flat and we turned off onto Covered Bridge anyway.
We climbed back up past the church and graveyard at Sandy Ridge. I warned Sue early about the long slog we'd be facing on the way to Mount Airy and South Hunterdon High School.
As is my tradition, I stop at the farm at the top of the first hill. There were no cows today. Sue and Jim stopped with me.
"It's a hay baler!" Sue said.
"You're speaking a language I don't understand," Jim told her.
"I read your blog," Sue confessed. "I like the pictures."
"Thanks. They help me remember what went on." The red barn, slowly losing slats and color, has regained a few window frames on the front and side.
I narrated the next part of the hill for Sue. The rest of the group was waiting in the high school parking lot.
"It's not about speed," I said as she pulled up. "It's about being comfortable climbing. Being a faster rider doesn't make you a better person. It just increases your chance of being an asshole."
"I'm afraid to ask," she said, "but was that the last one?"
"No," I said. "There's more. There's always more." [See, Jim? Ride leaders don't always lie.]
I wasn't sure what more we'd encounter. I was winging it. My only goal was to avoid going up Wargo. Ken had expressed his relief that we'd gone down that way in the morning; it would mean not going up on the way home. We both have the same reaction to it: it's not a steep hill, nor a long one, but it's there, a handful of miles from the end, out in the open, slightly bumpy, and just slightly annoying. Also in the late fall it smells like broccoli.
We hit an unlikely stretch of gravel on Rocktown Road as it approaches Route 31. Jim sang us across the highway, and we had to explain that to Sue too.
Snydertown annoys me at the end of a ride, so I skipped it and we went straight down Linvale, across Route 31 again, and found ourselves at 518.
"One hump or two?" I asked. Showing mercy (or maybe not), I chose one hump: New Road.
"Harbourton-Woodsville has been chipped," Jose said.''
"When?"
"A few weeks ago."
"Let's try it."
So we went up New Road. I promised Sue this would be the last one. Ken and I remembered the days before New was blacktop, when it, too was bumpy chip seal.
Harbourton-Woodsville looked pretty good. A road crew had been back to stripe it, so we figured it would be fine to descend.
"I'm gonna give you a beautiful downhill," I told Sue.
Ken said, "If you get up enough speed you can coast up the hill at the bottom." A few of us did.
We got a little spread out over the last mile down Lawrenceville-Pennington Road. Ken and Jose peeled off for home. The rest of us trickled into the parking lot.
"I'm hooked," Sue said. Sorry, Chris. I think you might have lost one.
We finished with a couple more miles than I'd planned, and more elevation gain than I'd expected. So much for short and simple, Jim griped.
III: Ride for McBride
There was a large group going out for the 50-mile route. Ira was nominally leading. I was with a smaller crowd of Slug types. They left before we did, but we caught up to them, got mixed up with them, and the group rearranged itself to the point where I never really did figure out who was with us and who wasn't.
The chain-link fence around the Air Force houses was on Croshaw Road, it turns out. I'd been off by 90 degrees and a few miles. The route turned out to be okay, and Joe agreed that it might be good enough to use again next year.
I only stopped once for a picture. It was too good to skip. "Attention back stabbing hypocrites thanks for nothing" it said on one side."
"Hope your happy with yourselfs," it said on the other. Both sides!
The author had to be a disgruntled Trumpist. No liberal would own that many American flags.
The folks running the rest stop in Plumsted weren't given the key to the bathrooms as they had been in years past, so we stopped at the CVS on our way back. I don't know what this means for next year's routes. Was this an error, or are we going to have to find a new spot for the 25-mile and 50-mile halfway points?
When we got back to Tall Cedars I spent so much time catching up with people in the parking lot that by the time I put my own bike away and changed into a dry t-shirt I missed the entire award ceremony. Dang. I hung around after most of the riders had left so that I could talk to Jared, Judy, and Jenna.
Although the number of cars in the lot seemed fewer than in previous years, Jared had the sense that we had about the same number of riders as usual. We tend to get more donations than riders, and we don't need much to keep the $2000 scholarship going. We did very little in the way of publicity this year; we could always do more. We like keeping it small, though. It's much easier to handle.
Jared hasn't yet posted this year's award recipient on our site, but you can read about previous winners here. You can also still donate; you can donate any time.
IV: Son of Piece of Shit
One more thing: my GPS worked perfectly for the entire 50 Ride for McBride miles. I know that will disappoint some of you out there. I, for one, was relieved.
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