The Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation Ride for a Cure
Thursday morning, October 6,
At the baggage claim, we’re met by Elise from the JDRF. I
am unfortunately not met by my bag, so I let the Delta people at the check-in
counter know where I will be, and we drive to
Back at the hotel, I am still bagless
and roomless, so I read. Around one in the afternoon,
Alison tells me my room is ready, so I head up, intending to nap. After laying down and watching the Weather Channel (Rain! Rain! Raaaaain!)
for a while, the phone rings – my bag! Wahoo! A porter
brings it up; now I’m too happy to nap so I head out to walk around town. On
the way out, I see a big semi pulling in; apparently our bikes are here as
well! The day is vastly improved, except for the whole rain thing. I walk for a
couple of hours, long enough to get a bit footsore, and far enough to get sort
of lost, though not for long. I find a map shop and buy topographical maps of
what I think will be the big climb of the ride.
Back at the hotel, we gather for dinner in the evening,
along with most of the rest of the team – Maria, Tony and Joni, and eventually
our coach Mike, who turns out to be my roommate. The dinner is quite good, and
accompanied by wine and beer and good conversation. After eating, a number of
us head out and end up at an Irish pub. it seems like
every bar in town has live music, including this one, but there’s also an
outside patio here so we can get far enough from the band to hear each other.
The bouncer tells us his sister has diabetes, and thanks us each for doing the
ride. We talk for a couple of hours and then head back to the hotel, and sleep.
Friday morning, we meet for breakfast in the hotel
ballroom. It is still raining outside, enough so that the official “tuneup ride” is cancelled. Cyclists being the lot that we
are, people begin appearing in riding clothes anyway, and collecting their
bicycles from the truck in the parking lot. Most of us
Dinner also brings some awards, for the best fundraising
(something over eleven thousand dollars), the most recruits (twelve for an individual,
44 for a chapter employee, if I remember correctly), and such. The Hy-Vee contingent is enormous, covering several states; we
discuss how to get some more Herman Millerites in the
room to counter the grocery group. We certainly can’t match a company with some
fifty thousand employees, but there are a lot of
The highlight of the dinner is a little girl from
On a more mundane note, we get course information – we
won’t be climbing to the
After dinner, most of us bring our bikes downstairs to
avoid the early-morning elevator crush (you really can’t get more than three or
four bikes in an elevator at a time), then a few of us go over to Magnolia’s
for a drink or two, but otherwise, it’s an early night; tomorrow is the day for
which I’ve been preparing for the whole summer, for over 2400 miles now.
The Ride
We’re up around
Downstairs, I collect Ruby and head outside; it’s just
before dawn. For the first time since we arrived, it’s actually not raining,
but it’s overcast and cool; conditions are actually pretty good. There’s a lot
of anticipatory standing around, picture taking, bike checking, and the like,
until someone gets on a microphone and introduces the Asheville vice-mayor, who
tells us how great we are, and then reads an officially-worded proclamation that
today is Ride for a Cure Day. It’s my first event worthy of official
proclamation. After the brief speechifying, we’re led in some stretches that I
can’t hear or see, so I do my own thing. I’ve got hours to warm things up and
stretch out.
We’ve been instructed to sort ourselves into “fast,
faster, and fastest” groups; the “fastest” squad is sent off onto the course
first. A minute or two later, they call for the “faster” squad, which most of
us have put ourselves into – it’s by far the biggest of the three groups, not
too surprisingly. We roll out of the hotel’s back parking lot and out into the
street, where we loosely line up. After a group shout of “We’re riding for a
cure!” we’re off. The first few intersections are police-patrolled so we can
roll though en masse. Our first downhill is a short, steep drop immediately
before a right turn onto what will become
I feel kind of stiff and clumsy, and my bike is noisy
from the rain and grit of yesterday. It’s actually a bit disconcerting, as Ruby
is normally professionally silent. We’ve been told that the first 20 miles is a
good place to make some time, as it’s generally flat, and there’s a time cutoff
at the 32 mile rest stop – if you’re not there by 11:30, they won’t let you go
on and try to do the whole 100 miles. That’s really a pretty generous
allowance, but the group I’m with doesn’t bother with pacing as much as I’d
like, cruising in the 19 to 21 mile per hour range. I decide to drop back a bit
and let my legs warm up at a more normal rate. Everyone skips the break stop at
the 8 mile mark; it’s really not needed at this point (although shortly after I
have to stop and visit the little boy’s tree off the side of the road). Stacey
stays with the group and pulls ahead steadily. I end up riding with Brian and
Mike until the rest stop at the 21 mile mark, where I eat bananas, orange
slices, and load some energy gel packs into my pocket. I also track down some
WD-40 – it’s not a great lubricant, but it’s better than nothing, and it does
the trick on my noisy drivetrain. After using the porta-potty,
I’m off, and the course begins to climb in earnest.
Here the road is wet, more with mist than rain, but it’s
not bad. It’s a beautiful road that switchbacks gently up a valley along a
rocky, moss-lined stream. Everything is as green as can be; fall colors are
only barely showing here. The slope isn’t too bad, and I settle into a pace
that’s comfortable and maintainable. I’ve done a fair amount of hill riding
this year, and it shows, as I’m regularly passing people. It’s not a race, but
I still want a good time for the distance; I’ve never competed successfully
against anyone but myself anyway.
The wet, winding road continues for a mile or so, and
then opens up onto a wide, recently paved major road with a nice wide shoulder.
It’s easy to maintain speed in the mid-teens, and it feels good to have a
couple of gear ratios left in the bank. I actually start feeling a bit cocky
about the climbing. The national coach described this first long hill as the
first real test of the ride, and it’s thus far only long, not really steep.
An official vehicle is stationed at an intersection, and
the driver waves us off onto a side road that descends for a ways. I think I’m
actually over the first hill at this point. At some point, though, I start to
climb again, and this time there are more teeth to the slope; it’s a low-gear
grind. I’m still doing well relative to others around me, but it’s hard, and
tunnel vision starts to set it. When I look up, the scenery is amazing, with
glimpses of the layers of soft hilltops that these mountains are famous for,
and horse farms, and sometimes tobacco drying in a shed. But the roads are also
winding, and the word “flat” seems to not be part of the local vocabulary. At
some point the road gets rough, and I feel the next climb start, and I realize
just how steep it is – this one is the truly nasty one, ski-hill steep. I’m in
my lowest gear, doing my best to keep my legs ahead of the grade, trying to
keep something like good form at less than 5 miles an hour. I have to get up
and out of the saddle to maintain any kind of momentum, but my legs are going to mush. The top of that slope is a blur of
relief, and I’m too far gone to even wonder what it will be like to go down
this thing later in the day.
Finally I make it to the 32 mile checkpoint. I’m in
plenty of time, and again eat some fruit and energy stuff, and make another
bathroom stop. The energy gels are my newest friend; they’re disgusting, like
sweet snot, but the effect on my energy level is almost immediate. I’m
surprised to see Stacey roll in after me; I don’t recall passing her (her
ponytail is a dead giveaway). It turns out she and a few others made a wrong
turn and went more than a mile down what was fortunately a short dead-end road.
Brian and Mike are in shortly after me as well, take a brief stop, and are on
their way before me. I end up leapfrogging them and Stacey for most of the day.
From the checkpoint, the road drops away into a wide
valley in a series of meandering curves. I don’t think we’ve done a truly
straight line since leaving
After a moment to look around and catch my breath, I turn
Ruby back to retrace the course. The downhill slope is nice, but that mist that
felt warm on the grind up is truly cold now. When I see the checkpoint, I’m
shivering. I see Stacey just starting up the slope. I’m starting to either feel
really good about the day or my mental faculties are getting less and less
oxygen, but I turn around and ride up to the turnaround with her. I always ride
better with another person within reach, and that
slope was long and steep enough to be dismaying at a few points, so I hope I
can be of use. I also get to go down that slope again, this time with my arm
warmers pulled up. On the way back down, Stacey rolls on while I stop for food
and water. The orange slices are particularly appealing.
As I’m leaving the checkpoint, Rod arrives, looking good
– his previous long ride before today was 44 miles, but he seems well on his
way to doing the whole thing. Rolling down I pass Ann and Coach Mike within a
mile of the checkpoint. Ann, who is our Ride Chair, has Type 1 Diabetes, and
despite not training as much as she’d hoped is bound and determined to complete
the 100 miles, powered as needed by Skittles. For a person to know that 15
Skittles will raise her blood sugar by 50 point speaks to a certain amount of
experience will the disease!
The ride down to the bridge crossing is smooth and
steadily downhill, so I cut loose and cruise in my big gears for much of it,
holding steady in the mid-20 mile per hour range. It’s nice to have that speed
for less effort than it feels like I’ve been expending for most of the day. As
soon as I turn right off of the main road, though, there’s a fairly long,
serious climb, and there’s no way to maintain the momentum partway up it due to
the sharp turn onto it, so it’s a hard, slow grind – there’s no more immediate
contrast anywhere else on this course between easy speed and slow suffering.
Almost everyone I see is walking up it.
Past that hill, I’m back info
the gentle switchbacks in the wide valley, this time climbing. Eventually I
catch up to someone who has a “COACH” tag on the back of his jersey; it turns
out to be the coach of the
As with past checkpoints, Stacey is leaving just as I’m
rolling in, so I’ve got someone to chase for the next 10 miles once I get
going, too. Brian and Mike leapfrog ahead of me, too; Brian seems to be doing a
bit better, although he’s still stretching every chance he gets to work the
cramps out.
After eating as many orange slices as I can stuff into my
mouth, I saddle up again, and head into the hilliest part of the return back to
Grinding up those hills after almost 80 miles is pretty
humbling; it’s all I can do to keep from stopping and putting a foot down. I’ve
tried all summer to train myself to keep up a good cadence especially when
climbing, but the combination of the length and grade of these hills, the
tiredness in my legs, and my bike’s lack of super-low gearing make doing
anything more than survival pedaling impossible. Some of these slopes are so
long and winding that a sort of pained resignation sets in; I know that, any
time the road seems to level out a bit, around the next bend the grade will
increase yet again. There are stretches of road where I can’t see another
person, let alone another cyclist in a yellow and orange jersey, and the road
is only marked at the intersections. It becomes easy to convince myself that
I’ve made a wrong turn and am now heading towards Tennessee rather than
Asheville, and at one point I actually do, and backtrack for half a mile or so
until an Official Vehicle flags me down and wonders what the heck I’m doing –
it’s pretty obvious they’re wondering if I’m OK. Every so often, though, I pick up something
familiar, or a glimpse of a bicycle in the distance, and I can go back to
worrying about keeping my feet moving in circles and trying to ignore the
weight that seems to accumulate in my thighs the more I climb.
Finally, though, I realize that the intersection ahead is
with the major road that I was so cocky about climbing; I’m nearing the 20-mile-to-go
checkpoint. Cruising back down this hill is wonderful, especially when the main
road sort of veers away and we get back on the gently-switchbacking
road alongside a tumbling stream. These curves are blind, but gentle enough
that I don’t feel like I have to brake down to a fast walking speed to sweep
around them. It ends all too soon at the checkpoint; again, it’s
right to the oranges for me, and the Fritos are pretty appealing, too. Stacey,
Brian, and Mike show up pretty soon after me, and don’t dawdle at all; they’re
back on the road before me, as is the
Once I get going, I catch up to the
Somewhere in there we also catch up with Stacey yet
again, and she latches on to the draft for a couple of miles. At some point,
she drops off to ride her own pace, not long before the road begins to rise again – the last real hill of this ride. Our pace slows
predictably, but somewhere as we climb I start to feel an adrenalin surge, not
competitive, but it’s demanding that I ride this hill a bit harder. I quietly
press ahead and build a bit of speed, maybe up to double digits, which,
adrenalin or not, is something of a surprise this far into the ride. It feels
good – really, really good – and better yet, it feels like I can maintain it
for as long as the road chooses to climb.
Before long, almost too soon, the hill crests in an
almost imperceptible change in grade from up to flat to down, and I let Ruby
go. Before long, my speedometer is showing the high 30s, and the adrenaline is
far from gone, so I click up though the gears, let my
hands fall onto the drops, and start pressing on. 40 shows
up on my computer. I click up as high as my drive train will allow. It’s a
silly thing, but I want to have a top speed for the day as well as a distance.
Finally, I see 45 on the display, and my legs can’t go any faster to get any
more, so I sit up and feel the air press me back to a more rational speed. A
Nissan Altima that I had no idea was behind me passes
me, and the driver gives me a wave.
Now this is really the homestretch, and I feel it. The
road is flat, for real for a change, and there’s a definite, pretty strong
tailwind, and all that adrenaline is still there, and the emotion of it all is
catching up. I’d thought I’d at some point do a 100+ mile ride on my own during
the summer, just to be sure that I could do it; I’m so glad I didn’t. But the
third digit on the trip meter, cool as it may be on its own and even cooler on
this challenging group ride, is so little of it – alone, it would have left
this trip with an anticlimactic, vaguely unsatisfying feel to it. But I’m not
doing this ride alone, and it’s not just about my own accomplishment; I’ve
spent this weekend with people who know what they’re doing, and who know
exactly why they’re doing it. They wake up with all the reason they need
hanging from their belt, or worse, they know that they can check their child’s
blood in the middle of the night without the kid waking up. How is that
possible, that a kid can have a finger pricked and not even wake up? How can
someone be used to that, to the extent that it’s not even worth waking up for?
It’s a motivation that I’ve been mercifully unaware of, but being exposed to it
is enough to make me wonder if I can go back to even pretending to care about a
custom filing cabinet. My attention span is short enough as it is without that
kind of question hanging over me as I sit in my little box every day.
I break out of the reverie at just the right moment, to see
my trip meter roll from 99.9 miles to 100. It’s worth a little whoop. I’m
cruising in earnest now, at the wonderful, wind-assisted speed of 20 to 24
miles an hour. Asheville is coming more and more into view, with buildings I
now recognize. The last mile takes me under Interstate 240, and a couple of
blocks later, to a left turn that takes me up a short, obnoxious little hill,
with no chance to have any momentum to start, and a stop light right at the
top, so you can’t just keep going. In fact, I’m still on the slope when I have
to stop, and I’m sort of straddling lanes with cars on both sides of me. At
least I’m in a useable gear when we get a green, and I grind across the
intersection with
I don’t want to be done, though; I’m still full of
adrenalin and emotion, and I’ve got to get some of it out before I can stand
still, so I slip back onto the saddle and head back out. Stacey rides around
the corner and to the finish only a moment after I do; she’s got the same
tired, sort of addled grin that I start to see on every person who rolls in.
Heading back along the course, I pass Brian and Mike pretty soon, and then
Diane and Maria. Maria’s already got a giant smile going. I turn around and
roll back in with them, back up that silly hill, and back though the cowbells.
I’m embarrassed to hear my name called again by the finish announcer. This
time, though, it’s enough, so I lean Ruby up against the truck where all the
bikes are accumulating and go get a nice, big roast beef and cheese sandwich.
We all stand around, waiting for the next
A few minutes after Rod, Ann and Mike appear,
arms up. As Mike says later, Ann was powered by stubborn resolve and a few
well-timed Skittles, which are apparently her remedy of choice for falling
blood sugar. She’s our ride captain, a 17 year veteran of type 1 diabetes, and a long-time cyclist who describes herself as
an Energizer Bunny – not fast, but able to go forever, which she’s demonstrated
today.
With that, we all entrust our bikes to the big truck
again, set out in rows according to their home destinations, and head up to
scrape the goo and crust from our bodies and come
back down to dinner. It’s a nice, big meal, and we hear some of the day’s
stories. The biggest is how Grandma Barb, riding at age 78 and part of a
three-generation ride family, was run off the road by a car and crashed down an
embankment along the river. Her aftereffects were limited to a few stitches and
an argument with the EMTs about whether or not she
should allow herself to be carried back up the embankment in a stretcher or
not. Riding this sort of thing, no matter what distance I try, in 45 more years
is a goal to care about, and being tough enough to tumble down a hill and still
argue with a paramedic would be just grand.
So now it’s almost two weeks since we returned from
I was going to say it’s gotten
better since then, but I’m not entirely sure. I’ve rolled back into doing my work,
plugging back though Pro/ENGINEER code and the like with no more distractability than before, but there’s always the nagging
sense behind the work that what I’m doing is not really contributing to much
more than the aesthetics of someone’s office, and all I’m doing in that case is
trying to match the visions of some designer.
I did get my bike back today, albeit briefly – I found
cracks in the rear rim, so Ruby’s in for repair under warranty – so hopefully
I’ll still have the occasional nice day for riding for at least a little while.
I’ve found that all those things that have sort of come up for me on this ride
at will always make a little more sense when I’m able to let my legs spin
faster than my brain!
I’m already looking forward to next year!