Throughout my ride on Friday – the longest ride I’ve ever undertaken, in terms of both distance and time – I thought of the slogan on a sticker sold by XXC Mag, a great publication on long-distance off-road cycling: “Sometimes ‘fun’ hurts pretty f*cking bad.”
I wasn’t going fast enough to be in agony, at least not the same sort of pain created by racing, but roughly the one-third mark to the end, I was in considerable, increasing discomfort that verged often on pain: my back was sore, my neck was stiff, my shoulders and upper arms were cramping, and of course my legs – from hips to, oddly, ankles – were beyond salvation. And oh god my knees. And I know I hallucinated a few times – imagining that I could see roadsigns that were actually too far away to be legible. About the only non-suffery times were my several rest breaks. Sitting on your ass in the dirt never felt so good:
It’s strange, though, to be in that state and still be happy, to still be having fun. I was out on nice gravel roads, seeing parts of the Southern Minnesota countryside that I haven’t seen before, and above all trying hard to get through the various obstacles literally in my path: to smoothly ride a horrible stretch of washboarded road, to maintain some speed on freshly-graded gravel that was deeper than my wheels’ rims, to not put a foot down on a long slippery uphill, to not tap the brakes on a long bumpy downhill (39.9 mph!).
I wound up riding 90 miles in 6:05 of saddle time. I had actually aimed to ride 10 miles further, to complete my first “century” ride, but that distance was just too much to do, especially because the longest I’d gone up to this ride was 62 miles (a “metric century” of 100 kilometers). All the mileage meant I got to see some good stuff, from the mature cornfields along the Cannon River
and the vaguely reptilian apparatus used to irrigate the corn and beans
and the pleasing linearity of partly-harvested corn
to picturesquely abandoned farm infrastructure like this crownless silo
and this caboose used apparently as an outbuilding or even a house at some farm west of Kenyon.
I hope I can find the time in the next six weeks – before it gets too cold – to do that century ride, to have some more f*cking painful fun, and to see more of the sights…