Overdistanced

I took Columbus Day off to (try to) do a 100-mile “century” bike ride. A big loop east, north, and west of Northfield got me to that distance goal, and the combination of long stretches of flats and some judicious hammering helped me hit my average-pace goal, too. The keys, I found, were choosing a big-but-not-too-big gear on all the flats and going as fast as possible down every hill. Having picture-perfect weather the whole time was a big help, too.

Physically, the ride was nearly as hard as anything I’ve done in my life, though honestly the 60-mile I did a couple months back felt much harder. On that ride, I was suffering from the halfway point onwards. Perhaps because I rode smarter this time – pacing better, eating and drinking regularly, stopping less frequently and for less time – I didn’t feel that I was on the very edge until very late in the ride.

As usual, the scenery contributed to making the ride great.

Like all my long-distance rides, this outing was mostly on gravel roads across rolling green (or, now, yellow, red, and orange) countryside that’s now the setting for intensive harvesting. I saw scores of combines rumbling through the soybean and corn fields and at least a hundred grain trucks either parked incongruously in the middle of a barren field (waiting for a combine – one, next to a shiny silver-rimmed Escalade: your ag subsidies at work!) or, more frighteningly, roaring along the roads on their way to this or that elevator. Nothing throws up more dust than a corn-laden semi-trailer bombing along at 45 mph on dry gravel.

More stationary sights were plentiful, too: falling-down barns, neglected farmhouses, fields studded with New Deal farm equipment, an engineless van sitting in the middle of a pasture and nearly overgrown with weeds. And while I’ve seen many empty corn cribs, this was the first time I’ve seen full ones. Since from a distance you can’t see the fencing that makes up the walls of them, the cribs appear to be constituted entirely of solid white-yellow corn. Sadly, they are not, because that would be cool. I also saw cows, horses, sheep, goats, chickens, turkeys wild and domesticated, geese, ducks, and pheasants. I didn’t see any deer, but I did see both elk and bison – albeit behind fences. Bison can throw off quite a glare, though I’d eagerly agree to ride past twenty miles of angry buffalo than to ride another mile behind a grain truck.

So while I expected both the physical arduousness and the visual scenery, I didn’t expect to struggle so much with the psychology of the ride. From about the halfway point, I solved and resolved the mind-over-matter problem in various ways. The least interesting was simply watching the miles tick by on my cyclocomputer. I tired of that early in the ride. The most ubiquitous brain game was counting – pedal strokes, breaths, chain squeaks, whatever – with second place occupied by trying to calculate kilometers from miles. On climbs, I muttered Jens Voigt‘s mantra, “Harden the fuck up,” in time to my pedaling. “Harden… the… fuck… up… Harden… the… fuck… up…” Silly, but effective.

A lot of the time, I simply thought fuzzily about various songs. I bet I spent 10 miles trying to recall the lyrics to a particular song that may or may have been sung by Moby. I never did figure that one out, though I did sing Raffi’s “Baby Beluga” many times, and pieces of “La Marseillaise.” The chorus – “Aux armes, mes citoyens…” – is great for cycling: bloodthirsty, rhythmic, French.

By the last third of the ride, though, the mind and the body had turned in unison toward a long, close examination of just what the hell was hurting now: a gimpy right knee, cramps up and down both calves, an achy neck, and a dust-induced hack that did no favors for the respiratory process (and could not be cured with any amount of water). Studying all these failings, and assessing their progress toward being unable to pedal another goddamn stroke, occupied at least the last 15 miles of the ride. I can’t say those miles were fun, but in their own way they kinda were.