Not Even My Wife Reads This

Last year's 400 was really hard for me. I got lost and I had stomach problems and I dehydrated and I bonked and I had 4 flat tires (1 blowout, 1 puncture, 2 bad fixes). But I finished. So I was a bit worried this time, even though I had a pretty strong 300 a couple of weeks ago.

The things that went wrong for me in the 300 were arriving a bit late, minor mechanical issues (badly adjusted brakes and chain problems, on a bike I rarely ride), not bringing enough warm clothes, and ridiculous levels of wind.

So for the 400 I made sure to arrive on time, I rode my usual bike, and I brought a wool jersey and wool socks in addition to the synthetic jersey and cotton socks I usually wear in warm weather. I also brought more food than usual: Clif bars, Gu, and Gatorade instead of plain water in my bottles. I didn't bring my Camelbak even though I got dehydrated last year, because I hate wearing one and it wasn't supposed to be very hot. I just resolved to completely fill my bottles at every opportunity and also to drink heavily at the controls. (Not that kind of drinking heavily; that'll make you crash your bike.) I think a bike with space for three full-sized water bottles is in my future. I couldn't do anything about the weather, though. The forecast was for a 50% chance of rain in the day and 60% at night, so I figured we'd probably get rained on some. (This is called foreshadowing. I learned about it in middle school English class. You probably did too.)

The group left Frederick at 4 a.m. and I started off near the front. Most of the fast riders seem to want to do a couple of miles at 15 mph to warm up, then speed up to over 20 mph. I prefer to do the first couple of miles at 17 mph and then gradually slow down to 13 mph. (Well, "prefer" is the wrong word. I'd prefer to ride at 25 all day. But that ain't gonna happen, ever. I didn't win that particular genetic lottery. I think my ancestors were the ones who tricked the mastodons into falling off cliffs, not the ones who ran down the gazelles.) So I often end up leading the brevet very briefly, then getting rapidly shelled out the back. At least it gives me a brief chance to see all the fast riders who I'm unlikely to see again all day.

Last year I somehow stayed with the fast pack all the way to the first control at 39 miles in Airmont. This year, I lasted about 5 miles before I realized that I was going about 23 mph on the flat, which was wasting energy for no good reason. (Maybe trying to keep up contributed to my bonking last year.) So I let the pack go and rode alone. Of course riding alone in the dark is a lot slower than riding with a fast group. Not only do you lose the draft but you also lose the benefit of other people's lights so you have to descend more slowly. And you have to navigate for yourself rather than just following a wheel and trusting that 20 people can't all be wrong. But I think it's still the right choice to let the group go, if they're riding faster than you can reasonably sustain.

I really didn't have much power in my legs on this ride, for whatever reason. Even just a few miles in, I found myself going 15 mph on the flats and coasting on the slight downhills. But I climbed well (by my standards, not an actual good climber's standards) all day. So the power was there when I really needed it, just not all the time. I pondered why I didn't have it as I slowly rode from Frederick down to Brunswick and then over the bumpy bridge into Lovettesville and around western Loudoun County toward Airmont. A few riders caught me from behind. I just let them go and kept riding whatever speed my legs wanted to do. Oddly that meant getting passed on the flats and then passing people on the uphills. Of course I also got passed on the downhills, but I always do, because I'm an overly cautious descender. It doesn't really matter much when you're riding alone because the total time spent going downhill is small, but it matters if you're trying to stick to a group and they accidentally drop you. So I need to work on my descending. But the early morning darkness was not the best time for that, so I resolved to not outrace my lights. (I was using an Inolight 20, plus a cheap LED helmet light for backup / repair / cue sheet reading purposes. The Inolight is reasonably bright but not super-bright, which makes it nice for my mostly bike trail commute because it doesn't blind oncoming traffic, but not so great for fast descending where you really need to be able to see far ahead. I also own an Edelux, which is significantly brighter, which I should have mounted before this ride and will definitely mount before the 600.)

I stopped briefly at the Airmont information control, wrote down the information on my brevet card, chatted briefly with a couple of people, and then started the climb up to Snicker's Gap. The climb was a lot easier than I remember from last year. Maybe my legs were more tired then from chasing the fast people, or maybe I felt slow because I was watching the fast people pull away from me. I made it to the top, climbed on the shoulder of Route 7 to the top of the hill (the shoulder is bumpy but perfectly safe for ascending at less than 10 mph), then moved to the white line for the extremely fast descent on Route 7. This is a scary descent not because it's technical (the road is dead straight and you can see forever), but because there's high-speed traffic on the road and not all of it wants to move to the left lane to pass you. My maximum speed was just over 40 mph and I got passed by another bike on the way down. Didn't even have time to see who, it was just "Uh-oh there's a car I didn't hear coming right next to me, no wait it's a bike, wow he goes downhill fast."

Still riding alone, I turned off Route 7 into West Virginia. I skipped the first store shown on the cue sheet, but my water was running low so I stopped at Charlie Brown's Store (which conveniently sells bongs and handguns so that area cyclists can tell more jokes about West Virginia) to get some Gatorade and use their porta-potty. A couple other cyclists caught me while I was in the store, but in my weird slow-flat fast-uphill mode I didn't think I could fit well into a group, so I just said hi and continued riding alone. The route contined toward Shenandoah Junction. We know it really was a train junction because you have to cross railroad tracks approximately every half-mile in that area, and most of them are diagonal and extra-bumpy, as if the people who built the railroads feared invasion by Dutch bicycle troops and wanted their tracks to also serve as defensive fortifications. (More foreshadowing.)

As part of a personal tradition of always riding more than the minimum number of miles on a brevet due to occasional inability to read a cue sheet, I turned left instead of right onto Flowing Springs Road and then couldn't find the expected turn onto Daniel Road because it wasn't there, it was the other way. Of course I had to ride another mile to make sure, before looking harder at the cue sheet and figuring out what I'd done wrong. Oh well, it was only 2.5 bonus miles, or a mere 1% of the total. And continually trying to get better at navigation rather than just giving up and using a GPS probably builds character.

After crossing a whole lot of railroad tracks without crashing, I made it to the Shepherdstown Sweet Shop, which has lots of really tasty desserts that you'd feel bad about eating if you weren't riding your bike 250 miles. And also sandwiches and drinks and bathrooms. They need to franchise this place and put Starbucks out of business. I had some delicious but messy cherry crumb cake thing, and a donut that had peanut butter in it, and also a greek wrap. Breakfast of champions. Hey, I didn't want to bonk.

I left Shepherdstown and went west, approximately following the Potomac River, but not actually close enough to the river for the route to be flat. Instead it kept on rolling. Downhill, cross creek, uphill, repeat. After 25 miles or so the course got on River Road. River and Creek are usually good words on cue sheets (unlike Mountain and Hill and Ridge and Eagle and Gap and Pass and Highway), but this particular River Road isn't as flat as most, because the railroad got there first and put their train tracks between River Road and the river. It was approaching noon and I saw some sun peeking between the clouds, so I stopped to put on some sunscreen. Apparently that was just the cue the clouds were waiting for, because it started raining a few minutes later, and rained for most of the rest of the day and night. Didn't really need that sunscreen.

Eventually River Road led to the bridge across the Potomac to Hancock, where Maryland is so narrow north-to-south that you can bike across the whole state in just a few minutes. (Even if you don't actually bicycle much and just read ride reports so you can laugh at insane people, if you live in the area you should head out to Hancock sometime and bike from the river to the Mason-Dixon line, so that later you can say you biked across Maryland and impress geographically uninformed people with your athletic prowess. You're welcome.) But before biking all the way across Maryland to Pennsylvania, I had to visit the C&O bike shop control. It's nice to have a control at a bike shop because if you have a mechanical problem they have some bike parts, and if you have a really serious mechanical problem they rent and sell entire bikes. And they also have porta-potties, and drinks, and a covered porch that procrastinating cyclists are allowed to loiter on while hoping the rain stops, and a limited supply of bike food. I bought a Clif Bar (I had some but wanted to try a different flavor) and some water and Gatorade, and drank until all the liquid that didn't fit in my bottles was gone.

The course continued down the Western Maryland Rail Trail for 5 miles, to dodge the Hancock traffic, then turned north into Pennsylvania cow country. Cows and rain and rollers, a winning combination. I slogged on until the Saunderosa Campground, where I got a delicious vanilla milkshake and refilled my water bottles. There were 7 other riders there, hiding from the rain, and I decided to leave with them and ride with the group to relieve the monotony.

There was a pretty big climb immediately after the campground, which featured a really stupid driver who tried an ill-advised pass on a blind curve, almost caused a head-on collision, then honked at us like it was our fault. How hard is it to wait until you can actually see whether you have room before passing? I know it's boring to be stuck behind a bicycle for 30 seconds, but it's a lot worse to be dead. Luckily the oncoming car was alert and stopped, so no carnage, just honking. The rest of the climb was slow and easy. The descent in the rain was fast and exciting. My rear brake wasn't very well-adjusted and brakes and tires and road were wet, so I went down even more slowly than usual to make sure I could stop, and got passed by a couple of guys. We regrouped at the bottom and continued through cow country together.

After about 20 more miles in the rain we reached Letterkenny, which featured a golf course whose pro shop has snack food and bathrooms. We stopped there and ate hamburgers, which were okay. While we were there Stan told me that the railroad tracks that were coming up were really nasty. (More foreshadowing.) So when we finally left I was third in line, and went over the first diagonal railroad tracks with my bike perfectly vertical but aimed left to cross the track perpendicular. And again with the second set. But then the third set of tracks were diagonal the other way (to confuse those invading bicycle troops) and I swung my bike around but I guess I didn't get it quite vertical, because I was on the ground. Luckily there weren't any cars right behind me to compound the damage. I was okay, just some road rash on my left arm and leg and a bruise on my hip. We checked out my bike, which was okay except that the chain had come off, which someone fixed for me while I made sure none of my bones were sticking out. Then we restarted. I've been warned about railroad tracks for years and have been crossing them carefully for years, but this was the first time I ever actually fell on one. Next time I come up to that kind of metal plate track setup in the rain, I'm unclipping both feet and going over at 5 mph.

After that excitement we'd lost a couple of riders off the front of our group, but they waited for us under a bank drive-through shelter a couple of miles up the road. We continued through lots of mild rollers and then through a bunch of disgusting slippery cow-byproduct-infested mud on Mud Level Road. Nobody slipped and fell in the mud but it was all over us anyway. Somewhere in this section we saw a cyclist up ahead. It was Paul, riding alone, and we merged him into our big group. We got to the control at Kane's in Newville just before dusk. Their fryer was broken but they made a good chicken cheesesteak. (I thought a real beef cheesesteak would be too greasy, especially after the golf course burger.)

While we were in Kane's the rain stopped. Fantastic! Unfortunately, a few minutes after we left, it started again. We went up Big Flat (the easy part but still a big climb). As it got darker I noticed my headlight was barely working. I figured the connector to the generator had come loose in my crash, but I didn't want to stop to fix it until someone else stopped. So I followed Joel's headlight until I saw Bill stop to fix something, then I stopped to fix my headlight (it was just a loose connector, probably knocked off in my crash on the railroad tracks) and rode with Bill up the rest of the hill and down the descent and then through the rollers of Michaux State Forest. Two lights are definitely better than one, especially when my one was my Inolight rather than my Edelux. We made it to the next turn and the group all waited to have a navigation discussion, since half our cue sheets were soaked and the rest were under fogged-up plastic. We came to a consensus and turned toward Gettysburg.

Just before Gettysburg Paul left our group. Not sure why, but whoever talked to him determined that it was okay for the rest of us to press on to the control. The remaining 8 of us stopped for a while at the 7-11 control. They had the air conditioning on so it was freezing inside, and then it was cold again for a while when we got moving again. But the remaining 40 miles was mostly flat to downhill and so not that hard even in the dark rain. Except that I couldn't read my cue sheet, so staying with the group was imperative. Luckily Bill had the route pretty much memorized. We took almost two hours to make it to Thurmont, stopped again at the non-control 7-11 there, then took a long time to make it to the end in Frederick. We arrived at 3:15 a.m. My utter disaster of a 400k last year took 22 hours; this one took 23:15. There was definitely a time penalty for riding with a big group because we rode at the speed of the slowest rider and took a long time at the controls and occasionally stopped to wait for each other. But there was a huge navigation and safety benefit to sticking together. Lots of lights.

When we got to the end my brevet card was soaked. I had it in a Ziploc baggie but some water got in there somehow. A volunteer dried it in the microwave, but the signature from one of the controls was illegible. Luckily I went through that control with a whole bunch of other riders so our RBA was able to verify with them that I did indeed stop there. Another benefit of riding with a group. But next time I'm double-bagging my brevet card. And bringing 3 cue sheets instead of my usual 2.