On The Road
by: Bill Oetinger 2/1/2003
The Ride from Hell
It’s February, a month in transition: some parts of the country are already enjoying 80° days; other regions are still locked in the midwinter deep freeze. In my backyard--northern California--February represents the beginning of serious cycling for the season, or at least it represents serious cycling for cyclists who have a big game plan for the year...an Agenda, with a capitol A. Folks who have it in mind to do grand things this year--races or double centuries or rides across the country--figure this is the time to start ramping up. There just aren’t that many months between now and some of those big-event dates on the calendar. Heck, there are doubles and races right in the dang month of February. No time to lose!
We have weathered the worst of what passes for winter in this temperate climate...at least in theory anyway. From here on, the days are getting longer, the sun is getting warmer, and the odds of getting wet are diminishing day by day...again, in theory. However--and it’s a big however--there are many exceptions to that theoretical rule. During all the months of our long spring, from February through May, there remains a strong possibility that rain--sometimes cold rain in wholesale job lots--will find us out there, a long way from home, while we’re engaged in that earnest and obsessive process of ramping up.
And that makes springtime the native habitat of the Ride from Hell, a term I’m using here to encompass only one subset of rides that might be considered hellish. I’m not talking about those monster, mid-season rides that are so difficult as to push us to our physical limits--the really hilly doubles, for instance, or RAAM or Furnace Creek. Nor am I talking about those bad rides where something truly horrific happens: serious injuries or fatalities. No, this sort of awful ride is supposed to be amusing, at least in retrospect...something that, although miserable at the time, can be laughed about later, and about which we can say, “Oh yeah, that ride! That was truly a Ride from Hell! Har har har!”
In my experience, Rides from Hell are usually self-inflicted. Well of course: all of our rides are self-inflicted. No one makes us go out there and ride. But this is more than an issue of free will. This is where, because of some compulsion to train--to ramp up--we set out to do some epic, foolish ride, when all of our common sense and better judgement, not to mention weather forecasts and the advice of friends and spouses, suggest we would be better off staying home and working on our stamp collections.
Rides from Hell can happen in any season, but are most frequently encountered, at least for me, sometime in the spring, when the compulsion to train harder--to get in those big miles--is egged on by the waning of winter and the return of warm sun and dry roads...except for those occasional spring storms that lie in ambush out there, like icebergs looking for their Titanics. In the real winter months, we have the good sense to dial it back. We say winter storms are just God’s way of telling us to take some time off the bike. We act sensibly, most of the time. If rain washes out our planned weekend ride, we grumble a little, but then shrug it off and busy ourselves with some indoor pursuit, like repacking our hubs. But when spring fever hits, we’re apt to plan a big ride and then stick with the plan, come hell or high water, which, come to think of it, are pretty much synonymous in this context.
Off we go, into the black and blue yonder, with moist clouds lowering over the hilltops. We spy little vagrant glimmers of sunlight out there somewhere and convince ourselves that, yes, it is going to clear up! This drizzle can’t last! The TV weatherman was wrong. The online accuweather forecast was wrong. Wishful thinking is a kind term for it. Delusional is closer to the mark.
We had a ride that fit this scenario recently. It looked bad at the start, and we dithered for quite awhile about whether to ride or go home. We finally conned ourselves into riding, even though it looked ominous, and for once, happily, the drizzle didn’t last, and in fact we got in a nice ride under clearing skies. (Just because we’re often delusional doesn’t mean we can’t get lucky every now and then. It’s those rare success stories that bolster our delusions.) Anyway, on this ride, while dodging the puddles, we got to reminiscing about some of those awful old rides we had shared where the drizzle didn’t fizzle out, but only got heavier and colder as the ride wore on. And I think we collectively decided that I ought to do a column about those terrible treks...a sort of homage to the Ride from Hell.
I asked for a little help from my friends on this one. This is one case where misery really does love company, and I wanted to hear some other people’s accounts of their own Rides from Hell. I will reproduce some of the best (worst) anecdotes here, and I hope it will help you to recall some of your own rides that fit this same template. I know you’ve had them. Not all of these fit into the springtime window. As noted, they can occur anytime. It’s just that so many of them do occur in the spring, it seems like the right time to remember them.
Only one of these accounts is from a local, northern California ride. The others come from further afield, from regions that make our climate seem nearly tropical by comparison. Let’s begin with this account from Jon Gardner about a century ride he and two friends did on January 22, just outside our February window...
“Ride leader Crista wanted us to know that it was a new record in her history of leading weekend rides. ‘I’ve never led a ride when it was less than 17°,’ she said after explaining that the thermometer on the van driven by her tandem captain read 12°. But ever optimistic, just as we were about to leave the ride start in Bryantown, Maryland, she pointed out it had warmed up: “It has to be at least 14 now!” Starting the ride at 8 instead of 7:30 made all the difference in the world, I guess. Chuck’s cyclocomputer includes a thermometer function, but it doesn’t register below 23°. Its makers must have had the good sense to never ever ride in temperatures as low as 12°.
“This was billed as a gentle, mellow century in scenic Charles and St. Mary’s Counties in Maryland, south of Washington. The route winds on mostly quiet roads through woods and farm fields, and includes scenic views of the Patuxent River near its mouth at the Chesepeake Bay. Cold, wind, and snow would be our only companions. Three miles in, Chuck and Crista had to turn around; Chuck’s facemask was forcing his breath up onto his sunglasses, where the moisture condensed and then froze. He went back for ski goggles. I told them I’d meet up with them at the rest stop at mile 35. Immediately after we parted, I was faced with the first challenge of the ride: a 200-yard stretch of blown snow packed down by passing automobiles. I picked my way gently through it and rode on.
“It was cold cold cold. Water bottles froze within minutes, although I could still squeeze a trickle of Ensure out of one of them for awhile, before the valve froze. The water froze in the tube of my Camelback when I forgot to blow it back into the bladder. I went the first 40 miles without fluid. Despite putting chemically activated toe warmers inside my shoes (which were themselves sheathed in neoprene booties) my feet were numb. The handwarmers worked a little better.
“Two missed turns later, I pulled into the rest stop minutes behind Crista and Chuck. Hanging from my facemask was a four-inch-long ice goatee that had formed because my own breath had condensed on the fabric and frozen into an icicle. In years of cross-country skiing, plus wintertime running and cycling, I had never experienced icing like that on my body or clothing.
“We stopped for lunch at a restaurant on the banks of the river, and the oyster stew tasted really, really good. By now, I was getting wise to the cold weather. I learned that my toe warmers worked better if I stuck them to the sock on the top of my foot, rather than the bottom. Wearing my Camelback inside my outer layer kept the tube from freezing. Nothing to be done about the water bottles, but at least I knew I’d have some fluid to drink on the way home.
“We rode on through occasional patches of packed-down snowdrifts. Chuck’s thermometer finally began working, reaching a high of 27 degrees. Finally, we pulled into the school at 5 pm, just before dark.
“In short, it was a ride I was happy to have completed and reflects my attitude about outdoor activity in inclement weather: nothing is too cold if you dress right. I can tell you that riding in bad conditions always makes you appreciate the perfect 80° days. That’s the best reason to do it.”
(This is an edited version of Jon’s account. For the complete version, visit http://home.earthlink.net/~jtkuehn/dcrand/articles/2000cold.html.)
Jon’s comment about dressing right is certainly true, and maybe people who live and ride in really atrocious conditions have learned to always do the right thing in this department. But in California, part of the job description for a Ride from Hell is to not have along all the right clothing. The weather is usually so benign that we become complacent and slack--probably even willfully stupid--in our preparations. I recall one dreadful ride in March when my friend Lou said, “There is no such thing as inappropriate weather...only inappropriate clothing.” At the time, we were standing around high on a ridge, being buffeted by windblown sleet and hail, and for most of us, our defense against the elements amounted to vests and arm warmers. Lou, in contrast--an intelligent, down-to-earth midwesterner--was dressed in full foul weather kit, from head to toe, looking more like a Glouchester fisherman than a cyclist. He said he’d first heard the line from a cycle-tour guide on the south island of New Zealand, a place where they know a little bit about precipitation.
The next Ride from Hell account comes from Wayne Hanno, of the Quad Cities area (Iowa-Illinois border, along the Mississippi river). It’s too long and convoluted to reproduce here, but it’s a good yarn, and you can read it all at http://home.mchsi.com/~hanno1/Wonderful2000.pdf It's A Wonderful Century - December 2000. The essential story line is that Wayne and his buddy Dave LeFever needed one century in December, 2000 to complete some self-imposed task known as the Big Dog Challenge. They had procrastinated away the whole month, hoping for improving weather--in a winter of record-setting cold--only to finally have to knock off their century in the final week of the year, when temperatures dropped to 18 below. It warmed up to mid-teens during the day, but they still had a hard time of it, falling repeatedly on the ice and snow-covered roads and enduring all the same hardships outlined in Jon’s account above. Note that the ride--another century, no less--is a self-inflicted, artificial construct. No one was holding a gun to their heads, forcing them to go out and ride in such horrid conditions. They had painted themselves into a psychological corner where they HAD to ride, regardless. I consider this an essential for a true Ride from Hell, for a good portion of what we’re laughing about later is our own idiocy.
Closer to home, two of my friends--Kirk Beedle and Bill Ellis--sent me accounts of the same ride as their personal favorite Ride from Hell. I was on that same ride, and I have to admit it would make my short list too, so I’m going to attempt to integrate all of our collective memories from that day into one account here.
 |
Homestake Mine |
The ride was called the Ride to the Mines and was an April weekend club ride listed jointly by the Santa Rosa Cycling Club and the Sacramento Wheelmen. If you’ve done either the Davis Double or the Knoxville Double, you will be familiar with most of the roads. It started at the Pope Valley Grange, went up Knoxville-Berryessa Road (past the huge Homestake gold mine) to Lower Lake, over Siegler Canyon and Big Canyon to Middletown, and back south along Butts Canyon to Pope Valley. It’s a very hilly 90-mile loop. Some of us rode to the ride start from about ten miles away, anticipating turning it into about a 110-mile ride.
A lot of people showed up...at least a couple of dozen. The weather forecast was not good. There was definitely a chance of cold rain, and smarter people would have backed off on such a daunting, remote route, but we had all been looking forward to this ride. It’s hard, sure, but really scenic and fun, at least on a decent day.
It was not yet raining hard in the early stages of the ride. (I think an essential element of any really nasty Ride from Hell is that it lures you along the route with moderately tolerable weather until you’re as far from home as you’re going to get, and only then does it unload on you.) But even though it wasn’t yet raining hard, we still got wet. A unique feature of Knoxville-Berryessa Road is several fords through little Eticuera Creek. Anytime after May, these low washes are dry, but in a wet April, they were still up to 15 inches deep, so pedaling through them got all of our feet soaked, early in the ride.
By the time we reached the little town of Lower Lake, less than halfway into the ride, the rain had picked up to the point where the rest of us was as wet as our feet. Our feet, having had a headstart on being wet, were now well on their way to being numb. We all piled into a little pizza parlor in town, where the folks treated us with that natural, small town hospitality that can’t be feigned: they let us string all our wet clothes up--including about 20 pair of soggy socks--on makeshift clotheslines around the restaurant, and they plied us all with hot coffee, whether we had money to pay for it or not. That helped a lot, but we were still a long way from home, and the weather was getting worse.
Fortunately--for some people--we had a couple of sag wagons on the course with us. As many people as could fit were crammed into the cars, but that left a handful of us to soldier on, over another mountain pass and down the long, long valley to the finish. We found out later that it was snowing just a hundred feet higher up the ridge than where we were riding, so we know this was a pretty cold day for April in California. What was landing on us was that most miserable form of precipitation: sleet. You can have warm rain fall on you and not get cold. You can have snow fall on you and not get wet. But with sleet, you get cold and wet both. Kirk, Bill, and I, and one other guy, Ron Grey, slogged through those final 50 miles more-or-less together, although each of us was locked inside our own little private cocoon of misery. Ron would later become a demon road racer, with many wins to his credit. But he was new to cycling on this ride...was just getting his feet wet, so to speak...and he was in a world of hurt, unprepared, physically or mentally, for that level of suffering. I did what I could to jolly him along with jokes and horseplay, and he claimed afterward he would not have made it if I hadn’t kept up the patter all the way to the end.
Bill recalls bombing down the last descent along Butts Canyon in the driving rain at a speed that would normally seem less than prudent, given the conditions, which included fingers so numb they couldn’t feel the brake levers. But he said at that point, he was so cold and unhappy that a sort of fatalism had set in: I don’t care if I crash and die; just get me out of here. I recall a similar mindset on a Markleeville Death Ride where constant rain led to hypothermia: descending at 50-mph in freezing rain and not caring anymore about anything except getting off the bike and into a hot shower.
I was going to wrap this up with one more anecdote about my personal favorite Ride from Hell--a ride in a blizzard in Central Oregon, wearing nothing but shorts and a summer-weight mesh jersey, and sick with a terrible, nauseating virus--but I think I’ll leave that wonderful tale for another time. This column has already gone on as long as some of those awful rides, and it’s time for me to back away from the computer and go outside for a ride. (It’s the last week of January as I write this.) Right now it looks sunny outside, but who knows what interesting weather awaits me over that next ridge...
Bill can be reached at srccride@sonic.net