Proof of Life

“Head busted, stomach cracked
Feet splintered, I was bald . . .
Quite lucky to be alive though.”

In this season of Thanksgiving one thing stands alone: I am thankful I am alive.

True for all of us. Not to beat a dead cyclist, but a driver plowed into me and my bicycle and left me for dead on a Gadsden County road back in March. I was concussed, had my back broken, and required surgery to fix my fractured leg.

 “Quite lucky to be alive, though,” as Bobby D. would have it.

Not only was I spared death or more debilitating injuries, but more generally the pandemic and the aftermath of the crash have proved remarkably good for me. In distinct ways, that crash was the best thing that happened to me. As a buddy said, “Everything’s coming up Flemming.”

More particularly, I am beyond happy to be back on the bicycle, as chronicled here earlier. I did not ride a pedal-stroke the latter half of March and all of April and most of May. I got back in the saddle on Memorial Day weekend, riding a bit around a beach island. Then I got back on my road bike, though not on the road. For June, July, and August I rode on the St. Marks Trail and other non-highway hard surfaces. Then on Labor Day I put the final wrench turns on a new machine, a gravel bike that may be the perfect ride. It freed my mind and my Lycra-clad ass has followed. The Lynskey outfitted with new Campy gravel groupset, with its 1x drivetrain’s wider range of gearing of any bicycle in my stable, is sweet and silent and it takes me places I never imagined. It has put me back in the game, riding distances of ever-greater mileage (if recalibrated to fit circumstances) and exceeding anything else this year.

I know this much to be true: 62 miles is not 100 miles. One-hundred miles is more than 62 miles.

Century or not, my ride in mid-October along the red clay roads of North Florida and South Georgia was a triumph. I was still in a boot on my birthday, unable to put in the customary mileage to match my years – back in May that was 56. I did zero.  But I ticked off the annual challenge, proof of life, harbinger of a year ahead. To ride your age means a goodly chance of remaining right side of the sod – I’ll have to get back to you with the peer-reviewed studies showing a high causative correlation between riding your age and living another year to do it again, but it’s a real deal in experiential truth. I certainly feel it. Keep the streak going and all such as that. And in 2021 I rode my age. Not on my birthday proper, but all the same.

I rode what conventional wisdom holds to be the functional equivalent of a century ride on the unpaved roads of the route. It is more difficult to pedal on fat, low-pressure tires upon surfaces with a much higher coefficient of friction – where does loose sand three inches deep appear on that graph? It is an undeniable fact of basic physics it is harder to pedal on dirt roads than paved highways. Still. See above.

I pedaled 61.6 miles. That’s enough.

All that said, if the Spaghetti 100 route I traveled in mid-October had been a little bit longer, if the day were a little bit hotter, if the air were a little more humid, if the red-clay roads were a little more sandy, I would not have finished. As it was, I was running out of energy. There was very little tiger left in my tank. Had a dog charged me on those final hillocks, I could have responded with a burst of pedal power. Without a bark start, I geared down and spun up with less mechanical advantage. Harbinger of slow progress ahead, but progress there is, a definitive moving forward.

There was a velocity cliff. I charged right over it.

At that point, somewhere after mile 54, I had no choice but to ride my own ride. I could do nothing other than ride at my own pace – faster was unavailable, slower was falling down.

I’d already fallen down. There were a dozen stretches of serious sand along the route from Miccosukee to Metcalf to Boston and back. I knew this particular shoal of sand along New Hope Road from previous rides. It did seem a bit longer and a bit softer this day. I thought I had the tactical approach right, to go to the lowest gear and spin spin spin. There is not much point in steering; the bike follows the contours of the soft spots. Perhaps my approach was too timid. Riding since has proved this out. The right strategy appears to be reckless disregard for safety and self-preservation. Hit the sand hot, keep the velocity up with high spin rates on the pedals and gut your way through the sideways drift and fishtailing rear.

Learning how to ride in a new way, with novel less-lethal opportunities to flame out, is innervating. This red-clay, canopy-road riding epitomized by the Epic Gravel route of the Spaghetti 100 is more than frame geometry and tire width. It’s an entirely different approach. It’s a different activity. Gravel-bike riding gives me what I most sought on the road bike, with a limited downside easily overwhelmed by the incredible upside. I don’t go as fast;  11 mph is the new 15 mph. I don’t go as far; 30 miles is the new 50 miles.

I always like to go places, to see things, to have a destination with points of interest along the way, both built environment and the great outdoors, when I ride. It’s the appeal. Simple pleasures – roadside flowers, reflections in a mill pond, bluebirds along fence lines, courthouses, legacy land markers, tobacco barns – are gigantic attractions of cycling for me and the gravel bike provides this and more. It’s a lot closer to a hike in the woods than a Sunday drive in the car. Paved roads of North Florida and South Georgia can certainly take you to remote locations, but it’s rare to offer solitude. Not so on red-clay roads under miles of arching oak canopies, or alongside vast spreads of mature pine. The pace is slower. The mileage counters are less eye-popping. But it’s a bigger adventure – there are a lot fewer gas stations along the way to fill up water bottles – with more spectacular natural beauty. The silence is markedly deeper. The sky seems to spread to farther horizons. These rides emphasize the solo journey, the self-supported responsibility of getting yourself back. There is no hope of hitching a ride from a passing good Samaritan.

We now spin around the Earth’s tilted axis at further remove, a more oblique angle, from the sun and the temperatures are frosty in this season. It’s hard to remember the debilitating power of the heat, but it is undeniable the red-clay routes take a rider through deep shade for most of rides. The dirt roads, more likely to arise where human paths followed animal trails, succeeded by horses and conveyances pulled by them and, at last, Ford Super Duty F-350 Titanium pickups. These roads tend to follow natural contours of the land. They follow ridges and run long along creek bottoms instead of taking the direct route down and, crucially, up in the interest of straight-line efficiency. There is beauty all around, with fox squirrels the size of house cats, a bumper crop of acorns, the slow progress of the Aucilla moving ever toward the Gulf.

Thanksgiving reigns. I ride and I am happy.