WHYFOR
Here, then, are the reasons I am going to ride 434 miles across Iowa next month:
CLARITY
Life is damnably ambiguous. It is hard to know if you won or lost that day’s battles. It’s often difficult to even identify the battles, much less who the victors are. Goals are squishy. Progress is often hard to measure. There is a lot of grey out there. It’s a business-school bromide that you can’t know who won if you don’t keep score. But that presumes everyone has agreed what game you are playing and on a single set of rules. There is no such consensus.
For this, or any, bike ride there is a clear measure of success and a certain mandate: Get to the end.
There are a series of clear tests, seven of them. Each day has a known starting point and a known conclusion. The crystal certainty of the goal each day is invigorating and gratifying, at least if I manage to get it done. If I set out to ride my bicycle 85 miles from Ottumwa to Mt. Pleasant there is only one question to answer. Did I make it? If so, I succeeded. If I do not pedal all those miles and up all those hills, then I failed.
It’s binary.
On July 27 I can tell you if I got it done. I find that prospect very attractive and it’s one reason I am doing RAGBRAI.
CAMARADERIE
There are 11 of us on this ride loosely doing it together amid 20,000 or so other people we don’t know. Each of us went to the same high school and knew each other when we were teenagers – some before that, some afterward as well. There is a bond made with people you knew when you yourself were in your formative years. It is a combination of familiarity, shared experiences, fond memories, and painful adolescent memories.
Without exception, I consider the other 10 men good human beings. A couple of them I think are exceptional people. All are smart and engaging and get my references to the third lake, the incinerator, the 1982 Art Club trip, and Billy Squier lyrics. I would not be going on this ride were it not for them. I look forward to spending time with them, sharing in the suffering, learning what I can from smart people, drinking beer and sharing laughs around the misting fan.
I have friends from church youth group, friends from college, and friends from different stages of my adult life. None of them are quite as close as these guys, even the ones I have not seen in 31 years.
‘COMPLISHMENT
The old cliché is true: If it were easy, everyone would do it. If I achieve the clarity of success, I will have done something I will be proud of in the aftermath. The doing of it promises to be full of suffering and frustration.
This is a personal thing. One of my high school buddies, and fellow RAGBRAI rider, last weekend completed a grueling, single ride of 200 miles along hilly Kansas gravel roads. On purpose. There is not much doubt Robert is in shape to complete RAGBRAI. My own readiness is much less certain. Once I get it done, I won’t hesitate to tell everyone about it.
I have said this ride – and all endurance events – are as much about stubbornness as they are about physical ability. But there is some level of fitness required and, if I succeed, it will because of the determined and consistent preparation I did. Any instance of sustained discipline, goal fulfillment, and final execution is something I am going to celebrate.
That’s why I am doing it. If there is joy, food, oddities, tall tales, and scars (emotional or physical) to show off, all the better. It ain’t braggin’ if you done it. Pain is temporary, old-age is forever, everybody digs generous health care benefits.
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p.s. I dithered over a post I’d written about my training regimen and finally concluded there was no way to make it anything other than tedious navel gazing.
I am going to append a series of footnotes I’d written for that abandoned post – why settle for mere tedium when you can go tedium-rare – to this new version. In that way, the boring stuff becomes more interesting, perhaps: Try to figure out what the original reference was by the context of the footnote.
"’Hell is other people’ has always been misunderstood,” Jean Paul Sartre said long after the 1944 play including this line was staged, ignoring the maxim of politics and crisis communications that if you are explaining, you are losing. He goes on with some windy and lame description of what he meant. There is no need. If people interpret in a way that makes what you’ve said relevant and widely used, just go with it, dude. Because, let’s face it: Hell is other people.
This cumbersome acronym reminds me of an early Simpson’s episode. The name dreamed up by political columnist Donald Kaul, quadrennially relevant when the presidential races came to the state, strikes me as clever the first time you hear it and less so every time thereafter.
It was a fabulous trip. I ate and drank and enjoyed myself thoroughly. The insidious truth at my age (a newly minted 59 as of May 5) is that any fitness gains take an inordinate amount of time to realize and but a moment of slacking to lose. Alas.
The coefficient of friction guarantees mileage on red-clay roads on 45-mm wide 60-psi tires is equal to road-times-X miles on 25-mm, 110-psi tires. Through rigorous experimental protocols I believe the X factor to be somewhere around 0.2, conservatively. Thus 10 clay miles is worth about 12 paved-road miles; so a 50-mile clay ride is about a 60-mile asphalt run. There is a definite psychological factor as well. After bumping along washboard hard pan and slogging through sand on the clay roads, I feel like a time-trial champ on the sleek road bike with its smooth ride.
There is a spreadsheet involved, naturally. I put the obvs in obsessively prepared. In addition to date, mileage, and surface I also note whether I saw a fox squirrel on each ride. Thus far, it’s a 50-50 proposition. I try to minimize my circular thinking about miles and time and speed, but in fact I think of little else; calculating is going what on with every pedal stroke. I keep a cadence metronome going in my head. I figure what portion of the ride remains with each passing mile. I estimate when my current pace will get me home. Performance, especially when it’s poor or uninspiring, consumes me. There are long periods where I am able to focus on what I am seeing, the landscape I have the pleasure to get through. It is far from universally Zen, however. I wish it were more.
Circumstances like rain or adverse wind or burdensome heat or a flat tire are a necessary part of training. I don’t begin a ride during a heavy downpour, but a forecast of rain does not stop me. As things heat up, I will welcome the opportunity to acclimate in South Georgia humidity and temps – all the better to handle what Iowa may throw at us.
This ride will test my ability to conquer hills. South Georgia and North Florida are not flat, but the elevation gains of my training rides are significantly less than what I will have to ascend in July. I have, thus, pursued a regimen of gearing upward into harder chain ring/cog combos and, further, progressed to where I can remain seated in a big gear. I will allow myself to gear down while on the ride.
My March and April rides have taken me right at 64 hours to complete. The vast majority of that is on the bike. Those hours are as important as the miles. The ever-longer pedaling sessions accustom my neck and hands and back to time on the bike and, then, doing it again the next day.
My experience is time in the saddle and accustoming my backside to hours on the bike is the most important training element. My legs will make it. Without enough training, though, my ass could very well keep me off the bike on Day 5; too sensitive to ride. A solid streak of stubbornness is required as well.