Four years ago I finally got around to riding the Horribly Hilly Hundreds – or as I call it, the Death Ride of the Midwest. With 200 km of riding and over 11,000 feet of climbing, it was possibly the hardest single day I have spent in the saddle. (There are shorter options but I’m not one for doing things halfway.)
So why am I doing it again, you ask? Damned if I know. I did it the first time because my friends had done it and recommended it. I had ridden coast-to-coast the year before so I figured I could do almost anything if I put my mind to it.
I rode coast-to-coast again last summer, so maybe it was symmetry. If I ride coast-to-coast, I have to do the Horribly Hilly the next year. Or maybe it’s because I’m 70 years old now and that seems somehow significant.
Maybe it’s just because I can and that’s not something to take for granted. At any rate, I need to train, as it’s only 4 months away.
Horribly Hilly 2019 finish (wet)Death Ride 1992 (also wet). Still about 75 miles to go. Yes, the jersey says ’91, but it was from the year before.
It also happens to be through beautiful countryside out near our adopted highway. While most of the hills are climbs I’ve done multiple times, the sadists who put the route together found a way to include them all in the same day.
The announcement arrived in my email a month ago. I didn’t throw it out. In fact, I just checked my in box and see that I flagged it to think it over. I was thinking “no”. A few weeks later a reminder arrived. I was still thinking, “been there – done that”. I’m not like Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who has done it ten times. We’ve had a few warm sunny days. I’ve been reading out on the porch. I guess the heat got to my brain. The deadline for advance registration for previous riders (with a discounted price and no lottery to get in) was only hours away so I thought, “what the hell?” and did it. Wish me luck.
The adopted highway. It’s easier from this position.
Wednesday night’s ride covered some of the ground of Sunday’s Ironman Wisconsin. We periodically saw orange route arrows taped onto the roads. We climbed 100 feet/mile, which doesn’t sound like a lot but is about the same rate of climbing as the Horribly Hilly Hundreds or the Death Ride. We rode 30 miles instead of over 100, but then, we did it after work. When Ironman participants ride these roads, they will do it after swimming 2.4 miles in open water. After riding 112 miles on these roads, they’ll run a marathon.
On the way to work the next morning, I saw green arrows marking the run route for Ironman. When I take a different route to work, I see swimmers (accompanied by kayaks) practicing on the swim route.
Will the Ironpeople have time to watch the sunset over these soybean fields?I saw this sign on last Sunday’s ride. It captures the half-fast cycling ethos, even when we’re training for a century.
Sunday’s ride was a reminder of where the white people who settled this area came from. We met in Verona and rode through Frenchtown, Belleville, Monticello, and NewGlarus. Of course, before them were the Ho-Chunk and their ancestors, the Mound Builders. The meet-up point was inaccessible due to road closures for Ironman, so I wandered a bit before finding a place to start. A few miles in, I joined the planned route. Twenty miles in, I saw the ride leader. Forty miles in, I stopped at a christian classic car show and saw a few more riders I recognized, but mostly I rode alone. You might wonder what christianity has to do with classic cars. I do. Old cars were parked at an angle around a one-block park. Very few people were looking at the cars. Most of them were in folding chairs listening to a preacher. I found the deep purple 1957 Chevy much more interesting.
I never tire of looking at contour farming.
ADude I follow wrote about riding alone and riding in groups, wondering which we prefer. My answer is “yes”. Riding in a group has the advantage that someone else can plan the route and you can follow a cue sheet. Riding alone has the advantage that you can go where your heart takes you and follow no plan; or have the fun of planning a route. A group lets you talk to people. Alone lets you be with your thoughts. A group give you the opportunity to draft behind someone and save energy. Alone means you can watch the scenery and not pay attention to the person in front of you. You can ride at your own pace. A quick pause here to run outside. The laundry is in the back yard but:
The laundry is hanging in the basement or in the dryer (and the rain has stopped), so back to riding. Somewhere in between those two is riding with a friend or two. I’ve been riding with this guy for about 45 years. This picture is from the 80s, when I was visiting back home from California and riding a borrowed bike. So ride alone, ride with a friend, ride with 100 friends. I don’t care. Just ride.
Half-fast in the mid 80s.Can you spot them here, 25 years later?
WELL, this isn’t exactly the after-action report I’d hoped I’d be writing; rather than regaling you with tales of the ride I am instead addressing the Tamarack Fire’s impact on the ride. LAST Friday I, along with a bunch of other vendors, were at the Expo and basking in the glory of the next day’s…
We were to meet our friend Mark in Markleeville IRL last summer for the Death Ride. The ride was postponed a year due to the pandemic and we elected not to make the trip this year. The ride should have been last weekend, but wildfire was roaring through the area and Mark and others were forced to evacuate. Click the link for his report. In his report there is a link to the GoFundMe page for fire relief.
I’m back
My first ride just for fun since breaking(?) a toe. It went better than I expected. No pain. It only hurts to walk. Time to start training for the two centuries in September.
In honor of the people of Alpine County I wore my 1992 Death Ride jersey for tonight’s ride. The smoke from those western fires is here and we rode through smaze, the sun just an orange ball with no brightness.
We rode through rolling farmland. The hay was just cut and baled, so instead of amber waves of grain interspersed with corn, it is just stubble and corn. I still love the alternating deep green and golden brown of the fields as they follow the contour of the hillside. As an added bonus, we get trees in the wet area at the bottom.
While I have written of the lakeshore path on my morning commute, I tend to post photos of the lake as seen from the path, rather than the path itself. Today you get the path in early morning sunlight. The lake is at the right edge of the photo.
This weekend I hope to get out and ride some real miles. Thirty at a time doesn’t cut it when I want to ride 100 in a day in two months, then do it again the next weekend.
Tadej Pogačar has won the Tour de France. If you care, you already know that. If you don’t, there must be some other reason to read this.
Pogačar is the youngest rider to win the Tour twice. At 22, he is still eligible to win the Best Young Rider jersey three more times. He dominated the Tour, winning three of the four jerseys. He proved himself to be a well-rounded rider, winning a time trial as well as mountain stages. He proved himself to be an aggressive rider, attacking on climbs when he didn’t have to, when other riders would have been content to follow wheels and know they still kept the overall lead; and his joyous grin when he stood on the podium was infectious.
The green jersey is another story. Mark Cavendish is a one trick pony if there ever was one. While the story of his return is a good one (he was a late addition to his team), as a road racer he does only one thing well. He is the best in the world at accelerating from 40 to 45 mph over the course of 200 meters after being led to that point by his teammates. He tied Eddy Merckx’s all-time record for Tour de France stage wins. Merckx was a complete rider, winning sprints, time trials, mountain stages, the hour record, tours, one day classics… Cavendish wins sprints. He was very nearly the Lanterne Rouge (last place overall for the Tour), beating only two of the 141 riders to finish the race. One of those was his teammate and super domestique Tim Declercq (AKA “The Tractor”).
Cavendish’s hope to break Merckx’s record came down to the final stage. While the final stage is viewed as a formality in terms of the overall win, it is a big deal to others. Finishing with 8 laps on the Champs-Élysées, it gives breakaway riders a chance to be seen by millions out in front, not just out in front in some obscure spot in the French countryside. The breakaways are inevitably caught (this year not until the ultimate lap of the Champs-Élysées), to set up a final moment of glory for the sprinters. Here was Cavendish’s chance to break the record in front of the Paris crowd.
He was beaten to the line by Wout van Aert, a finish I find fitting. Van Aert is a complete cyclist. He won the stage up the iconic Mont Ventoux. He won the final time trial on the penultimate day of the tour, and then he beat Mark Cavendish in the final sprint. He also won the world cyclocross championship three times consecutively. When compared with Merckx after the tour, van Aert said, “Eddy Merckx won the GC of the Tour five times and he won basically every race in the world of cycling. I’m just a really little cyclist compared with Eddy.”
Mont Ventoux, image from Wikipedia
My new favorite bike racer is Guillaume Martin, author of “Socrate à vélo”. Martin is the son of an Aikido teacher and a drama teacher. He holds a Master’s degree in philosophy. “Socrates on a Bike” is said to place famous philosophers in the peloton and discuss them as bike racers with regard to their philosophies. I say “is said to”, as I am relying on the words of others from their reading in French and writing reviews in English. As I don’t read French and have not found the book in English, this is hearsay. Speaking of French, there was a time that French was the language of the peloton. To be accepted among Tour riders, one had to speak some French. At the end of this year’s tour, Tadej Pogačar, a Slovenian speaking in Paris, gave his speech in English. To me, that is sad. The ride is in France, the top three riders were Slovenian, Danish, and Ecuadorian, and he spoke English to the crowd. [Editor’s note: I briefly passed through Richard Carapaz’s home town of Tulcán, Ecuador, just over the border from Ipiales, Colombia, in 1977. Sadly, I have no memory of the town, with my first stop being in Ibarra, 126 km to the south.I found my journal from that trip. There was not much about Tulcán, but I did find this, written in Colombia in my last days before returning to the US (March, 1977): “The brain can efficiently store and retrieve just so many visual images…and to share those images with another is then difficult, indeed. My poor head overflows with images that will remain primarily private…”]
The Death Ride
The 2021 edition of the Death Ride was to have been Sunday, July 18. It was billed as the 4oth Anniversary and the “Death Ride Resurgence.” The 2020 edition was billed the same way but canceled due to the pandemic. This year’s was canceled at the last minute due to encroaching wildfire. Mark, please post a comment here to let us know you’re OK.
Back on the bike
I was able to remove my toe splint without cutting it off, so the swelling is down. Saturday I was able to clip into a pedal – I’ve been riding with one foot clipped in and the other with my heel on the pedal to avoid pressure to the broken toe. I still walk funny, pushing off from my little toe instead of my big toe, but I think I am ready to rejoin the Wednesday Night Bike Ride. This week is a hard and hilly route, so we’ll see.
Or maybe just the kayak
“Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing – absolutely nothing – half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats…in or out of ’em, it doesn’t matter. Nothing seems to really matter, that’s the charm of it. Whether you get away, or whether you don’t; whether you arrive at your destination, or whether you reach some where else, or whether you never get anywhere at all…” The Water Rat in The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. I guess I’ll hit the water now…
Half-fast Cycling Club 