Breakfast of Champions
One of the training tips that I typically give to new randonneurs is to train regardless of conditions. On Sunday, chart out your ride schedule without looking at the forecast, and stick to it, even if that means riding in a blizzard on Monday or a heat wave on Friday. If you make it easy to skip training when you've had a full night's sleep, a clean set of clothes and fresh legs, imagine how much easier it will be to quit when all of that is taken from you -- after 600 miles on the road, desperately trying to get one full 90 minute REM sleep cycle while clutching your helmet to your chest in a desperate bid to keep it warm and dry it out.
I awoke in Villaines around 1:30 am on Friday morning, and my first instinct was to close my eyes and stop; to not go out into the dark night; to stay in the warm minivan and rest a while longer. I had, maybe, an hour of sleep. I have had, maybe, five hours of sleep since Monday morning. I sat in that car seat for a minute before I heard a voice say, "Cris, you have to leave." Then the training kicked in and I got on with it.
The voice was Mike's from St. Louis. He had suffered a crash early on in the ride, and had made it as far as Brest then joined us in Loudeac before abandoning in Tinteniac after his knee couldn't go any further. He had accepted his fate, proud in that every mile after Brest was a mile further than anything he had ever ridden in his life, and even though he couldn't finish, he was going to do his best to make sure that the rest of us would. Mike talked Glen and me through our pre-ride checks, asking us to confirm that we had refilled our water bottles, stocked food and checked our bikes. Then we were off -- fourteen hours left and 200 kilometres to go.
At the very least, it had stopped raining. As Glen and I left the limits of Villaines, the street lights faded and I could look up and see stars. If I focused I thought that I might see the Milky Way and perhaps trace over to the light of Polaris, keeping it on my left as I made my way back to Paris. Ahead of me another cluster of red stars, the taillights of bicycles ahead of me, would also lead me back, and for an immeasurable period of time my world was nothing but this floating tapestry of light and shadow, silent save for the clicking of shifters and the hum of chains.
Four days of rain had washed out much of the lubricant and grease that kept my parts running, and my bike was beginning to sound as tired as I was. We rolled into a village, empty, quiet and sepia-lit, and I pulled off to the side to do some quick maintenance by street lamp, dripping lube onto my chain and derailleurs to keep them from grinding each other into an early death. The conventional wisdom is that, before a 1200k, one should rebuild their bike with fresh parts -- new brake pads, new shifter and brake cables, new chain -- but I didn't have time to do more than replace the brake pads and this chain was already 4000 miles old and nearing its end-of-life. So, as I lubed the chain and wiped off the excess with a pack of tissue paper, I would just whisper, "All I want is for you guys to last me another 180K. That's all."
While working on my bike, I realized that I had lost Glen. Bruce had left a half hour before us and I had no idea how far he was ahead or if I had already passed him in the darkness. I hadn't seen Emily since Brest and last saw Jake on the approach to Villaines. The pack that we had ridden with had dissolved and I was now doing this ride on my own, a prospect that may have been lonely and isolating was actually thrilling and liberating.
Eventually I arrived in Mortage-Au-Perche at 5:30, forty-five minutes ahead of the closing time, and as Mike and Julie received me, they said that Jake was here already but everyone else was still out behind me. As Julie waited for her husband to appear, Mike talked me again through my control tasks. Get water. Get food. Check the bike. Ok, it's 6am. You should go. As I was leaving, Mike said to me, "you're in the home stretch. You only have to ride a little less than 100 miles in ten hours."
I knew what he meant -- back when I was just training, 100 miles in eight hours was me being casual. Needing ten hours was being lazy, but I still laughed at that statement. Six years ago, the prospect of 100 miles being a victory lap would have been ridiculous. And I still wasn't completely home free. Sleep deprivation caught up to me as we entered the forest of the Perche Valley. At first I thought that all I had to do was last until dawn and then the morning light would keep me up, but this wasn't to be. It had gotten bright enough that I could see fine without my lights but I was still micronapping. At one point, I woke up just as my sleeping body leaned far enough left that I would have fallen over into the oncoming traffic lane. I needed to find some way to stay awake.
Shortly after that, I drifted into the village of Longy Au Perche, and a bakery had just opened for business. I stopped and went in, hoping for coffee but just then remembered that French bakeries are actual bakeries and not just breakfast restaurants that happen to specialize in baked goods as they are in North America. So, they didn't have coffee, but they did have quiche. Thick, fragrant quiches glistening with egg, butter and cheese and studded with lardons, cuts of slab bacon as large as a man's thumb. I bought two.
Outside, another French rider was eagerly devouring his own quiche. Then he looked up at me and asked in French if he thought that we had enough time to sit here and eat. It was getting close. I shrugged and said I was going to eat half now and half later. I wrapped the leftovers, stuck them in my jersey pocket and went on.
The break and conversation got me awake for a bit, but I could feel myself drift off as my body worked to digest breakfast. I tried counting backwards in French again to stay awake, but was struggling to even keep that up. Then, we left the Perche valley, entering a massive, windy treeless plain. That was when the bacon kicked in.
Suddenly, I woke up, saw a paceline a few hundred metres ahead of me and got it fixed in my head that I had to catch them. I started to sprint, which surprised me as much as anyone else. I had now ridden almost 750 miles and my body was now in many states of wrecked, my legs and knees had no business thinking that they could pull off a 25mph sprint into a headwind, but somehow I was quite clearly able to do that, passing groups of riders like they were standing still. My knees lodged a complaint, a throb of pain that indicated that something was being pushed past its limit, but the strain was dulled by a flood of endorphins that my body released as it knew that it was nearing the end. My quads protested, but still they toiled.
I took a brief break when I joined another paceline, and slowed down to unwrap the other half of my first quiche and, leaning against my handlebars, I started to finish that one. Another rider came up, looked over and did a double take as if to confirm that I was, indeed, eating a quiche on a bike. I just brushed off the crumbs near my mouth and smiled at him. Then, I finished my food, geared down and pulled the pack for a while before deciding to sprint again.
I should point out, that as euphoric as this 'runner's high' was, I wasn't passing people just for the hell of it. I was still sleep-deprived and sprinting was the only thing that was making my mind focused and stressed enough to keep it awake. If I slowed down for a significant amount of time, I would fall asleep. If I just rode in a paceline and worked on staying a certain distance behind the guy in front of me, I would start nodding off. Every field that we passed had carnivorous man eating rabbits lurking in the tall grass and I realized that I was starting to hallucinate in broad daylight.
To hear Julie tell it, I had almost beaten her and the minivan to the final control in Dreux. She and Mike had just parked and thrown open their doors when they saw me pull into the control at 10am. If I wanted to, I could have finished by 2pm, arriving in 88 hours with two hours to spare. But, I didn't like this hallucinating in broad daylight business. So, I told Julie that I was going to sleep for a bit and that I would leave in an hour. If anyone else made it in before then, I'd accompany them, but I wasnt going to stay later than 11am. I wanted the extra hour of spare time just in case. I called silentq and told her to meet me at the finish at 3pm. Then I ate the second quiche and then turned myself off for an hour.
By the time I woke up, almost everyone had arrived. Emily, Jake and Bruce all entered in a pack around 11:05. Jake was not going to stop for very long and asked if I could stick around and wait for him. I felt a little antsy to get going but hung around all the same, even though the state of Jake's legs meant that he would fall behind within a kilometre of leaving the control. I stopped in another village briefly to use the bathroom and remove my contacts, which had been in my eyes for almost 36 hours now. On the way out, I caught up to Jake, who was clearly in pain, and as I passed him, I called out, "20 miles left. We're almost there. Just ride steady and don't do anything stupid."
I should, of course, stop saying that. Especially when I have no wood to knock on.
15 miles from the finish, as we entered the Rambouillet forest, I took a right turn a little fast and hit a small patch of gravel, but recovered my balance and started to climb. But then I felt a disturbing sloppiness in my front wheel, looked down and realized that it had gone flat. It was around 2 pm. I had two hours left to finish and I needed to work fast. Pulling to the side, I pulled off the wheel, opened the tire and removed the tube. Not wanting to waste time looking for the tube puncture, I pulled out a fresh tire tube and began feeling inside the tire itself for a puncture or tear. A stream of cyclists, all aiming to finish within cutoff passed me by. None of them offered help.
As Emily rode past she asked if I needed anything but by this time I was reinflating the tire and I said that unless she had a CO2 cartridge, there probably wasn't much that would make this go faster. Jake caught up to me and while I initially waved him on, he still stopped, dismounted and offered the use of his Road Morph pump, which had a pressure gauge, so that I would at least know if my tire was fully inflated or not. I took it, finished pumping and got back on the road, only to have it go flat again scarcely a hundred yards down the road.
Now, cursing my luck and sloppy mechanic skills, I got off again and asked Jake to borrow his pump. Also, because having to use a patch kit would've been time consuming, Jake was also kind enough to loan one of his own spare tubes from his kit. This time, I found the culprit, a sharp piece of gravel that was lodged in the side of the tire, likely from when I took that turn at an angle and allowed the shrapnel to penetrate above the kevlar belt. Jake was fidgeting nearby and said, "hey, Cris, I'm riding kind of slow and ..."
"Dude, go on. Thanks for the loan, but seriously, yeah, go. Finish. I'll see you at the end."
With that, he was gone. Another Danish and British rider had stopped next to me and despite the fact that I told them that I was ok, they insisted on waiting around until I got back on my bike and rejoined the ride. That was nice.
From there, it was riding as hard as I could to get to the end. Signs started appearing telling us that we had 15 km. left, then 10km., then 5. Onlookers and drivers would clap for us as we entered St. Quentin, then red lights would stall us as the minutes ticked by. The final 5 km. stretch to the finish involved at least a dozen traffic lights, all of which seemed to go red as soon as I would arrive. It was terribly anticlimactic, but I soothed myself by thinking that it would at least give silentq a comfortable cushion of time to make her way to the finish and be in a position to greet me when I arrived.
By this point, I had finished all of the food that I had brought with me and my pockets and bags were littered with empty wrappers. My energy was starting to flag as my body consumed the last of its calories, but as we cleared the second-to-last rotary and approached the last 250 metres of the ride, I could hear the faraway roar of the welcoming crowd and the noise gave me one last surge. I sped up as I passed the last signal light, and then saw the cheering crowds, the blur of faces, and suddenly, there, apart from everyone was silentq waving at me and smiling the widest, purest smile that I had ever seen in my life. A perfect ending to a perfect adventure.
I awoke in Villaines around 1:30 am on Friday morning, and my first instinct was to close my eyes and stop; to not go out into the dark night; to stay in the warm minivan and rest a while longer. I had, maybe, an hour of sleep. I have had, maybe, five hours of sleep since Monday morning. I sat in that car seat for a minute before I heard a voice say, "Cris, you have to leave." Then the training kicked in and I got on with it.
The voice was Mike's from St. Louis. He had suffered a crash early on in the ride, and had made it as far as Brest then joined us in Loudeac before abandoning in Tinteniac after his knee couldn't go any further. He had accepted his fate, proud in that every mile after Brest was a mile further than anything he had ever ridden in his life, and even though he couldn't finish, he was going to do his best to make sure that the rest of us would. Mike talked Glen and me through our pre-ride checks, asking us to confirm that we had refilled our water bottles, stocked food and checked our bikes. Then we were off -- fourteen hours left and 200 kilometres to go.
At the very least, it had stopped raining. As Glen and I left the limits of Villaines, the street lights faded and I could look up and see stars. If I focused I thought that I might see the Milky Way and perhaps trace over to the light of Polaris, keeping it on my left as I made my way back to Paris. Ahead of me another cluster of red stars, the taillights of bicycles ahead of me, would also lead me back, and for an immeasurable period of time my world was nothing but this floating tapestry of light and shadow, silent save for the clicking of shifters and the hum of chains.
Four days of rain had washed out much of the lubricant and grease that kept my parts running, and my bike was beginning to sound as tired as I was. We rolled into a village, empty, quiet and sepia-lit, and I pulled off to the side to do some quick maintenance by street lamp, dripping lube onto my chain and derailleurs to keep them from grinding each other into an early death. The conventional wisdom is that, before a 1200k, one should rebuild their bike with fresh parts -- new brake pads, new shifter and brake cables, new chain -- but I didn't have time to do more than replace the brake pads and this chain was already 4000 miles old and nearing its end-of-life. So, as I lubed the chain and wiped off the excess with a pack of tissue paper, I would just whisper, "All I want is for you guys to last me another 180K. That's all."
While working on my bike, I realized that I had lost Glen. Bruce had left a half hour before us and I had no idea how far he was ahead or if I had already passed him in the darkness. I hadn't seen Emily since Brest and last saw Jake on the approach to Villaines. The pack that we had ridden with had dissolved and I was now doing this ride on my own, a prospect that may have been lonely and isolating was actually thrilling and liberating.
Eventually I arrived in Mortage-Au-Perche at 5:30, forty-five minutes ahead of the closing time, and as Mike and Julie received me, they said that Jake was here already but everyone else was still out behind me. As Julie waited for her husband to appear, Mike talked me again through my control tasks. Get water. Get food. Check the bike. Ok, it's 6am. You should go. As I was leaving, Mike said to me, "you're in the home stretch. You only have to ride a little less than 100 miles in ten hours."
I knew what he meant -- back when I was just training, 100 miles in eight hours was me being casual. Needing ten hours was being lazy, but I still laughed at that statement. Six years ago, the prospect of 100 miles being a victory lap would have been ridiculous. And I still wasn't completely home free. Sleep deprivation caught up to me as we entered the forest of the Perche Valley. At first I thought that all I had to do was last until dawn and then the morning light would keep me up, but this wasn't to be. It had gotten bright enough that I could see fine without my lights but I was still micronapping. At one point, I woke up just as my sleeping body leaned far enough left that I would have fallen over into the oncoming traffic lane. I needed to find some way to stay awake.
Shortly after that, I drifted into the village of Longy Au Perche, and a bakery had just opened for business. I stopped and went in, hoping for coffee but just then remembered that French bakeries are actual bakeries and not just breakfast restaurants that happen to specialize in baked goods as they are in North America. So, they didn't have coffee, but they did have quiche. Thick, fragrant quiches glistening with egg, butter and cheese and studded with lardons, cuts of slab bacon as large as a man's thumb. I bought two.
Outside, another French rider was eagerly devouring his own quiche. Then he looked up at me and asked in French if he thought that we had enough time to sit here and eat. It was getting close. I shrugged and said I was going to eat half now and half later. I wrapped the leftovers, stuck them in my jersey pocket and went on.
The break and conversation got me awake for a bit, but I could feel myself drift off as my body worked to digest breakfast. I tried counting backwards in French again to stay awake, but was struggling to even keep that up. Then, we left the Perche valley, entering a massive, windy treeless plain. That was when the bacon kicked in.
Suddenly, I woke up, saw a paceline a few hundred metres ahead of me and got it fixed in my head that I had to catch them. I started to sprint, which surprised me as much as anyone else. I had now ridden almost 750 miles and my body was now in many states of wrecked, my legs and knees had no business thinking that they could pull off a 25mph sprint into a headwind, but somehow I was quite clearly able to do that, passing groups of riders like they were standing still. My knees lodged a complaint, a throb of pain that indicated that something was being pushed past its limit, but the strain was dulled by a flood of endorphins that my body released as it knew that it was nearing the end. My quads protested, but still they toiled.
I took a brief break when I joined another paceline, and slowed down to unwrap the other half of my first quiche and, leaning against my handlebars, I started to finish that one. Another rider came up, looked over and did a double take as if to confirm that I was, indeed, eating a quiche on a bike. I just brushed off the crumbs near my mouth and smiled at him. Then, I finished my food, geared down and pulled the pack for a while before deciding to sprint again.
I should point out, that as euphoric as this 'runner's high' was, I wasn't passing people just for the hell of it. I was still sleep-deprived and sprinting was the only thing that was making my mind focused and stressed enough to keep it awake. If I slowed down for a significant amount of time, I would fall asleep. If I just rode in a paceline and worked on staying a certain distance behind the guy in front of me, I would start nodding off. Every field that we passed had carnivorous man eating rabbits lurking in the tall grass and I realized that I was starting to hallucinate in broad daylight.
To hear Julie tell it, I had almost beaten her and the minivan to the final control in Dreux. She and Mike had just parked and thrown open their doors when they saw me pull into the control at 10am. If I wanted to, I could have finished by 2pm, arriving in 88 hours with two hours to spare. But, I didn't like this hallucinating in broad daylight business. So, I told Julie that I was going to sleep for a bit and that I would leave in an hour. If anyone else made it in before then, I'd accompany them, but I wasnt going to stay later than 11am. I wanted the extra hour of spare time just in case. I called silentq and told her to meet me at the finish at 3pm. Then I ate the second quiche and then turned myself off for an hour.
By the time I woke up, almost everyone had arrived. Emily, Jake and Bruce all entered in a pack around 11:05. Jake was not going to stop for very long and asked if I could stick around and wait for him. I felt a little antsy to get going but hung around all the same, even though the state of Jake's legs meant that he would fall behind within a kilometre of leaving the control. I stopped in another village briefly to use the bathroom and remove my contacts, which had been in my eyes for almost 36 hours now. On the way out, I caught up to Jake, who was clearly in pain, and as I passed him, I called out, "20 miles left. We're almost there. Just ride steady and don't do anything stupid."
I should, of course, stop saying that. Especially when I have no wood to knock on.
15 miles from the finish, as we entered the Rambouillet forest, I took a right turn a little fast and hit a small patch of gravel, but recovered my balance and started to climb. But then I felt a disturbing sloppiness in my front wheel, looked down and realized that it had gone flat. It was around 2 pm. I had two hours left to finish and I needed to work fast. Pulling to the side, I pulled off the wheel, opened the tire and removed the tube. Not wanting to waste time looking for the tube puncture, I pulled out a fresh tire tube and began feeling inside the tire itself for a puncture or tear. A stream of cyclists, all aiming to finish within cutoff passed me by. None of them offered help.
As Emily rode past she asked if I needed anything but by this time I was reinflating the tire and I said that unless she had a CO2 cartridge, there probably wasn't much that would make this go faster. Jake caught up to me and while I initially waved him on, he still stopped, dismounted and offered the use of his Road Morph pump, which had a pressure gauge, so that I would at least know if my tire was fully inflated or not. I took it, finished pumping and got back on the road, only to have it go flat again scarcely a hundred yards down the road.
Now, cursing my luck and sloppy mechanic skills, I got off again and asked Jake to borrow his pump. Also, because having to use a patch kit would've been time consuming, Jake was also kind enough to loan one of his own spare tubes from his kit. This time, I found the culprit, a sharp piece of gravel that was lodged in the side of the tire, likely from when I took that turn at an angle and allowed the shrapnel to penetrate above the kevlar belt. Jake was fidgeting nearby and said, "hey, Cris, I'm riding kind of slow and ..."
"Dude, go on. Thanks for the loan, but seriously, yeah, go. Finish. I'll see you at the end."
With that, he was gone. Another Danish and British rider had stopped next to me and despite the fact that I told them that I was ok, they insisted on waiting around until I got back on my bike and rejoined the ride. That was nice.
From there, it was riding as hard as I could to get to the end. Signs started appearing telling us that we had 15 km. left, then 10km., then 5. Onlookers and drivers would clap for us as we entered St. Quentin, then red lights would stall us as the minutes ticked by. The final 5 km. stretch to the finish involved at least a dozen traffic lights, all of which seemed to go red as soon as I would arrive. It was terribly anticlimactic, but I soothed myself by thinking that it would at least give silentq a comfortable cushion of time to make her way to the finish and be in a position to greet me when I arrived.
By this point, I had finished all of the food that I had brought with me and my pockets and bags were littered with empty wrappers. My energy was starting to flag as my body consumed the last of its calories, but as we cleared the second-to-last rotary and approached the last 250 metres of the ride, I could hear the faraway roar of the welcoming crowd and the noise gave me one last surge. I sped up as I passed the last signal light, and then saw the cheering crowds, the blur of faces, and suddenly, there, apart from everyone was silentq waving at me and smiling the widest, purest smile that I had ever seen in my life. A perfect ending to a perfect adventure.