Blinded by the Light
September’s riding was a little different this year, and in some ways that’s a good thing.
The obvious difference is that Jay’s not here anymore, having moved to Florida a couple weeks ago. That meant no Labor Day cookout after a morning ride up Mount Wachusett, and no NBW Flattest Century in the East.
The Flattest Century (which of course is not actually the flattest century) has always been a pain in the neck. Over the past four years I’ve struggled with flat tires, a hurricane, crackhouse lodgings, and riding the entire 100-mile distance on my folding travel bike. Last year, after being violently ill the night and morning before the ride, I dragged myself through it, then pretty much vowed not to do the ride again.
Instead, I wanted to try another ride that happened on the same weekend-the Eastern Trail Alliance’s Maine Lighthouse Ride (MLR)-another coastal century that starts in South Portland and promised coastal views and nine lighthouses. It sounded like a great way to do something new and make a break with the Flattest ride.
On the other hand, none of my remaining riding buddies bit, so (having no car) I had to arrange my own transportation. Since the ride was only a few miles from the Portland train station, I figured Amtrak would be better than renting a car. On the plus side, I’d have the opportunity to ride as easily as I pleased, having no buddies around to keep up with and hours between when I finished and my 8pm train back to Boston.
So Friday afternoon I left work, stopped at home to grab my bike, rode to North Station, and hopped the Downeaster. We pulled into Portland a little after 8pm, and I checked into a hotel room right next to the Regional Transportation Hovel.
Now, the downside of not renting a car was… Since I didn’t have any place to lock things up, I could only bring as much stuff as I was willing to lug along with me on a 100-mile bike ride. So I didn’t bring any clothing beyond my cycling kit. So I’m sure I got a few odd looks as I walked down to the CVS and picked up some drinks, then to Espo’s Trattoria, where I grabbed a “funky chicken” pizza: BBQ sauce, chicken, onions, and hot peppers. Tasty!
As I munched on the pizza in the hotel room, I watched the weather with no small degree of anxiety. In recent days, the forecast had fluctuated from party cloudy with rain late in the day to a complete weekend-long deluge. Between my discomfort with the weather and the travel arrangements, I also mused about ways I could be more comfortable with the uncertainties of life.
When my alarm went off at 6am, conditions weren’t great. Temperatures were okay, but it was very humid, with a clammy, misty fog and a leg-tearing 30 mph wind. At least it was coming from the southeast, so it would be at our backs on the second half of the MLR.
I set out from the hotel and rode five miles through a deserted downtown Portland and across the mile-long Casco Bay Bridge into South Portland to Southern Maine Community College, where I checked in and was one of the first people to gather at the starting area.
Having a few minutes to kill, I walked out the 900-foot granite breakwater to Spring Point Ledge lighthouse and back again. I also got a nice photo of a trawler motoring past the lighthouse, and the event photographer got an excellent shot of me (right) as I waited for the official depart.
Shortly thereafter we were off, but not for long, since our second lighthouse-tiny little Bug Light-was less than a mile away. After a brief stop there, we picked up the South Portland Greenbelt for a 6-mile ride out of town. With a couple hundred riders, the path was quite crowded, and a bit dangerous thanks to the poorly-placed bollards that appeared at every intersection, but it made for an easy roll-out and warm-up.
Finally we picked up some local roads for a while, but it wasn’t long before we reached the Scarborough salt marsh and the 2-mile crushed gravel path that traversed it: not a great option for road bikes, but the only option we had. Still, it was nice riding across the tidal bogs.
Then it was back on blessed tarmac again, where I hooked up with a paceline going slightly slower than I was as we rolled into Old Orchard Beach. Now, Maine is a hole, but all the rest of Maine looks down on OOB as an even worse hole: a cheap, kitchy, squalid copy of any low-budget seaside “resort”, swarming with French-Canadian tourists. And yeah, it was about that, although having never visited there in my adult life, I found it somewhat interesting. That was the location of our first rest stop, which I hit at 8:51am.
Pulling out of OOB, I caught a gentleman in a Pan-Mass Challenge team jersey for Brielle’s Brigade. Four weeks earlier, he’d ridden his first PMC all the way from the New York border, but the team’s young hero and inspiration lost her battle with cancer just weeks after the ride. He and I chatted for a while on the run into Saco and across the river into Biddeford. When he shipped his chain at the foot of a big hill out of town, I rolled on and left him behind.
Except for the brief stretch at Old Orchard, the entire outbound leg was a ways inland, so there weren’t any real ocean views. I reached the second rest stop in Arundel at 10:07, having covered 36 miles. I’d been facing a ridiculously strong headwind, but it hadn’t seemed to effect me much, and the fog had thinned out a little bit. I noticed that I’d lost a handlebar end cap somewhere along the line, which seems to be a common annoyance for me.
I pulled out of the rest stop with a group of about eight girls, and we would leapfrog one another for the next 50 miles. After a short jaunt down into Kennebunkport, I reached the coast and made the halfway turn northward. I passed the Bush compound, which was, of course, arrogantly flying the Texas flag over Maine territory. Then I passed an ambulance and rider down, which was a reminder that cyclists are subject to life-threatening injury at any moment during a ride.
The sun started peeking between the clouds, but the wind grew even fiercer, sometimes helping, but more often not. The coastline was quite beautiful, with a raging surf churned up by distant Hurricane Leslie crashing against the rocks. Much of the second half of the ride followed the same route as friends of mine take during their Seacoast Safari for Cystic Fibrosis ride.
At 11:11am I had completed 57 miles and arrived at the rest stop at Fortunes Rocks. My legs were tightening up, and they’d felt a bit crampy all day due to the high humidity. The sun had disappeared again when I rode on through Biddeford Pool, where I looked around for more lighthouses. Then back down that hill and through Saco, where I briefly ran across a huge group of people from another charity ride before our paths diverged.
I found myself back at the Old Orchard rest stop at 12:12, having covered 73 miles. There were 22 very hard miles-including going back over the crushed stone path through the Scarborough bog-between there and the final rest stop in Cape Elizabeth, where my father once ran the Chamber of Commerce. When I finally reached mile 95 and stopped there at 1:46pm, I flopped on the ground near the food table. A thoughtful volunteer looked down at me and actually said, “I was thinking I’d offer you my chair, but you’ve been sitting all day and probably don’t need it.” Yeah, thanks lady.
The sun had finally burned through the clouds, and I took some extra time to recover from that long sustained effort, where I’d really been tapped out and my knees had complained. The rest definitely helped, because I felt much better on the final segment back to South Portland.
Before I left, I also noticed that the magnet that records my pedaling cadence had fallen off my crankarm, so I’ll need to replace that sometime soon.
Coming out of the rest stop, we zoomed down a big hill to Two Lights in Cape Elizabeth, but then had to turn around and climb right back out again. Just a few miles further we entered Fort Williams Park to visit the last lighthouse: Portland Head Light, which is one of the most photographed lighthouses in the world.
By then the number of out-and-back portions of the route had gotten me thinking about comparisons to the Flattest Century, which winds around up and down coastal peninsulas in a desperate attempt to rack up 100 miles before the end. For MLR it was more a question of how many times we actually doubled back on ourselves (if you care to count, we backtracked eight times).
Just a short distance beyond Portland Head, I found myself back in South Portland and arriving at the SMCC campus. I completed the ride at 2:44 with 106 miles (five of those were the commute from the hotel to the start). The actual ride took about 7:15 in clock time, which is pretty respectable given the number of lighthouse stops and the fact that I wasn’t pushing myself. My average speed was only 16.1 mph.
After checking in, I decided to head right back across the bridge to Portland, just in case the promised rain came abruptly. I stopped at a convenience store and stocked up on recovery food and took up residence on a bench in Deering Oaks, a beautiful little park in the neighborhood where I lived until the age of eight. My train wasn’t until 8pm, so I had five hours to kill. I spent three of them resting, watching the park’s water fountain, the seagulls whirling overhead, the squirrels panhandling, and the clouds screaming across the sky.
As the sun lowered and the September afternoon cooled, I headed back to the train station and hung out there until the train departed. Fortunately, there were only two other people in the business class car, because I’m sure I smelled pretty ripe in my cycling kit.
Despite all my fears, I had completed the ride and gotten out of Portland without getting wet. But the fierce line of thunderstorms I’d been dreading finally blew through the area while I was on the train. Ironically, a leak developed in the train’s ceiling right next to me, so I did wind up getting rained on for a few moments before I changed seats.
Fortunately, by the time we got to Boston at 10:30pm the storm had passed, and although the roads were wet, I managed to get home without undue discomfort. It had been a long but rather successful day.
In the end, I really enjoyed the ride. The people were friendly and the route enjoyable, and (continuing a three-time theme for my 2012 season) it made a really good change of venue from the all-too-familiar Flattest Century.
It also was memorable as my fifth and probably final century of 2012. And it is entirely possible that it was the last century that I’ll do with the Plastic Bullet which has served me well for so many years. If so, it was a pretty memorable way to close that bike’s long history.