Four o'clock. I woke up my dog. He was confused. So was I. At least there wasn't a grease vent cleaner outside the window all night. A walk around the neighborhood for our morning constitutional. The South End was busy. Many, many riders live here. It was trash day. My dog loves trash day and our walks usually take longer because he has to, um, stake his claim to all the trash. We rounded the corner to Lawrence street and he was checking out yet another mound of trash. Except this one moved. We apologized and moved on. I guess winter is coming.
Home, three-S, put Billy in his run for the day and off to the Park Plaza to catch the shuttle for the Trade Center. At this point, I need to apologize and thank my neighbors across the hall, Steven and Ruth. When I got back home, four days later, there was a message on my answering machine (time stamped at 5:00 a.m.) asking if everything was ok because the dog had been barking non-stop for an hour. I knew my dog knew something was up. Sorry.
The Trade Center was, as Charlton Heston would say, "A Madhouse! It's a MADHOUSE!" The first person I ran in to was Greg, The Logistics Guy. It wasn't starting well for him. "Everything I touch is turning to shit," he said. Oh dear. I thought it was a fun sort of chaos (I got a good night's sleep this time). Everyone, having lived through the lines the day before, was in a hurry to get somewhere. Anywhere. To, uh, stand in another line. "Where's the low red truck? Where's the high green truck? What's your number? Is that orange or red?", "I'm blue 93, where do I go?"
Breakfast was good. The Trade Center didn't have to cook anything, it was all cold. I hate institutional food.
One of the unfortunate things about a high carbohydrate, low fat dinner, like the one the night before, is that it's also high in fiber. The ratio of men to women on the ride was 60/40. The ratio of men's restrooms to women's restrooms in the World Trade Center is 50/50. The WTC is not just a convention center, there are business offices there as well. Fidelity Investments and AT&T among others are there and employees of those companies were represented on the ride. In fact, I worked there on a couple of different contracts for Fidelity, so I know where all the hidden restrooms are. Apparently, so did everyone else. Not one single women's room had a line. Every men's room did. Revenge is sweet, I guess.
When you check in your bike, it goes into a lettered section. I was section H. So I thought, H, 8. Eighth out of the blocks isn't so bad. I was afraid of a Boston Marathon wheelchair start. The first guy hits a pothole and 3300 riders go down like dominoes. I really wanted to be first out. "Section A" was first. "Section S". What? What happened to section B? You mean they're not going in order? "Section H." Bingo! Third! Out onto the apron. To wait in line.
You have to wear a helmet to ride. It must be Snell approved. It can also be decorated. Many were. There were teddy bears (of course), a Barbie, rubber chickens, lemmonheads, shark fins and huge flowering plumes of something. And there were thousands of T-shirts saying "Ride. Eat. Sleep."
7:30 am. Months of preparation. It's here. The time is now. Left out onto Northern Ave, right onto the Haul Road. Waving to the helicopter news cameras and all the other media crowded around. Glad that so many people came out to cheer us on. Wondering if it was going to stay this cold all day.
Less than 1/10th of a mile from the start, I saw the first flat. Poor guy. Riding through the cheering crowds and pffft! Right on the Haul Road.
This ride has been in the works for over a year. The media knew about it. There have been banners on Boylston St. and Mass Ave all summer. For some reason, the nightly traffic reports (2, 4, 5, 7, 38, 56) forgot to mention anything about the ride. (These reports are on the nightly news and tell you where the construction and slow downs will be during the next morning's commute). When the ride was being planned, I rode around with Greg to try to find somewhere to start the ride big enough to have a mass start. The World Trade Center is the only place that could provide both a mass start and indoor, overnight security for the bikes. But the ride goes West (mostly) and the WTC is at the eastern most edge of town on the waterfront. That means that the ride has to go right through the center of town at rush hour on Friday morning. The police blocked traffic for us for an hour. It was news to everyone, apparently. One of the main exits off the Southeast Expressway is East Berkeley St. We rode up Berkeley St. The expressway was stopped. So was the turnpike. You couldn't exit onto the expressway. It was a mess. Except for the riders, of course. It was kind of nice!
People really came out to cheer us on. People on every corner. (And a couple of people fuming in a stuck car). Signs, banners, clapping and cheering. It was great. It looked like all of the ambulatory patients and staff from Fenway (the beneficiary of the ride) were out cheering.
Friday was a school day. At every school we passed, the kids were out on the playgrounds applauding and screaming as only kids can. Miles and miles of them.
Lunch was one of the only screw ups of the whole weekend. There wasn't any -- lunch that is. Uxbridge Common was there, but the lunch wasn't. The earliest riders (me!) got in too early for the lunch truck. Rumor has it that it got lost. There was plenty else to eat: bananas, peaches, granola, pretzels and on and on. So 11 o'clock rolled around and it was off again. After lunch the next day, I'll never, ever complain about missing lunch again.
Ugh. The hills. They started shortly before lunch and continued well into the next afternoon. I'm proud to say that I didn't walk up one single hill. And there were a lot of them. You may have heard about "heartbreak hill" in the Boston Marathon. Feh! That's a bump.
There's really not much to say about this lake, except that it was at the bottom of yet another hill. I just like the name.
You just never know who you're going to see out on the road. It might be real, it might be a hallucination. It might be Jackie O in a demure pink pill box hat waving and welcoming everyone to Connecticut. Or not.
North Woodstock, West Woodstock, Woodstock Valley to Chaplin with streets named Tower Hill Rd, Mount Hope Rd, Wormwood Hill Rd. All of these hills go up. None of them go down. Up. One of them went so much up that you could only scale it by switching back. Or walk. I didn't walk.
At least one of the hills went down. Big time. Many bikes had a lot of whiz bang equipment like computers. Mine had me. But two of the guys I passed hurtling downhill towards a one lane bridge said that they were clocked at 42 miles per hour. I felt like that guy in the pictures testing a rocket sled. My cheeks were being pulled back to my ears. I'm grateful there were no bugs.
That's how far away the finish line for day one was. Always. The campsite was one mile from lunch. It was also one mile from the Connecticut border. And from the UConn campus. Just one more.
At the UConn campus (at the top of a hill), there were a bunch of cheerleading sorority girls with a lemonade stand. A rider was heard to say, "Wow, if girls had cheered me like that when I was in school, I might have turned out an entirely different man."
It pays to be first. Or at least early. I arrived at the finish line shortly after 4 p.m., ahead of almost everyone but the racers. My bike was checked into Boston row "B" in the security bike pen. From about 5 o'clock on, the lines just kept getting longer and longer and longer. The line to pick up your tent, the line for the shower, the line for the food, the like for the bike mechanics and especially the line for the Massage Therapists.
This was probably the biggest gripe people had during the weekend (outside the weather, that is). Forty massage therapists volunteered for the ride. What a godsend they were. But there were only forty of them. And 3300 cyclists. Something had to give. Those who had the most trouble finishing felt they were more deserving. Those who made it in to camp first thought so too. It was very Darwinian.
Dinner was good and there was a lot of it. Some kind of burrito or enchilada type thing. With the first of what would prove way too many legumes. There are 4000 people (riders and crew) staying in 2000 tents anchored wall to wall. Legumes are chock full of proteins and complex carbohydrates. They are also full of other things. One misplaced match would have erased most of northern Connecticut from the map.
My tent mate showed up around 7:30. He got stuck farther back in the starting pack and it slowed the whole day. His name is Jon and he works in the children's garment wholesaleing industry in New York. Nice guy. Very New York.
If you were at one of the pit stops after a certain time, the ride management assumed (rightly) that you probably wouldn't finish the ride before dark. You got sagged. The sag wagon didn't run back and forth, though. One trip. Which meant that all of the saggers got in to camp together and pretty late (missing any chance of massage, of course). And since they all came in at once, all of the lines got just that much longer.
Ahhh! Thousands of disco bunnies in one camp and it was so quiet you could hear a tire go flat before midnight!
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