The rural roads and extensive bike paths out and around Amherst, Massachusetts and alongside the Connecticut River are lightly traveled, flat and ideal for cycling. And so (but also because mega-bike ride organizer Glen Goldstein went to school here) a couple-hundred New York cyclists come up to the Pioneer Valley each year in early August to ride varying distances from 30-100 miles.
The rolling party started, for me, on Friday afternoon in the East Village with a bus ride out of the city and up through Connecticut to the campus of Umass Amherst. Riders were scattered between the inexpensive dorms (bring your own fan), the "deluxe dorms" and my digs at the Campus Hotel (with TV, Internet and a front desk.) Within minutes of our arrival and as soon as our bikes were unloaded, we pedaled like a heavier, slower and sometimes wider-tired version of the Tour de France peleton the two kilometers into town for a pre-ride dinner.
In order to try and keep an independent distance from the maddening crowd, about seven of us left our bikes with the volunteer bike guard (all details had been attended to) and slipped away from the dozens of riders lined up to eat at one restaurant and went down the street to a less crowded Italian restaurant for wheat beer served with oranges and mildly raucous conversation, pasta and foccacia. Clarence Eckerson, Street Films - maker and general life enthusiast, accompanied by the oh-so-level headed and delightful Fatima held court at one end of the table and I visited with two new friends, Jorge and Beverly down at the other. Sufficiently loaded with carbs, we retrieved our bikes and pedaled home.
Saturday's weather report should have been the signal to get out riding early to avoid the afternoon thunderstorms and if I had left at seven o'clock and followed the route programmed into my Edge 705 GPS, I probably would have made it to the end-of-ride-almost barbecue and cold beer before the heavens opened. But, I dawdled getting my bike ready on Saturday morning, panicked when I thought I had lost my wallet (it was in the bottom of my bike messenger bag) and had a second cup of coffee with lots of sugar before getting to the starting area at 8:00 and promptly riding off in the wrong direction. Rather than exiting the parking lot with other riders, I rode back to the hotel, dropped off my free pair of cow socks (part of the ride swag) and then fell in with a group of riders heading off down the road, following the several different colored road markers. I figured that if there were three routes and three sets of markers that I would ride for a while and then figure out why my GPS had me going off the other direction.
Well, at about ten kilometers into the ride, after going along a lovely bike path, I realized that I had not programmed in a bike path on the ride until about 100 km into the route, so obviously I was on the route but had skipped ahead by several hours. So, I used the GPS to route me back to a point that I KNEW was along the first part of the 162 km (100 mile) route and eventually found my way back to the florescent pink road markings I should have been following from the start. Later I discovered that there was a separate exit from the parking lot for the 100 and 162 km riders that would have put me on the right route rather than having ridden an extra 25 km at the start.
Total moving time was 6:55, which is not bad considering that I ended up 16 km (10 miles) over my goal of a Century (100 miles) and ended up doing 177.4 km. The rain hit hard after about four a half hours of riding. 25.6 km/hr average but there were times when I slowed to be sociable and ride with others... before dashing off at 30 km per hour again.
By about 3:00 pm, I'd finished up the ride (all but the last few kilometers into town) and dove into potato salad and inhaled two barbecued sausages with kraut on a roll, washed down with a few cold beers. Then, a fun group of us from the bus ride up to Amherst returned to the dorms, showered and met at Elements in downtown Amherst for a soak in the hot tub. Beverly and Jorge, Randi and Eileen, Sunsy, Emily from the same publishing company where Javier works, and myself. Really fun, in fact so much fun that the owner had to come ask us to quiet down since we were disturbing people getting massages inside. I had scheduled a 90 minute massage and left the group to have my glutes and hamstrings kneaded and those usual knots at the rhomboid and scapula junction elbowed away.
I'm amazed at the resilience of cyclists, who can ride for six to eight hours and still party way into the night. Faced with a huge calorie debt that must be repaid, the hundred and a half of us still standing refueled on margaritas (Glen had rented a machine), mojitos, cases of beer and dozens of pizzas. There was no one amongst us who said, "no, I really shouldn't" as the ice cream, cookies, cake and other decadently sweet or dangerously alcoholic were passed around. We were all sub-prime borrowers paying back the calorie mortgage on many miles in the saddle.
By 11:30, I'd had a full dose of life and needed to be horizontal and unconscious for at least six hours before getting up and hiking with Peter Haas the next day. Peter is an old friend and professor of political science and international relations at UMass Amherst. We climbed a mountain in the woods with his two dogs and ate lunch in Amherst, during which not more than a four second gap occurred in the conversation. As two members of Peter's famed "epistemic community" we did speak the same Wittgensteinian private language of international environmental politics and governance and may have not skipped a single acronym or failed to use a single bit of insider jargon over four hours.
The bus left at 3:00 pm, full of exhausted cyclists who were happy to consume more alcohol and gaze trance-like at an amazingly stupid Harold and Kumar movie on DVD. I really wish that someone had spoken up to veto the idea of in-flight entertainment, since the weapon of mass distraction effectively destroyed the chance of conversation, community and camaraderie for the drive home. That damn DVD had transformed the bus from a rolling living room into a movie theater and several dozen very interesting people sat transfixed as the video screens sucked the life out of them.
Just after seven o'clock we arrived back in the East Village, unloaded our bikes and scattered into the megatropolis. I hailed a cab, threw my bike and bag in the back and was home in minutes.
Great weekend, some new friends, a superb workout, tasty margaritas, no injuries, some highbrow and lowbrow conversations, generally cooperative weather and a good excuse today, Monday, to put my feet up, take a yoga class and bask in the afterglow of an excellent adventure.
