So, my Mother's Day gift from my husband was to drag me on a 2-day, 210-mile bike ride....OK, he didn't drag me, I wanted to do it.
As most who know me well realize, I like to test limits, find the boundaries...what I can achieve with my team at work, the patience of my superiors, the limits of myself. I saw this bike ride as another opportunity to do that.
This was the 50th Tour of the Scioto Valley (TOSRV) and its considered one of the classic American bicycle tours and had about 3,000 riders this year. It started as a father and son ride to honor their wife and mother who had died. I thought a lot about this origin after I had finished the ride. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOSRV
We saw all kinds of riders--a guy on a velociped . Seriously, one of those "big wheel in the front, little wheel in the back" old-timey bicycles. We also saw three people on a triple tandem and found out later that the two in the back were blind and the rider in the front was the only sighted rider.
I was really concerned when the weather report showed that we would have headwinds both days but I'd gotten good at riding in Al's slipstream during our 200-mile ride last year and figured that's what would get me through this year. We had a rest stop after every 25 miles and so, in my mind, I had broken up the ride into 4, 25-mile bike rides each day, At the start of each leg I told myself, "This is a 25-mile ride. You can do a 25-mile bike ride."
I really tried to look around and take in the scenery as much as possible. Southern Ohio is really beautiful and the ride went through lots of rolling farmlands and woods. The ride profile looked something like this--
Anyway, we're on the leg between Chillicothe and Waverly which is nothing but rolling hills. The Columbus area was scraped flat by glaciers during the ice age and boy do I appreciate their work. But, after Chillicothe, we were beyond the reach of the glaciers...damn, you lazy glaciers.
I never asked Alan where Schoolhouse Hill was because I didn't want to dread its approach. I was just taking each hill as it came. We were riding up what seemed to be one excessively long hill when Alan said to me, "I'll tell you something at the top of this hill." Deep down inside, I was hopeful he would say it was Schoolhouse Hill, but, knowing Alan, he could have some obscure piece of trivia to share with me. But, it was Schoolhouse Hill and I gained a lot of confidence when I knew I survived that climb.
We finished out the ride with no real incidents except for about 20 minutes of rain after Waverly. It was very refreshing and didn't slow us down at all. We arrived in Portsmouth about 4 and joined the party at the park. We signed up for our massages, went to set up our sleeping arrangements at the workout center at the Southern Ohio Medical Center and then went to dinner at the Portsmouth Brewing Company .
We went back to our sleeping accommodations, took showers and I was asleep by 9.
The next morning, we were on the road by about 6:30 with the obligatory stop at Crispie Creme, the local donut shop that gives away donuts and coffee to the TOSRV riders.
It was a foggy and cool morning. Alan warned me that today would be a grind that I just needed to get through. I knew that because it was uphill on Sunday
The first leg was pretty hard and slow going for me. The second leg, the hated Waverly to Chillicothe didn't feel that much better but Alan said I rode with a lot more energy. We got to Chillicothe for lunch and as we sat there, my legs were violently shaking due to fatigue. But I knew I had reached the flatland....the land of my beloved glaciers so I was optimistic.
The ride from Chillicothe to Circleville was uneventful bordering on unmemorable. But I knew once I got to Circleville it was 25 miles to the promised land. That promised land wasn't an actual physical location, it was the finisher's certificate I knew I could claim if I made it to the end.
Amy's boyfriend, Sean, had shared this Radiolab piece on endurance athletes with me and one of the stories is about a woman, Julie Moss, who competed in one of the early Ironman Triathlons. (You can hear it here.) When she found she was in first place, she became so fixated on the prize of winning that, even though she was collapsing (and eventually pooping her pants on Wide World of Sports) she kept pushing and crawling toward the finish line. That was my inspiration, that finisher's certificate was the prize I became fixated on. To quote Julie, "I don't care if it hurts, I don't care if its messy, I would finish."
So, we came out of Circleville and I knew I would be able to finish. As we got a few miles out of town I was in Alan's slipstream and trying to conserve every ounce of energy. My thought was, "I would apply the brakes only if necessary because I wanted to conserve all forward momentum." So, at one point, I creeped up on Alan on the inside so my front wheel was beyond his back wheel. My hands were on the center of my handlebars and not on the hoods so I was nowhere near the brakes.
At this point, Alan decided to move over toward the edge to get out of the road, right into my front tire. As our tires rubbed for a few seconds, my bike started fishtailing and I careened into the traffic lane. As I was trying to maintain control and declip from my pedals, I see sky and think "This isn't going to be good."
At the next moment, I feel a smack as my head hits the road, see the flash of light and then my left shoulder and hip hit. I roll over onto my right side (Alan says I was still clipped in) and lay in the median groaning. Alan was next to me in a few moments saying, "Talk to me, Kat." I replied, "What do you want me to say?" He started his neuro exam and asked me where I was and I said, "On a road outside of Chillicothe, Ohio." That was the detail he needed to determine that I had passed my neuro exam and he asked me if I was hurt anywhere else and I said I didn't think so. As I laid there realizing that I was OK, I remember thinking, "If my bike is too screwed up to finish this ride, I AM GOING TO BE PISSED!"
At that point, the HAM radio operator that was 1-1/2 blocks away came running up. TOSRV has these operators located every 2-3 miles on the course in case of emergency. We were around the corner from him and I asked him how he knew I crashed and he said he heard my helmet hit. I crunched it up pretty good
Alan checked out my bike and found the front tire was rubbing against the front fork. Turns out that about 4 inches of the tire was pulled from the rim. As he worked on that, the tube popped. But, he was able to replace the tube, the tire was OK and my bike was fine. The only damage was to my reading glasses that I had in the left pocket on the back of my jersey--my iPod and Blackberry were undamaged--and my bike computer that flew off when I crashed.
I got back on the bike and finished the ride. It did give me time to think about what could have happened....if a car had been right behind me, if my helmet hadn't been properly adjusted, if a car had been coming in the other direction and I had slid a little further. It made me think of the woman who was killed in last year's Pelotonia .
I was glad I finished the ride but its going to be weird getting back on the bike after that. Not because of what happened but mostly from my thoughts of what could have happened. Gave me a good opportunity to appreciate how fortunate I am in so many ways.
