EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the third in a series of my bike ride from San Francisco to Carlsbad.
The true essence of cycling, like life, lies in discovery. The first bike rides tend to be short bursts. Around the block. Down to the park. Out into the country.
Then, well, once you’ve logged enough miles to gain confidence in your endurance, you chart a course for adventure. You ride to the next town, or a friend’s house, or a faraway brewery to meet a friend.
When you’ve finally ridden to some place, it hits, this insatiable quest to find your limits. Then discovery transforms to the countryside, the landscape and, best of all, the people who cross your path.
After we stopped for lunch with Jennifer and Denise, our support drivers, the excitement of our launch had worn off and reality set in. The post-lunch pace dropped considerably and making it to Santa Cruz, some 90 miles from our start, appeared questionable.
Once again I slipped behind the others, not interested in the pace they were forcing. Just when we needed a break, we got one. Jeff got a flat.
Jeff started changing his flat, something of a habit more than a ritual with him. On the only training ride we did together before this trip was prolonged by a flat, Jeff’s, of course.
As the mood shifted from play to work, our spirits were uplifted, reminding us that this was going to be an adventure, and anything might happen. As Jeff struggled with his tire a young woman rode up heading north and crossed the road to chat.
“Are you the guys going from San Francisco to San Diego?” she asked enthusiastically.
The reporter in me wanted to quickly set the record straight, that my goal was Carlsbad, some 30 miles short of San Diego, and the others would be happy to make Santa Barbara. But her smile seemed worth feeding, so the simple reply was an unconvincing, “Uh-huh.”
“Your camera crew is up the road about two miles,” she said excitedly, acting much like Garfield’s canine sidekick. “They took some pictures of me. They thought I was one of you.”
Before any of us could think of something remotely interesting to say, she jumped back in.
“Are you guys trying to set a record or something?” she asked, having been privy to only our tire changing pace.
At that moment Jeff’s expression was utterly blank. He knew the inner tube should fit into the tire, but it wasn’t cooperating. It was a classic Butthead, “Huh?” pose. Record, indeed.
No, I told her, we’re just trying to finish in one piece. That’s when she went on auto-pilot, giving the Reader’s Digest version of her autobiography.
She just graduated from Cal, was taking a semester off before starting medical school to train for an ultra-distance race this coming weekend, a 508-mile killer ride through the Mojave Desert and Death Valley.
She was riding a standard road bike with a banana and apple duct-taped to the frame that made her look more like some frightening temptress in a bicycle horror flick, and explained that for training purposes she takes this thin-wheeled creature on mountain bike rides with her friends, the cycling equivalent of saying she does one-arm pushups because she finds two-arm pushups mundane.
Having covered the 508-mile Furnace Creek race she was entering when I worked for The Register, we struck up a little conversation about ultra-distance cycling that was dominantly one-sided with me following Jeff’s impersonation with my own Beavis effort, “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah.”
If nothing else, it made the time pass quickly, because it seemed like Jeff had his tire fixed in no time, which, was more like a half-hour time. The fact remains, as she rode off with us staring in awe, that she induced an adrenaline rush that would certainly help us through the rolling hills ahead.
We caught up with our “camera crew” at the base of a downhill, which meant Jeff would be in prime photo position. Jeff rides downhill like a wild man. Having done that once in junior high school, which resulted in an airborne flight that witnesses say took me 10 feet into the air and 20 feet out before crashing over my handlebars earning 15 stitches, I find my hands firmly on the brakes in most downhill situations.
Slowly but surely, Dan fell off the pace. He hadn’t been feeling good in the days leading up to the ride, and I knew his feeling of misery having experienced it just a few weeks earlier in Houston.
A couple of times Jeff and I backed down to help give Dan some help in our draft. Eventually Jeff rode away up the road and I dropped back to escort Dan.
When we got to Davenport, 75 miles from the start, Dan and Jeff decided to hop into the motorhome. I cranked away with Sunset Beach my goal. There we would bed down in Jennifer’s parent’s beach house.
I felt strong, no doubt boosted by opening day adrenaline. I figured the rest of the trip may be hell, but who cares. I was having one of those days where you feel like a God, and I wasn’t ready to hang it up yet.
I rode through Santa Cruz, confidently whizzing by traffic slowed by the rush hour. Just as I was cranking around the corner to follow Highway 1, I saw the sign that makes cyclists want to scream. “Begin Freeway” “Bicycles, pedestrians or motor-driven cycles prohibited.”
About an hour later I was in some bike shop begging for directions to Sunset Beach. Some effervescent kid came from the back room. “I live out there. What do you want, the fastest route or the easiest.”
Here I must submit for the masses that I inherited sweat glands from my Father, who can have a spicy fork of horseradish make it look as though he’s been chopping wood all day. The kid looked at me again. “The easiest, ooookaaaay …”
Eight miles later I was at the base of the final hill of the day, a short, steep muscle-screamer. But I made it and never felt better.
My excitement refused to wane. After a trip in town for pizza, the others were in bed by 9:30. I walked down to the beach (some 99 steps down the cliff) and sat alone listening and watching the waves crash beneath a full moon.
One of those images of discovery that lasts a lifetime.
Time to ride.
