Well, here I am in Atlanta several weeks later. I'll start off with an explanation of why there were only three days: My friend Ralph that I was riding with had to leave after three days because his daughter Anna was in the Iowa state swim championship. I could have stayed and finished the ride on my own, but riding together with Ralph was what made the all of the aches and pains worthwhile, so I headed back to Ames with him on Wednesday morning and caught an early flight home. I still feel like I accomplished something; we covered 220 miles in those three days! The other good news is that Anna is now the Iowa state champion in the 100 meter butterfly!
As I suspected, the only time that I ever had the self-discipline to actually sit down and write about the trip was when I was on the trip itself - that made having the iPad on the trip really nice. That's also why I'm just finishing this three weeks after returning.
As for the ride itself, I learned some things that were not obvious before I did any long rides (remember, I'd never ridden more than 27 miles before this). I will now summarize these points for your reading enjoyment:
When I saw the distances we would be riding every day, I expected to be in a state of constant exhaustion and fatigue. This really didn't happen. The only time I felt so tired that I couldn't continue was at the end of the first day, when we had several big climbs in a row, and I just pulled over to rest for about 30 minutes and was fine. The hills are where you get tired; I never felt much fatigue on flat ground.
What will make you want to quit is the aching pain in the seat. I didn't feel this at all the first day; I think that if I had only done the first day (80 miles, lots of hills) I would have left feeling like quite the macho man. It wasn't until I got onto the seat on the morning of the second day that I realized how sore I was. When you first sit down, you're sore. After a while, this turns into numbness, which seems ok for a little while. But then, the numbness turns into a really deep pain. Stopping to rest helps, but when you get back on the seat, it's worse than ever, as if you were healing up from a broken bone and then you fall on it. Because of this, the second day was pretty miserable. I don't know if I started getting used to it, or changing the way I was sitting, but the third day was not as bad as the second. Not to worry, I ran into a new problem on the third day:
My hands. After three days of supporting my upper body weight on the handlebars, I started losing strength and sensation in my hands and fingers. The nerves were under constant pressure, and it became difficult to change gears, which require you to push a lever with your thumb. I could move my thumb, but I couldn't feel it, so I would have to watch myself change the gear in order to know if I actually did it. And unlike the butt pains, which stop hurting as soon as you get off the seat, the numbness and weakness in my fingers lasted for about three days after the ride was over. At one point, there was a little girl and her mother giving out free water and lemonade near Clear Lake (which was very nice, you get used to paying for water just about everywhere) from an igloo cooler with a spout on the bottom. I couldn't push the button on the spout with my thumb, and had to ask the little girl to push it for me.
Speaking of water, that was the last point I'll make. On a long bike ride, you go through water bottles constantly. I realize now that if I was on a long ride with no place to get water, I would dehydrate long, long before I was tired or hungry. On the first day where we had the most hills, we'd climb the hill and then drink a quarter bottle of water coasting down the other side. With two water bottles, this means you're good for about 8 hills before you need to find a place to stop and fill back up. We drank so much water and gatorade that we rarely felt hungry when we arrived in the towns. So if you're thinking about going out for a long bike ride, be sure to get not one but two water bottle cages and keep them filled!
So that's a lot of whining and complaining. What about the good parts? The best part was the people in the towns. Most of the towns we passed through were 300-500 people. One was 27 people, and the overnight towns were around 8-12,000 people. So we'd have 25,000 bike riders passing through these towns like a horde of drunken locusts, and instead of complaining about how flagrantly drunk we were, or how every public bathroom was occupied all day, the people in the towns would sit in their chairs by the road side, clapping and cheering as we would roll by. That's saying something when you consider that it takes about 6 hours for the whole group to pass through, and with me in the back half of that, I wouldn't expect anybody to be clapping by the time I got there. But they were, and they'd help us park our bikes, and they'd have a dozen kids from the church selling sweet corn all day long and smiling, and they'd help us with directions to the houses we were camping at. That part was really cool.
So will I do it again next year? I think I have a pretty good idea of what it's all about now. I know that I could have made it the last four days if I'd kept at it on my own. I learned a lot, and I had a great time with Ralph, but I think I'm going to look for a new adventure next summer. Any ideas?
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
2 comments:
Thanks for posting these, Jesse. I enjoyed reading them. Sorry about the butt pain. A real bummer (couldn't help myself).
Enjoyed reading over your account of RAGBRAI. Lisa shared in her Christmas letter. I had a friend in Shaker Heights who used to ride every year. She'd take the whole family along as she was an Iowa native.
Happy Holidays to you and your family.
Gayle Thorpe Baar
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