The healthiest and best in shape I have ever been in was the summer before my senior year when I rode in the Hotter'N Hell 100 mile bike ride. The ride takes place in and around Wichita Falls, Texas. It is in August, and it is usually outrageously hot high nineties and often over one hundred—some might even say hotter’n hell. The course itself is not that difficult, as it is on country roads that are almost comically flat. Because of the heat, it is a hard ride, but it’s not as excruciatingly difficult as some centuries, like the Ride Around the Bear, for instance, which involves up to 22,000 feet of climbing! By comparison, the altitude change in the Hotter’N Hell is roughly the height of a medium-sized NBA player. There was a whole cycling club that rides all one hundred miles on bikes that look like this:
Whereas I only able to ride 75 miles on my beautiful 12-speed Peugeot. Somehow I had forgotten to pack my cycling gloves, and my friend Dave that I rode up to Wichita Falls with from Dallas/Ft. Worth didn’t have an extra pair. So I wasn’t wearing gloves that day, and I started to have shooting pains in my wrist because the layer of Spenco gel that was usually protecting my hands from the shocks and vibrations of the road was sitting in my bedroom over 120 miles away.
I was unable to feel my fingers or fully clasp the grips of my bike at about the halfway mark. By seventy miles the pain was just awful, and I finally gave up when I saw an aid tent at 75 miles. I had ice on my wrists and tears in my eyes as I rode back to the finish line in a school bus with the other folks whose bodies or bikes gave out that day. I was still proud of myself for trying and I proudly wore the entrant’s t-shirt for years, but I’ve always felt like I failed that day. It’s not been my Uncle Rico “If only the coach had put me in the fourth quarter, we’d have been state champions,” moment that explains why the rest of my life has been so disappointing. But I do think how my life would have been different if I had kept riding 35 - 50 miles a day on my bike. How would my health be, what would my body be like? What would my physical endurance be like? My mental toughness? I think about this often. Not finishing this bike ride is not why I quit riding though.
Just a few weeks after this ride I had an accident that so shook me that I have never felt comfortable on a bike since. Almost thirty years ago and I still get a sick feeling in my stomach and heart palpitations when I think about it. I was crossing a pretty busy four laned road very close to my house. I had done so many times. As I was crossing I hit a patch of loose gravel the wrong way, and my bike and I went skidding into oncoming traffic. I skidded to a stop and all I could hear was the horrible screech of tires skidding toward me. Next thing I knew, my head was under a car, with the tire resting on my helmet. I was a millisecond from instantaneous death. I got up, told the person in the car that I was fine, looked for a clearing in the traffic and pedaled the rest of the way home in a haze, blood dripping from my right arm and leg. As I picked out pieces of gravel in the shower, then disinfected and bandaged my wounds, I swore to myself that I would just get right back on that bike tomorrow, and be more careful around gravel, but I put it off. I was injured after all. When the wounds didn’t require bandages any longer, I told myself that tomorrow I would get right back to it. Then next week. I did eventually ride, but the mileage of my rides were low, and sometimes I would just stop and walk my bike home. Too embarrassed to admit to myself that I still in shock, that I was afraid to ride. I kept that beautiful bike for years, moved it from dorm rooms to house and apartments. Taking it for a spin now and then, but never feeling at one with it again. Eventually I gave it away or donated it—honestly, I cannot recall. But I miss it. I miss riding. I miss an athletic activity that I enjoyed. I want it back.
How I am going to succeed in this venture:
I am going to take a bicycle riding safety course that is specifically designed to help get people who have not ridden in many years comfortable on the bike again.
I am going to get myself in shape through resistance training, power walking (eventually running), and bike riding.
In the winter I will ride a stationary bike, increasing my mileage until I can easily ride 50 miles.
In the spring, I will increase my mileage until I can ride 100 miles and still have gas in the tank.
I have a buddy who is going to do this with me. We are going to support each other in this.
I am afraid of this challenge. Truly frightened. And that is why on some level that this is the feat that I am most excited to take on.