Ride Around Clark County

Somehow I’ve managed to love riding bicycles despite the fact that I haven’t been in acceptable physical condition since 1978. Unlike those unique individuals who can drink a case of Miller for breakfast and then bag a 100-mile single-speed mountain ride, I approach any ride over five miles with the wary preparation of the chronically unfit. I don’t mean to suggest I stretch or anything, just that I worry about it a lot.

I’m also fairly sure that sometime between 2005 and 2011 continued exposure to extremely unhealthy levels of stress damaged some kind of valve in my head that regulates sleep. My wife tells me this is related to cortisol levels, and I’m inclined to believe her, but I only know there’s hardly any point in the day when I could not spontaneously fall asleep. The only exception to this is night-time, when you’re supposed to.

At any rate, it’s been a pretty unhealthy few years there. I’ve tried to ride at least some almost every day, but all short rides, too many of them inside on rollers, and I haven’t done any significant road rides since I used to be able to ride bikes with my wife, back in 2004, before life got extremely complicated. It was with some trepidation, then, that I told my boss, Jay, I’d join him and the Portland Velo club for a group ride on the 2012 Ride Around Clark County in Vancouver.

Not doing the ride would have been absurd. For one thing, my boss asked me to go ride bikes. I’m not blind to how rare and fantastic a thing that is. Secondly, I’m moving there. The ride was going to roll through much of the neighborhood where I’ll be living, and there’s no better way to see it. Of course I would love to do it, yes, thank you, I’ll be there. Done.

The only thing was the miles.

And, to a lesser degree, the condition of my road bikes, which hadn’t been touched since being strapped to the roof of my car for 2700 miles, and weren’t flawless even before the trip started.

I didn’t have the impression that we’d be doing the 18-mile loop. Jay has ridden across the country. I hadn’t met anyone from Portland Velo, but they didn’t sound like dabblers.

Friday night I took an inventory of my diet over the past month since starting the drive across the country and setting up camp in my basement AirBNB room, and realized I’ve been subsisting on hamburgers, cookies and beer. This had the potential to be ugly.

As it turns out, a lot of people ride bicycles here. The photo up top is just the people who happened to be at the first rest stop at the same time we were. Turnout for the ride was huge, despite the cooler temperatures and occasional light right (which turned out to be just about perfect). The members of Portland Velo are extremely nice people with extremely nice bicycles. Just within the smaller group of twenty or so riders in our group, we had two Parlees, a gorgeous Indy Fab, and even a Tom Kellogg built Spectrum.

We did the 65-mile loop, and somehow I survived. Partly it was scenery, and partly it was getting to ride with a really nice group of people, but I hung on. The self abuse diet caught up to me around mile 55, when the quads went (first right, then left), which meant the decision to give up standing, a resolution arrived at following a delicate negotiation between legs and ass. There seems to come a point for me when my legs have officially cramped, but I’m still able to pedal as long as I’m seated. In fact, it’d be more accurate to say I’m unable to stop pedaling without causing my whole body to cramp endlessly in on itself until all of me can fit into a space about the size of a Starbuck’s Grande cup. So I started the last ten miles or so developing a strategy for how I would eventually get off my bike and back into my car without ending up in the fetal position or alarming passers-by.

For whatever reason, though, the cramps mostly went away in the last few miles, allowing me something like composure during the process of loading up the bike. Well, as much composure as possible when you’re loading a ridiculously nice road bike onto a car that’s missing a rear window on the passenger side, and is completely caved in on the driver’s side.