I'm forwarding Agnes' writeup of her experience on the 300km this
past saturday. This was her longest ride ever, and she is a new,
and welcome addition to randonneuring.

rob hawks

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: agellen@... <agellen@...>
Date: Feb 25, 2007 12:17 PM
Subject: [GPC] Brevet Report
To: agellen@...
Cc: gpc <gpc-talk@...>


Hello GPCers,
Below is a report of my experiences on the 300K. it is absurdly long, and
excessively detailed. I recommend skimming, or, if you want to skip
straight to the misery, start at paragraph 9.
Agnes


My alarm is set at the earliest yet for the start of any ride: 4.15am
(just barely beating out 4.30 am from my pre-ride to Livermore the week
before). I wake up, slip into my cycling clothes. I had slept with my
hair braided to save myself 2 minutes of sleep. I feel very tired as I
look out the window for Bruce's car, despite the fact that I went to bed
at 8pm the night before (I trained myself with progressively earlier
bedtimes the night before.) He arrives exactly on time, then next stop is
to pickup Rob, and then we are off. Rob looks the chipperest of us four,
and I try to absorb some of his enthusiasm. We get to the start, and I
don the rest of my cycling clothes (Later on in the ride, a convivial
assembly of Randonneurs at the Marshall store will talk about spending the
previous evening deciding what clothing to bring today. An easy decision
for me, since I just put on all the cycling clothing I owned!). Surprise!
Mark A. is there; we had been sure he would not show due to the forecast.
But at that moment, things look good; and they keep looking good, for a
while at least…We assemble our bikes, sign in, and off I ride to the
start. This is the last time I see Bruce or Rob till the finish. I hear
a funny clicking sound, and it turns out my bike's speed magnet is hitting
the sensor; I stop to adjust it. This is probably the point where I
messed it up, though it doesn't stop functioning until many miles later.

I see many of my GPC friends at the start, which is nice, because I will
not see them again on this ride: Peter M., Steve D., the Mike who calls me
"Agnesh." I recognize many of the bikes from the 200K, and once again
admire the Rivendelliana. Todd gives a speech, in which he reminds us
that the final control (the Marshall store) closes at 6pm; that if we get
there after 6pm we have to mail him a postcard from the post office across
the street; that he included the postcard with 2/3 of the brevet cards,
based on expectations of when we would finish. I realize (from the memory
of the thinness of my brevet card in its ziploc) that he did not give me a
postcard. I am simultaneously pleased and worried. I remember Bruce
emailing me the night before saying I would surely not need the postcard,
and I wonder if he's right. I feel I had better live up the their
expectations!

It's 6am. We set off across the Golden Gate bridge, and it is as much of
a thrill as it was on the 200k to ride en masse, beginning our adventure
together in this obviously epic fashion. I chat with Bill R. about his
upcoming 35 day bike tour; we ride through Sausalito and up to the bike
path. I ride with Veronica and Mark A. along the bike path as we head to
Fairfax, with Dan B. close nearby. Mark A. plans to stop in Fairfax, and
I'd like to join him but don't want to lose the group so early in the
game. I can feel that I am not feeling that great; Steve D. had cautioned
me against doing 150 mi. with him last week, that I might not be recovered
in time for this ride, my longest to date. I can feel now that he was
right, but I don't regret having done it. I figure I'd rather be slower
today than have missed out on last week's fun. At White's hill I struggle
to keep up with Veronica and the group around her, and manage right until
we crest over the hill, where I let a gap form. On the flats, the group
is not far ahead of me; I try to catch up several times by sprinting
ahead, but feel my lack of practice at this task. I decide to let them
go. I ride merrily along at slow and steady pace, passed by a handful of
riders, happy to be on my own and not trying to keep up. (Why do I need
to re-learn this lesson every ride?). I look down to correlate the route
directions with my trip computer, and see that it is off by at least 10
miles. The speed sensor turns sporadically on and off for the rest of the
ride. Mostly off, mercifully, so in those later stages don't have to know
how slow I'm going. At some point it rains a bit, but nothing serious.
The sky sure looks grey, though. Mark A. rides up to me, having caught up
after his stop, and I envy the coffee I imagine he got. We chat a little
about lighting, batteries and the like, and he rides on ahead.

The secret control is a relief; I am glad to have an excuse to stop for a
minute as we wait in line for Todd to sign our cards. I am even gladder
to have a chance to remove the reflective sash Rob H. kindly leant me. I
started off the ride wearing it so proudly, feeling like a real
Randonneur, but it became the bane of my wardrobe as it fell off my
shoulder every 15 seconds (Rob had warned me of this). I see Mark A.,
ready to leave, and this is the last I'll see of him on the ride. I
admire the purple tandem of the nice couple, on line in front of me, whose
path I will re-cross many times again on this ride, and whose names I've
managed to forget. I think about how not-great I'm feeling today, and
decide to swallow my pride and ask Todd for a Marshall postcard. Armed
with it, I ride off to the first real control. I ride mostly on my own,
dreaming of coffee and bathrooms, hoping I will not get lost due to my
malfunctioning odometer.

Arriving in Petaluma, I see a Peets and can hold myself back no longer. I
stop for my much needed cappuccino and bathroom, and catch another group
of riders who guide me to the first control at the Safeway. I buy some
batteries for my dim taillight, get my receipt and go back outside. There
I see Kevin F., another GPC friend and I hasten to install my batteries so
I can get over to him before he leaves. The best move of my day. Kevin
is riding with a group of guys (Bill, Charlie and Ken, I think were their
names), and we head out together. We manage a reasonably smooth paceline,
and I am thrilled to get a turn to pull. We are descending a small hill,
and I start to rapidly decelerate. I stop, and realize my jacket has
caught in my rear wheel. (Yes-for those of you who remember my email
earlier this week-again! I know how lame this is: feel free to scoff. I
appear not to be able to get this right. I can only count myself very
lucky that I didn't crash) I catch up with Kevin's group, and think how
nice it is to ride with a group I can actually catch up to when I have to
stop for some reason. I'm rarely in this position.

It begins to rain, and our group merges with a larger group of riders. I
feel a stabbing pain in my eyes, which I try to ignore until the point
when I can't keep them open any longer. The rain has washed sweat into my
eyes. I stop, wipe my face, put on my rain jacket (which I will not
remove for the rest of the ride) and catch up. The largish group rides
through together, getting wetter and wetter, barely talking and enduring
the spray from fendered (bad) and unfendered (worse) bikes. I feel guilty
for the suffering I know I am inflicting on the rider behind me, but
there's little I can do about it. There is no speed benefit at riding
together, because we can't ride close enough or fast enough to get a draft
advantage, and we get a steady shower of road-dirt water, but it's better
to suffer together than alone. I notice Bill R. is on our group, and he
seems unfazed by the rain. I talk to him a bit and try to take heart.
The group falls apart a bit, but I manage to always keep Kevin in my
sights (again, very smart thinking). At some point near control 2 he
announces he has a flat, and I stop with him while he fixes it. Kevin
has, I am to learn, an uncanny knack for timing his flats with the
location of convenience stores. The woman in this one nicely lets me use
the employee bathroom, which, with its complicated double-locked door,
must be the best guarded bathroom in the west. It takes me five minutes
to unlock the door, which I do with great anticipation. The closest thing
to the treasure I expect to find inside is a toilet paper cozy.

We head on to Safeway, I load up (overload) on bars and cookies, Kevin
gets a much more sensible sandwich which he shares with me, and we head
out once again. The rain has abated, and this becomes the nicest part of
the trip. There are few cars, so we can ride side by side and Kevin can
tell me 400K horror stories. I ride Westside Dr. and River road for the
first time, and though Kevin assures me they are much more beautiful in
good weather, they had a special charm in what my son would call "the
misty gloom." (A phrase from one of his favorite books, "Who will comfort
Toffle," about a depressive dwarfish loner. Children have funny taste.)
At some point there's road repair, the road becomes one way only, and we
have to alternately share the road with oncoming traffic. It's hard to
figure out where to ride; at one point Kevin and I try to ride in the
"construction zone" separated from the road orange posts, but a
construction worker is coming our way, and we have to move into the road
proper. Scanning traffic for an opening, I forget to look ahead, and ride
straight into one of the posts. It bounces obligingly out of the way, and
I remain upright. (Later, I tell Kevin about this, and he says "I'd
wondered what that sound was.") The lesson of this is that if you are
going to ride into/over something, the best thing you can do is pretend
nothing is happening. This lesson will be repeated during a later and
darker stage of our journey.

Sometime during this happy time my right knee, the bane of my past 10
rides, wakes up and remembers it's supposed to have problems. This is
stage one of my knee pain: mild annoyance. We hit highway 1, and it is
windy. I cannot tell if it is a headwind or side wind—the wind seems to
be coming from every direction at once. Pacelining is useless, we
struggle through the best we can. Kevin says we should stop at a Bodega
bay for food, in case we don't make at to Marshall before it closes. At a
bathroom stop, we encounter Zach K., whose path I've crossed several times
en route, and Kevin and he discuss our chances for making it to Marshall
by 6; they are cautiously pessimistic. At Bodega bay, we eat cold fried
chicken and potatoes packaged in little plastic boxes. (Very gourmet for
brevet food, Kevin tells me) I have a cherry coke, and reflect on the
fact that I had relegated coke and potato chips to the first 15 years of
my life, until I started cycling. We forge on through the winds, and then
make that dreaded right turn to follow highway 1 at Petaluma Valley Rd.

Steve D. has already brought to your attention the headwinds of hell, so I
will only add a few words to his description. I was *pedaling * down
every hill, sometimes in my granny gear. I don't even want to talk about
the uphills. This is where I enter knee pain stage two: actual pain, but
knee still fully functional for pedaling. I start falling behind Kevin,
who regularly slows for me to catch up. The thought "I am not going to
make it" rears its ugly head. I push that thought out of my head by
insisting that I will reach Marshall by six. After an eternity, we hit
Tomales and a set of un-fun rollers where I am really struggling. I think
only about the number of minutes we have in order to cover the 7.5 miles
to Marshall, and what speed we need to go to make it. I occupy my mind
with what seem like immensely complicated feats of division. As we
Moots-riders like to say, all of this is moot, since I have no idea what
speed we're going (my speedometer has long since ceased giving any readout
at all). After another eternity, we hit Marshall. It is 5:47! The store
is open! I don't think I've ever been prouder of a feat in my life. I
think I was prouder of this than of finishing. The mood in the Marshall
store is cheerful, tired, bustly camaraderie. The purple tandem couple
sits with Kevin and me, and I overhear someone else complaining of knee
pain. We all know we just made it, and it means so much to everyone to
have this little milestone. It feels like a good omen for the prospect of
finishing. I want to sit there and sip clam chowder forever. Kevin gives
me some ibuprofen, and he makes another guy (Mike?) who is unwisely
boasting of carrying tons of pills and never using them, give me his
ibuprofen too. I take Kevin's pills and save Mike's for later. And we
head out. It is getting dark, so our lights go on.

>From this point on, I ride behind Kevin and his dynamo lighting system,
far superior (for now…) to my, yes, I'll confess in a whisper, not one but
two viciously unregulated Cateye El-530s. People glom on to us and fall
away, One nice guy named Jared tries to talk to me, but I'm in no shape to
chat…over the rollers I am transitioning to knee pain stage three: bad
pain, knee only partly functional (cannot push down, but can pull back and
up) I stay close behind Kevin and start to seriously wonder how I will
possibly ride 40 more miles with this knee. That's about when the rain
starts up hard again. My eyes hurt from squinting; I am trying to
maximize what I can see and minimize rain in my eyes. In the dark, rain
and with glasses that repeatedly fog, my vision is very poor. Kevin's
unmistakable spastic taillight pattern becomes my only friend in the
darkness. Besides my granny gear of course, which was my number one tried
and true buddy for the rest of the ride. I think I may have worn the
teeth off that one in those last 40 miles; I almost never shifted up.

Somehow we reach Nicasio Valley road, and I recall how this used to be the
far out point that I would ride to on rides leaving from San Francisco.
We are still a long way from home. I don't want to take a hand off the
handlebars to reach down for a water bottle, so I'm grateful when Kevin
proposes stopping for a drink, in the dark and pouring rain. The rain
gets worse. We ride on to and through Fairfax, both of us falling hard
into a pothole at some point. In San Anselmo at 9pm, Kevin once again has
a very fortuitous convenience-store flat, which he attributes to the
aforementioned pothole. I start shivering as soon as we stop, so I go
inside, but feel guilty that I have left Kevin out there in the dark and
cold on his own. The convenience store clerk very kindly agrees to have
Kevin change his flat inside the store (Turns out, the clerk had just
fixed his first flat the night before) He also let me use the bathroom.
He also ignores the huge puddles of water we leave all over his floor.
Thank you thank you, San Anselmo 7-11! In the store is the point at which
I realize I can't put much weight on my right leg, or walk properly. (The
next morning my son would ask, "why are you so limpy?") We both have
coffee to warm up, I take my reserve ibuprofen, call Bruce to let him know
where we are and call Kevin's wife for him to give her an update as he
finishes fixing the flat. I debate whether or not I should call my
husband, but I know that he would read right through my assurances to the
pain, misery and self-doubt barely beneath the surface. I figure he will
worry less if he doesn't talk to me, especially since I told him I'd be
home between 9pm and midnight. As long as I call by midnight, he wont
worry.

>From San Anselmo to Sausalito I enter knee pain stage four: the final
stage. My knee stops working altogether. I figure my left leg is going
to get really strong, and on the hills I think about how good my left
pedal stroke will become from this exercise. I think how, if my right
knee never works again, I can always become a one legged pedaler. I have
other such thoughts of near madness, trying not to think about the two big
hills I have left. The rain gets worse. My knee hurts like hell, even
though I'm not using it: just bending it with the pedalstroke hurts. I
try unclipping and riding with only one leg clipped in, and this does feel
better, but I worry I'll fall. When I think about how there's no way I
can pedal another revolution, I argue back that pedaling with one foot
should only be half as hard as pedaling with two, and half-speed is not no
speed. I'm not setting any records, I tell myself, I'm only aiming to be
back by the cutoff (2am). Kevin knowingly rides slow, so I can keep up.
At some point we are climbing a steep twisty dark road. The rain gets
worse. I'm in my lowest gear and barely staying upright. I call to Kevin
to slow down so I can stay closer to him and have the benefit of his
lights in this darkness. He stops for me to catch up. This is where his
lights give out. His backups are even worse than my setup, so we ride on
that. On the descent, he hits another pothole and then has me ride ahead.
We go very slow. The rain gets worse. You would think that rain ceases
to matter after every inch of your body and clothing is saturated with
water, but rain is tricky that way: after penetrating your clothing, and
your body, it heads straight for your soul, making sure you sink into
misery.

Somehow we make it to the bike path, and battle through the winds that
never seem to leave it. They seem like childsplay compared to the winds
we've dealt with today. Little do we know our strongest winds are still
to come. At some point on the bike path we pass under a highway, and are
shielded from the rain for 15 seconds. Kevin comments that it's the
longest dry spell we've had all day. At the end of the bike path I fail
to hear Kevin call out to warn me about a tree branch. (He's riding ahead
again, despite his lack of lights. I learned an important lesson: lights
matter, but being sharp eyed and attentive matter just as much. Kevin
could ride surer with his nothing backups than I with my 2 full power LEDs
and helmet light.) I ride right over the tree branch without a hitch. In
daylight, I would've seen it just at the last minute, and done
*something* that would have caused a fall. Luckily, I didn't see it, so I
did nothing and stayed up.

The climb up to Sausalito was not as bad as I feared. I was getting into
a left footed pedaling rhythm, and the rain went from downpour to jut
plain rain. I was beginning to think we might make it. At some point we
got blasted by a gust of wind and blown out into the road; just a few
seconds later and we would've been blown right in front of a car. Kevin
said "I hope the bridge isn't like that." I guess Poseidon heard him, and
was in an angry mood. The bridge was bad. I thought we might get blown
over. We walked around one of the towers, and rode the rest of the way in
a deep tuck. The bridge seemed to have grown four or five times since our
ride out that morning.

But we made it. Over the bridge, down the hill, to Todd. We signed in (I
think our official arrival time was 11pm), I hugged Kevin and Rob H. who
then loaded my bike, got in the car, and drove off with Bruce, Dan and Rob
to hear their stories and tell mine. I was thinking the whole last 100
miles how annoying it would be for them to have to wait for me at the
finish, but the truth is it was such a nice thing to arrive with people
waiting for you! As I got in the car, my husband called and I could tell
him I was done! Bruce, Rob, Dan and I went out and got dinner at a
brewery, I changed into my regular, non-sopping clothes, had some chili,
and felt oddly elated. At around midnight, I got home and spent another
two hours up with my husband, telling him every detail over hot milk with
whipped cream (after 300K, I figure you get to drink whatever the hell you
want). And at 6am, I woke up to type this. I'm far from recovered from
my ride, but I'm happy.

I thought a lot on this ride about what a brevet is. The 200K was,
officially, my first brevet, but it didn't feel like a brevet. It was the
longest distance I had done till that point, but not a particularly hard
ride; I rode strong, felt confident, made good time. I never once worried
that I might not finish it, or felt like I was falling apart. The 300K
felt like a brevet; it felt like a test. Not a test of bike handling, or
speed, or strength, or fitness, or mechanical knowledge; all those things
are things you need, but the thing being tested is your will, in a form so
pure you don't otherwise encounter it. Remember in high school when you
learn about the three kinds of conflict "man vs. man" "man vs. nature"
"man vs. himself." And remember when you realized that you could get an
easy A by pointing out that every apparent case of the first two is really
a case of the third? If we decide not to cheat, and limit ourselves to
"man vs. man" and "man vs. nature," we can, I think, get at the heart of
the difference between bike racing and randonneuring. Racing is a man vs.
man kind of conflict: the head to head competition is what gets those guys
going. Randonneuring is a man vs. nature kind of struggle: nature in the
form of mother nature, with her storms, hills, headwinds, darkness and
nature in the form of one's own physical
nature, with its attendant limitations (knees, sleep, eyesight etc.).

Since you have spent nearly as long reading this as I spent riding the
worst-and-best brevet, I will end this, with just a few thanks:

The people who made my ride possible are:
Todd, the RBA
Bruce, who picked us all up from home, drove us, got us back.
My Grizzly friends, who have showered me with advice, encouragement, and
help.
My husband, who watched my son from dawn to dusk on this as on all my ride
days.
Kevin, without whom I'd somewhere between highway 1 and Sausalito.
Thanks, y'all, and... on to the 400K!



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