103 Miles

My Longest Ride

Yesterday, 14 July, was my longest ride ever, from Newton to Great Bend, KS.

I have dedicated that leg to the memory of Paul Wack, a favorite English lit teacher of my friend and donor Ashley Weir, and liked by many other students over his career. Weir learned much about the American classic novels through his creative and challenging lessons, which stayed with her years later.

I don’t know how to describe a ride of that duration to anyone who hasn’t done it. You’re on the bike for 6, 7, 8 hours unless you’re an absolute speed demon. And even then, you will have moments when you think, I cannot hold this pace for this distance: whatever the pace and distance. It is all relative. And this is true even when temperature, terrain, and wind are all favorable, as they were for us: just beautiful, easy spinning, mile after mile on a road that unspooled like ribbon before us, and virtually no traffic to worry about.

There are the touch points: saddle, hands, and feet. These are common pain sites, but so are shoulders. Tylenol and Motrin are great helps. So is ultrastrength Tiger Balm and CBD cream. There are the insects who collide with you, the vehicles that drive by. And then there are the animals, whether the raccoons you startle—a raccoon in broad daylight is often a bad sign, but this one scrambled back into the corn so fast I wasn’t particularly worried for it—the cows in their spa. That photo is courtesy of Richard Mathews and his wonderful lavender? mauve? Lotus Dauntless, a bike I love because my first good bike some 40 years ago was a beautiful yellow Lotus. I love seeing fine old bikes—steel and titanium, aluminum, beautiful woven carbon fiber—rolling down the road years after they were rendered “obsolete” by advances that were all too often about cheaper manufacturing processes rather than advances in design and metallurgy.

Horses also watch us curiously and so do… eland, the largest of antelope. These fine folks at Hedrick’s Exotic Animal Farm were definitely curious about us. (If they were zebra, I wouldn’t have lingered even as long as I didn’t: zebra are some of the toughest, most aggressive herbivores out there, having evolved in an unusually predator-rich environment. They have prospered by assuming everything not obviously another herbivore is out to eat them. No thank you.)

There is something marvelous about seeing the country from a bike moving at 5, 10, 15, 20, even 25 mph, measuring it with your pulse and breathing and cadence, rather than a speedometer.

And choosing to do this, because almost all of us have or have had the physical capability of doing this or something like it, changes your understanding of your self forever.