"That" Ride - 2016. Pt I

On the morning of June 25th, 2016, I went for a bike ride.

I love that sentence. I means one thing to the reader unfamiliar with my story and it means something else to the few who know. And it’s a comic understatement to what the ride represented in my head. And my heart. And my ego. This ride was set apart from any ride I had done previously; I was out to push myself further, harder than I ever had in my 42 years.

Setting out a little after 5 in the morning, still dark, I had a well-mapped main route that I had planned to give me the best chance for success: low traffic, good shoulders, and with any luck, a tail-wind. But I wan’t sure what success really was. “Success” was a bit nebulous in my mind, even as I hopped on by bike and started cranking that morning in June. From the birth of this idea, it had gone from one general concept to another. I could never pin down exactly what I was aiming for, I just knew I wanted to push myself to…something.

A year prior, my ego took a severe hit…I was trying to ride the ~140 miles from my house to Ottawa, Ks, basically just to see if I could. I had done several centuries (100 miles in a day) by that point and was pretty confident in myself. Unfortunately I learned a very hard lesson that day as I failed so embarrassingly close to my goal: Don’t underestimate the importance of nutrition in endurance sports. I was eating like I would do on a much shorter ride, lots of sweets, Gatorade, etc. On longer stretches, that kind of eating leads to some pretty miserable stomach issues. On top of the over-sugared stomach issues, I got a flat tire at mile 134 and had left my repair kit (and phone) in the support vehicle. By the time I flagged down a motorist with a cell phone to call my wife (support driver), I was so shaky, overheated, and exhausted, I could barely load the bike onto the rack, let alone change a tire. I was done. Defeated. Embarrassed. And determined to not let that number stand.

As the idea of surpassing 134 miles in a day rolled around in my head, I wondered what distance I should shoot for. It needed to be a number well beyond 134. 150? Not far enough. Too close to 134. I was actually angry with that number and the failure it represented to me. I didn’t want to beat 134, I wanted to crush it. 175 miles? How about a double century? Now we’re talking. 200 miles.

“If your dreams don’t scare you, they aren’t big enough.” That quote is attributed to Mohammed Ali and is one of my favorites. 200 miles was certainly scary at first. Scarier once I did the math. I didn’t take many notes on my 134 mile ride so I can’t talk statistics, but it had taken most of a day. And it was grueling. Maybe 200 miles wasn’t realistic. Maybe chasing a number was too structured. I was trying to see what I could do, maybe my goal should be just that: to see how far I could ride in one day. My upper limit. If it was less than 200 then at least I’d know what it was. If it was beyond 200, then I wouldn’t be selling myself short by paying too much attention to a number.

As I began to plan out this ride, I considered a few factors:

1) I needed to leave early to give me a wider window of time. This would allow for more breaks as I wore down towards the end of the ride. It would also shift my riding to the cooler part of the day.

2) There was the nutrition piece. I had eaten what I thought my body needed and it ruined my ride. So I knew I was going to have to do some research. I read about endurance sports and how the athletes ate (most of these articles are about runners; I couldn’t find any about cycling). I tried to learn as much as I could about what the body needs, what it’s capable of efficiently processing in a given period of time, and what the stomach goes through during extended physical exertion.

3) There was the route. As I said in the opener, I planned a mostly north-bound route on state highways and paved county roads to keep me away from the heavy traffic, give me decent shoulders to ride, and maybe catch a tailwind (as Kansas winds in the summer are usually out of the south).

4) Finally, there was the rider. I love riding, but I’m not an athlete and not a competitive person. For the thousands of miles I’ve ridden, I’ve never ridden in a “race,” so my training to this point was basically conditioning my body to be comfortable on my usual 30-80 mile rides. To prepare for such a long ride I began training harder than I ever had. I loaded my bike with saddle-bags full of water bottles. I rode into the wind and on the biggest hills I could find. I needed to beat “134 mile Tyler,” so I was going to train a hell of a lot harder than he did.

I should add at this point that all of my riding had been done on a Trek DS 8.5. This is a dual sport bike with hydraulic brakes and hydraulic from fork. It’s a 29 pound bike unloaded and I was running 700x38C tires on it. For the non-cyclist, that’s a heavy bike with a lot of rolling resistance. I had ridden this bike, Bikeal Jordan, thousands of miles including across Kansas 4 times and it was a part of me when I rode. I love this bike like a friend. I knew I could greatly increase my range by getting a light road bike with skinny tires, but I wanted to see how far I could go riding like I normally ride on the bike that I normally ride. But yeah, I did at least take my trunk bag off…

In the weeks prior to my “big ride” (as I was calling it), I had a training schedule planned and I stuck to it. It involved 60-100 mile days, loaded heavy, back to back to back with rest every 3 or 4 days, and a day of rest prior to the actual ride. And my wife’s homemade pizza the night before.

Leading up to the day of the “big ride”, I watched the weather closely and made sure my schedule was open for alternate dates in case a summer thunderstorm popped up. I’ve ridden in some nasty storms (Ellinwood leg of BAK 2014, anyone?) but they’re not desirable for what I was trying to achieve, whatever that was. It was looking like my main route might go through some light showers but nothing that was a show-stopper. And I had identified several alternate side routes in case I needed to adjust for weather, road work, higher than expected traffic, or even boredom.

My then-wife, Julie, was going to be my support driver for this ride and was very involved in my training and planning. We worked together on the route and she was going to be watching the weather real-time on the day of the ride to help me change course if needed. Additionally, she would monitor my physical and mental state during the ride. As my wife of more than two decades, she knew me as well as I knew myself and she would be able to notice subtle changes in me as my condition began to deteriorate (and would actually save my life on a future ride, after our divorce, but that’s a different story).

The night before the big ride, I just relaxed. I went over the route on the maps and in my mind. I double and triple checked my bike, made sure the support vehicle had everything I may need (tools, extra lights for my bike, etc), did some basic stretches, ate an unreasonable amount of homemade pizza and had one of my favorite beers (Hoegaarden).

(Side note: when you are training hard you can eat ridiculous amounts of food and you are hungry all the time. It’s almost shocking the amounts of food a person can eat and still stay trim)

I was physically ready. I was mentally prepared. But I still didn’t know what I was aiming for. Definitely more than 134 miles. 200? Maybe. Hopefully. But damn-it, hope is not a strategy; this was the most prepared I had ever been for just about anything. Hope or luck weren’t at play here. I had trained hard and I was going to go out and give it my best. I was going to find out just how much better than “134 mile Tyler” I had become.

Please watch for Part II: The Ride 2016, coming soon…