First of all, huge thanks to everybody who sponsored me! I raised nearly $2,200 for the Multiple Sclerosis Chapter of Illinois, blowing the $300 minimum out of the water, and exceeding my own goal of $2,000. Thank you! I will recap the ride here in a couple parts; please check back again early next week for the rest of the story!
Friday afternoon, my friend Harriett and I started to get ready: I picked up the rental car, and she picked up a borrowed bike rack. Neither of us having any experience with strapping things onto cars, this turned out to be a comedy of errors. Does this bar maybe go here? No? What about here? Finally—about 45 seconds before it started to rain—we had the bike rack firmly attached to the car, and both bikes firmly bungeed in.
Exhibit A:
There were at least a dozen bungee cords involved. Those bikes weren’t going anywhere.
The ride provided a secure area for us to leave our bikes at overnight. We found our deluxe accommodations (the Northern Illinois University dorms) and set our alarms for an obscenely early hour.
You learn a lot about your friends when you share a hotel (or dorm room) with them. Turns out that Harriett is a chipper morning person. Our alarms went off at 4:30 the next morning, and she jumped out of bed and began chatting. Anybody who has the pleasure of dealing with me first thing in the morning knows that I am surly and grumpy at best. Harriett mercilessly turned on the overhead lights, and so I stumbled and grumbled out of bed and into my biking clothes.
It was about 6:30 by the time we’d gotten ready, eaten breakfast, and taken advantage of photo ops while we were still fresh.
Little did we know what was ahead of us.
The ride started off really well. It was a little overcast, and we hit a smattering of rain, but the rolling hills felt good, especially when we got up speed on the downhills. The bucolic landscape was all cornfields and farm houses, and red-winged blackbirds chirped and squawked all around us (I found out letter that red-winged blackbirds in the city often attack cyclists. I think I’m glad I didn’t know this at the time).
Other than the brief storm (which was more bark than bite), the weather was perfect: sunny and clear and hardly any humidity. And then we got to the halfway point, where the winds started. I found out that afternoon that the winds were 15mph with 25mph gusts. No longer did those hills feel good, and no longer could we get any speed on the downhills. For 40 miles, we fought either directly into the wind or a crosswind, with only two very short spurts with the wind at our backs. My knees were screaming, and I was pretty disheartened by how slow we were going—at one point I was fighting for 4mph. But then, near the end, when we found our way back to the residential area surrounding the NIU Campus (and our start/finish point), a woman outside her house held up a sign: “Thank you for riding!” That gave me a little push to crawl those last couple miles across the finish line. 77 miles—40 of those battling the wind—completed!
I promptly went to the medical tent and iced my poor knees, which felt like I had left my kneecaps in a cornfield somewhere. We ate dinner (we actually ate two dinners—you burn a lot of calories when you spend all day on the bike!) and slept very, very soundly.
Next week: Day Two.
