Don’t stop! Whatever you do, don’t
stop pedaling. If you stop, you’ll never get going again. Brynwood Lane is the steepest
street in Portland, and if you dare ride a bicycle up it, you’ll most likely
need to talk to yourself in the third person. You’ll need to use that little voice
in your head as motivation, or else you’ll probably scream as loud as you can—which
I’ve seen grown men do. I’ve also seen chains pop from the immense pressure put
on them, as well as a variety of uphill “crashes,” including one cyclist who
popped a wheelie, flipped onto his back, his bicycle landing on top
of him, his feet still clipped into the pedals. I’ve seen lots of people
slouched over their bikes, shuffling up the hill on two feet. But those are the
types of things that can happen when you attempt to power a bicycle up a hill whose
grade climbs above 30 %. That’s why you don’t stop!
“And why are we doing this again?”
Those words, or a variation of them,
seem to be the most popular phrase uttered throughout the ride. And we all seem
to have our own reasons. My teammate Jim, whom I’m sharing this day of suffering
with, is quick to answer, as if he has pondered the question for some time. “If
I’m not doing this,” he says, “then I have to go work. This is much better than
going to work.” But is it?
My reason isn’t as justified as Jim’s.
“If I wasn’t doing this,” I say, “then I would just be doing a similar ride by
myself. This is much better than riding by myself.” My reason is a bald-faced
lie—there’s no way I would do a ride like this by myself.
We are in the midst of the De Ronde
van Oeste Portlandia, or the Ronde PDX, as it’s better known. RideOregonRide.com
calls it “inarguably the toughest under-50-mile road ride in Oregon.” With 19
climbs, over the course of 43 miles, riders who finish the route will have
ascended over 7,400 feet by the end of the day. That’s like riding a bicycle to
the top of the Empire State Building about six times; or the Eiffel Tower seven
times; or the Statue of Liberty twenty-five times; or, well, I think you get the
picture. And it’s not only the total feet of climbing that makes the ride
challenging—it’s the extraordinary steepness of the hills. In fact, the men who
designed the route specifically set out to find the steepest hills in Portland.
And just why would anybody do such an incredibly cruel thing like that?
Though the ride has been going on
for seven straight years, attracting hundreds of determined cyclists each time,
the website for the Ronde PDX remains rather vague. It’s only one page and
says very little. “Tradition has it,” it reads, “that on the 14th
Day of Worship, the hard men of the land shall gather to match their skill and
strength against each other on the inclines of Flandrian earth, stone and
tarmac.” Since 1913, the nation of Belgium has celebrated the Ronde van
Vlaanderen, (or for those of you who don’t speak Dutch, The Tour of Flanders) a
legendary one-day road race that takes particular pride in its rough
cobblestone roads and excessively steep climbs. The original race organizers
never set out to use such steep or poorly constructed roads, but that’s all
that were available in such a small geographic area. On the other hand, the men
behind the Ronde PDX intentionally set out to find the most grueling hills imaginable;
some more difficult to ride than any on the actual Tour de Flanders.
And just how do organizers get away with producing
such an incredibly difficult—and some may say dangerous—ride in the heart of
one of the largest cities on the West Coast? Easy—they refer to it as “unsanctioned.”
Now, when you think of unsanctioned bicycle events, what usually comes to mind
are hipsters doing alley-cat races, or playing bike polo on “fixies;” or punks
racing downhill on bikes that seem way too small, or jousting on bikes that
seem way too tall. The Ronde is anything but. Most everybody here is a serious
rider. You almost have to be to ride 43 miles. You most definitely have to be
to ride 43 miles of excruciatingly steep hills.
Personally, I’m impressed with anybody who is even
willing to show up at the start line. I’m even more impressed with the ones who
don’t seem to fit in, the ones without the fancy bikes and slick kits that I
recognize from the local race scene. There’s the guy who’s going to do the
entire ride in a full-body Spiderman costume. And the guy on the fat-tire mountain
bike, with enough bags and accessories attached that you’d think he was on a yearlong
excursion through the Himalayas. And of course, the most impressive of them all—a
seven year old boy, riding a bike with 20 inch wheels. And even more impressive
than seeing these cyclists at the start line, is knowing that they crossed the
finish line (though Spiderman did shed his mask somewhere around mile 20.) Yes,
even the child, even though it took him all day (you can read about his
accomplishment at http://bikeportland.org/2014/04/07/the-7-year-old-who-conquered-portlands-toughest-bike-ride-104139)
After 19 hills and five hours of rain and fog and mud, Jim and I finish for our fourth consecutive year.
Knowing the course, and the hills, and what we’re “up against,” I do admit that
it gets easier each time, though I will never, ever call it “easy.” There is a
grand sense of accomplish when you’re finally finished, though the original
question still lingers—Why are we doing this again? At this point, we have
nothing to prove. We’ve done it before and we’ll do it again. Jim may use his “getting
out of work” excuse, but if he suddenly became a millionaire and never had to
work again, I know that he’d still be here. I can say that it’s good training,
or a great topic to write a blog about, but then again, I’ve done it in the
past when I wasn’t training, and I wasn’t blogging. People like to say that it’s
because we’re all a little bit crazy, or that we love suffering, but those seem
to be facts rather than reasons. Maybe the answer is the simplest one—the one a
child would give. Perhaps the one that seven-year-old gave to his friends at
school on Monday morning.
Why are we doing
this again? Because.
Just, because.
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