Riding 200km is difficult, and it seems to add a needless degree of difficulty to do it in the dark, but if you consider that the next distances on the randonneuring calendar are 300km, 400km and 600km (not to mention the 1000k), at some point it is helpful to inure yourself to riding in darkness.
Last weekend, our resident randonneur extraordinaire Brad, fresh from this exploit, took on the NER 200km overnight brevet.
“Everything is funnier in the dark,” he says. “At 2am, what keeps you going are the ridiculous things people say and dreaming about your next snack.”
Leaving at 9pm on a Saturday night, this 200k, sent riders out onto quiet roads and brought them back in around 5am, just in time for breakfast. Of the 14 randonneurs who participated, three were prepping for this week’s 1000k event, and a few were tuning up for the granddaddy of them all, Paris-Brest-Paris.
Today, we are very proud to say that Brad (bRad) finished the Trans Am Bike Race in 25 days 10 hours 31 minutes. 4406 miles. Astoria Oregon to Yorktown Virginia. Average miles, 176 per day. See previous reports on his progress here, here, here and here.
This is/was the ride of a lifetime, and Brad managed it with zero mechanicals and not one flat. He pushed through all the fatigue, kept his daily mileage up, and crushed it.
We’ll follow up with a full trip report and some insight from Brad into what it takes to race across the continent, but for today we’ll just say that we are so, so proud and happy for him.
Kentucky offered up climb after climb after climb. And dogs. Lots of chasing dogs. But that’s America, right? On into Virginia he rode, until today, in sight of Yorktown, and the finish. Stay tuned for the dramatic conclusion, and in the meantime, enjoy some photos from the road.
When last we checked Brad’s progress in the Trans Am Bike Race, he was cruising through the Rockies. Over the last few days, he’s really put the pedal down (pun intended) and crossed off all of Kansas and most of Missouri. He’ll cross the southern tip of Illinois and then head into Kentucky over the next few days. If he didn’t still have so far to go, we’d say he’s on the run in to the finish. And while he’s confessed to being tired, he’s still covering 150-200 miles a day, sometimes riding at after dark to avoid the mid-day heat.
As always, he sends back great photos, especially for a guy literally racing across the country.
We had a number lunatics friends at the Green Mountain Double Century this weekend, including our own Jake Bridge, and close friends of Seven Matt Roy and John Bayley. This annual event is one of the great challenges on the New England ride calendar, the brainchild of Sandy Whittlesey. It’s the big brother of the hyper popular Deerfield Dirt Road Randonee, held each August on some of the same dirt roads.
Jake, Matt and John all finished this year, if only to prove they are better people than the rest of us.
Here is Jake’s report:
Jake’s Rolling Self-Portrait
The most brutal day on the bike turned out to also be incredibly pleasant, laid back, at times even relaxing. The route was 210 miles, over 20,000 feet of climbing, and mostly dirt roads. Even starting at 4am, everyone knew there was no hope of meeting any reasonable deadline. We weren’t making it back for dinner. We weren’t making it back before dark. Maybe, we thought erroneously, we’d make it back by midnight. It would be foolhardy to crush any particular hill, with so many yet to come. With no deadlines, no KOM’s, no town line sprints, we settled in to enjoy the company, the roads, and a beautiful day in Vermont’s Green Mountains. We stopped for lunch at a restaurant, sipping tea and lemonade and swapping stories while waiting for sandwiches and french fries.
Don’t get me wrong: it was plenty brutal, full of long monstrous climbs. Shortly after dark, the cue sheet warned, “terrible climb”, and we climbed, terribly, 1000 feet in the next two miles. Headlights told us where the edge of the road was. Taillights up ahead told us where the top of the climb wasn’t. The early part of the day had been marked by expansive technicolor views and jovial conversation. By the end the views had shrunk to illuminated patches of gravel and the conversations were mostly internal.
And, then, somehow, it was flat again. A few easy miles along the green river, frogs hopping out of headlight beams, and we were back where we started.
You might have read, last week, about Matt Roy’s last attempt at the GMDC. Spoiler alert: it ended in the ER. This year went a bit better for Matt.
He says:
Turned out to be a good day after all. It was a last-minute decision to toe the line with the rest of the GMDC crew but I had been staring at the course profile above my desk for over a year now, pinpointing the exact spot where my hand came off the bars and I flew into the gutter. It meant that I would be tackling the course without a support car and without a team by my side but it also meant I could ride without pressure or expectations (my own, more than any one else’s). Happy with how the day went.
Here are some of Matt’s photos, which suggest, it was a good day (and night) for riding 210 miles.
