Race Report: 2014 National 24-Hour Challenge

"To be a real challenge, the outcome had to be uncertain."

-Jan Heine

I knew this would be a tough one.  The National 24-Hour Challenge is a race with pedigree.  It's been held in Middleville, Michigan on the same weekend every year since 1983, and in that time, it's attracted a who's who of ultracyclists.  Over the years, the race has grown to more than 300 racers, which is enormous for a 24-hour cycling event.  By way of comparison, Bike Sebring was less than half the size, and that field was dominated by 12-hour and 6-hour racers.  In N24HC, everyone was signed up for the whole caboodle.

In a field that size, it's inevitable that some talented riders toe the line, and this year was no exception.   I knew that Collin Johnson, the 2x defending high-mileage rider, would be back again; he'd racked up 470+ miles at least once in this event and had set numerous ultracycling course records over the last few years.  I also knew that Scott Luikart would be back; he'd won N24HC in 2011 with 472 miles, and also had won the 24-hour division of the 6-12-24 Hour Time Trial Championships last fall.  Even random people I met before the ride seemed inordinately athletic.  One guy was unpacking a couple of top-end BMC race bikes in front of my hotel; he said he was a triathlete who didn't expect great things, but his Kona shirt suggested otherwise, and a quick Google search confirmed that he'd ripped off 9:20 Ironman races several times in recent years.  That kind of athletic ability and drive didn't suggest he'd go quietly into the night.  And who knew who else might show up?  It looked to be a rough neighborhood.

Finally, N24HC presented what was, for me, a novel challenge: a draft-legal race.  Sure, I'd ridden plenty in pacelines and pelotons over the years, but not once had I done so in a competitive situation.  Draft-legal bike races involve a host of tactics that never come into play in a triathlon: when to take it easy, when to make a break, where to position oneself in the group, when to chase breakaways, and so forth.  I'd be making all of that up as I went along.

The good news was that, for the first time in years, I was heading into the race feeling like I'd prepared consistently and properly.  Since I cranked things up in December after my fall layoff, I'd trained with intensity and dedication: 5-6 days a week of quality bike work, including, most weeks, 4 days of interval work on the trainer.   I'd also put in the long rides: after racing 24 Hours of Sebring in February, I'd completed 200k, 300k, 400k, and 600k brevets with the D.C. Randonneurs, the last of which I rode straight through at an aggressive pace.  I felt as strong on the bike as I'd ever been, so I arrived at N24HC determined to push myself to see what I could do.  I'd been ecstatic with a 441-mile day at Sebring, my first 24-hour TT and a non-drafting event.  N24HC was somewhat hillier and warmer, but I hoped that with more miles under my belt I could clear the 450-mile threshold and maybe surprise some of the pre-race favorites, who doubtless would be watching each other more than me.  (Which is their loss, really, because I have nice legs.)

Given that the 24-hour racing thing is still very new to me, my only resolve is never to repeat a mistake if I can help it.  To that end, after Sebring, I resolved several things.

1. Plan to be cold during the night, no matter the forecast; when you're exhausted, your body doesn't act like it should.  This time, I brought my Assos thermal vest and arm warmers despite the fact that temps were supposed to remain in the mid-50s.
2. Get the saddle right.  I love my Cobb saddle for anything up to Ironman distance, but at Sebring, I could barely sit down for the last six hours.  Solution: put a Selle Anatomica Titanico X on my tri bike, just like on my randonneuring rig.  These saddles are all over the place on the ultracycling circuit, and at this point it's unclear to me why anyone ever rides anything else.  They're rapidly taking over my bike stable.
3. Don't go so hard that I can't eat real food.  It happened at Sebring because I had brake rub issues without realizing it, and my stomach never quite recovered.
4. Plan to want a lot of salty food.  Arrange to have hot soup for later in the day.
5. Embrace the fact that there is no such thing as too much, or too many different kinds, of chamois cream. 

Pre-race

Middleville Michigan is a quaint midwestern town in the middle of nowhere, but with a lot of greenery -- just the place to hold an event where cyclists ride all night.  My trusty crew and I made our camp at the Holiday Inn Express, where there were exactly two kinds of customers that weekend: (1) ultracyclists, and (2) people who drove these things:

It's a Franklin!  (So I was told)

Gorgeous cars.

Redefining classic.

If Tri Team Z had a Franklin, this would be it.

See how the rear-view mirrors are mounted?

Yep, they're strapped to the spare tires.

Never pass up an opportunity to mug for the camera in neon shoes.

Then there was this guy, who went with 2 $10k BMC race bikes.  He's probably slow.

We trekked over to the middle school where the race would be hosted the next morning, and the scene was like a Woodstock of ultracyclists pitching up tents all over the place.

A beautiful evening in Michigan.

After getting checked in, we huddled at Applebee's to discuss tactics.  My straightforward request to "give me what I need before I know I need it" was met with bemusement; it's a wonder that they didn't hand me a therapist's phone number at any point during the race.

On race morning, as is often the case before big competitions, I was sufficiently nervous that I had trouble eating much.  There was a time in my early triathlon days where I'd literally dry heave before every event. Things aren't quite that bad anymore, but the fact is that 24-hour races are flat-out intimidating endeavors.  In Sebring, the only one I'd done to date, I wound up shivering all night in the damp 40-degree Florida air, as I was too exhausted to generate any body heat; I desperately hoped not to face another round of that misery. But, even on the best of days, the time and distances involved are too large to wrap my head around.  I do my best to think of it as just another long ride, but my subconscious knows otherwise, and it seemed to be spending the morning spinning furiously while I stared into space.

We took some team photos for prosperity and/or for Missing Persons posters that may be need later in the day.

The team: Bill, Our Lady of Suffering, Amy, and Joyce.

Barry Benson, a fellow DC Randonneur, had graciously invited my crew to spend the day under his canopy, which would prove to be invaluable.

Barry Benson in hi-viz jersey.

Dad and Amy, feeling less nervous than I did.

And then it was time to go.  I sauntered up to the line and began giving people the evil eye, until I realized there was something different about them.  Something brighter.  Something... that would enable the race officials to tell who the heck they were as they made progress throughout the day.  Helmet stickers! Dammit, I had no idea where I'd put my bag, and the race was about to start.  Somehow, though, Amy was standing right there with precisely the packet I needed.   The first sign of a good crew member!

I actually don't mind when people label me.  Note the rider trying not to laugh.

The starting line was a nervous but friendly (and Fredly) scene; I was the only guy I saw with a disc wheel, and the less said about my mirrored visor, the better.  There were several teams of athletic-looking roadies. I knew Collin, last year's champ, was sporting number 2 (number 1 was last year's top female), and I was surprised to see him wearing a Camelbak.  I later found that he preferred to ride long first loop (125 miles) self-supported, so that his crew could have a leisurely morning.  Apparently he's a nicer person than I am, or maybe just less terrified of the whole thing.

Freds looking nonchalant.

"Hey, I can see my knee socks in your visor!"

"When I say 'go,' head that way until tomorrow morning."

Loop 1 ("We can have lots of fun")

From reading race reports from years past, I knew the front pack would set off quickly, but that there would likely be a break before long in which the eventual winners would ride off the front.  My strategy was just to stay in touch with those guys; in Sebring, due to mechanical issues, I'd lost 5 miles in the first hour and had never seen the front of the race again.

The first loop was a 124-miler (200k) through rural Michigan.  It could fairly be described as lightly rolling hills; nothing too much to worry about climbing-wise, but enough change of pace that it didn't turn into a grind.  Crews could meet their riders at the three designated checkpoints along the way, where our bibs also would be punched to mark our progress.

The opening miles, through the town of Middletown, were a lovely, crisp spin in a peloton of 30-40 riders.  I hung out near the front taking pulls when it was my turn, and otherwise just tried to relax.  I found to my pleasant surprise that my longtime riding buddy Max had latched onto the front group; he'd had knee surgery this spring and wasn't expecting great things on the day, but I was happy to see that he was pushing the pedals from the get-go.

Through the first 20 miles, things went smoothly, if quickly; we were averaging more than 22 mph, which can be a little bit hairy in a large group of riders who don't know the course.  That challenge suddenly became apparent when I was sitting second wheel as we bombed down a country road.  Suddenly, the lead rider shouted "right turn!" and dove into it; apparently he'd seen the yellow arrows on the ground very late.  I thought for a split second about trying to decelerate in time to make the turn, but I realized that I'd very likely cause a massive pile-up by doing so.  With a groan I rolled past the turn as every rider behind me had time to make it, and turned around to climb back up the hill to get back on course.  By the time I got going the right way again, the peloton was a good 100 yards in the distance and moving fast, which forced me to take off after them at full speed in order to avoid getting left behind.  I caught back up after a mile or two, having worked quite a bit harder than I wanted to, but as I made my way back up toward the front, one guy thanked me for not prompting carbon carnage by trying to make the turn.  I'm a regular humanitarian, I am.

The peloton rolling into the first aid station.

Lookin' purdy.

The peloton rolled with startling speed through the first aid station at mile 34; I got my bib punched and paused only long enough to exchange bottles with the crew, but already the front riders were 1/4 mile down the road when I pulled out.  Desperate to avoid getting dropped, I surged back to the front, but it wasn't necessary; soon enough, the peloton was back up to its previous size of 30-40 riders.

This wasn't how I'd imagined things going.  In prior years, the front few riders had broken away early, but this year, there was a huge pack just sticking around.  In some ways it was helpful, because the large group made it easier to make good time.  In other ways, though, it was annoying as hell.  I'd estimate that, of the 40-odd riders in the group, only five had any interest in pulling.  I'd take a turn at the front for a mile or so, flick the next rider through, and he and several behind him would immediately pull off and drift to the back as well.  To their credit, Collin and Scott, the two pre-race favorites, were among those willing to put in some work.  But it was increasingly galling that self-evidently strong riders would glom onto our wheels without making any effort to do their part.  Eventually I got sick of sacrificing myself without reciprocation, so I planted myself toward the back of the pack and drifted along in the slipstream, trying to figure out how to make something happen in the race.

Checkpoint 2: Preparing for takeoff.

All systems go.

My chance came at the second checkpoint, around mile 70, and I made my move.  Just before that point, Scott and Collin had dropped off the pace for a bio break, and I rolled through the checkpoint in first place.  I quickly grabbed two new bottles from my crew, then sprinted back out onto the course, blowing by a couple of riders who were waiting for the peloton to regroup.  I then TT'd the next five miles all-out, looking back to confirm that no one was following me.  It looked like I'd gotten away, and I had the pace car all to myself.  Liberty!!!

In some ways, I think this move defined my race.  I reasoned that one of my only advantages over Scott and Collin was that neither of them knew anything about me, and neither of them likely thought I'd be around very long.  Based on that anonymity, I hoped that they'd continue to roll along with the peloton, and that maybe they wouldn't notice anyone had broken away until I'd built up a lead of several miles.  I figured that, if I could build up enough of a lead, it might wind up sticking; I was confident in my ability to ride solo at a good pace all day and night, and these ultra races are largely mental.  I wanted to give Scott and Collin every opportunity to write the day off, or to start mentally racing for second place.

For a long while, things went great; I was flying down rolling country roads speckled with sunshine streaming through the canopy of leaves, unencumbered by wheel-suckers, and feeding off the endorphin rush of putting power to the pedals and feeling like I had bottomless strength.  I stole glimpses behind me on occasion, but by all appearances, I'd snuck away.  Best of all, the pace car was saving me the trouble of navigating through the unfamiliar terrain, and the driver was motivating me with thumbs-ups every now and then.  My average speed had crept up from 22.8 at the start of my breakaway to over 23 mph.

I tore into checkpoint 3 at mile 96 with no one in sight behind me, got my number punched, and looked around for my crew.  Hmm -- not good.  They were always right at the front waiting for me, but not this time.  I really needed new bottles, but things were what they were, so I began to accelerate back out onto the main road.  Just as I did, I glimpsed them in an adjoining parking lot carrying the cooler toward the checkpoint; apparently I'd beaten them there! I was flattered, but also slightly panicked that I'd be chased down, so I quickly grabbed some supplies, and when my mom asked (incredulously) if I was in the lead, I merely pointed toward the checkpoint entrance, where a stream of riders was then barreling in.  (Oy vey.) But I wasn't going to make it easy for them.  I ripped back out onto the course and set sail for the end of the first loop.

Century split: 4 hours and 20 minutes (23 mph) (PR).

Ironman split: 4 hours and 51 minutes (23.1 mph) (PR)

The final 28 miles were a blur of effort and emotional swings.  Sometimes it would look like I'd gotten away from the chasers; other times, on long straightaways, I could swear I saw a speck in the distance that could only mean bad news.  I looked for motivation wherever I could, and found it in the idea that I was having to fight off a chase group could work together to run me down.  Indignation is a powerful thing.

First one back!  Feelin' both punchy and punched, in more ways than one.

I pulled into the final checkpoint at the end of the daytime loop -- mile 124 -- by myself, and prepared to start the 24-mile short loops that I'd traverse until dark.  Unfortunately, as I was about to get my number punched, I looked back and there, just behind me, were Collin and Scott, the very people I'd hoped wouldn't track my breakaway.  So busted.

200k (125-mile) split: 5 hours and 25 minutes (23 mph) (PR)

This wasn't good.  I'd worked tremendously hard over the last 50 miles of solo riding, and all I'd really managed to achieve was parity with the pre-race favorites, who'd been matching my pace but doing so by trading off pulls.  So much for my clever move.

Has anyone seen my matches?

I was in a hole and there was a long day ahead.  As we refueled, I proposed that the three of us work together for awhile instead of beating each other up, and they quickly agreed.  We set off on the 24-mile loops with no one else in sight.

Loop 2 ("There's so much we can do!")

The second loop was a 24-miler that we'd ride until 8:00 pm, halfway through the race.  In my head I'd imagined that, with three of us working together and well out of sight of the rest of the field, things would be a little calmer.  I was both right and wrong.  I was right in the sense that the three of us worked very well together, taking honest 2-mile pulls, no one shirking his duties, and we made very good progress.  I was wrong in the sense that, holy crap, Scott and Collin ride like locomotives.  On certain hills it was everything I could do not to get blown off the back of the train. We stormed through the first loop of rolling hills just under 23 mph.

Game face on!  Behind me, Collin Johnson.

When heading out on the second short loop, Scott and I agreed that we were riding a little hot; we didn't want to go so hard during the daytime that the (12 hours, dear God, of) nighttime riding would only involve drifting down the road.  So, we set out to be more cautious, and finished the second 24-mile loop at the same damn ridiculous speed we'd ridden the first one.  Oh well.

Amy, probably telling me to get my shit together.

And so it continued.  At the end of each lap I'd be virtually certain I'd wind up in a ditch if we didn't back of the pace, but it never died down much.

Pulling the train.  With Collin Johnson and Scott Luikart.

Clinging on for dear life.  With Collin Johnson and Scott Luikart.

300k (188-mile) split: 8 hours and 15 minutes (22.8 mph) (PR)

200 mile split: 8 hours and 48 minutes (22.7 mph) (PR) 

400k (250-mile) split: 11 hours (22.7 mph) (PR)

Altogether more reasonable than how we were spending the day.

By the time the daytime loops closed on us around 7:50 pm, our speed had fallen only 1/2 mph, down to 22.4 mph, and we'd covered a ridiculous 268 miles.  To put that in perspective, at Sebring 24-Hour in February, I'd covered 245 miles in that time.  In fact, at the Saratoga 12-hour TT in 2012, I broke the existing course record with 256 miles -- 12 fewer -- and that race ended after 12 hours.  This one was just getting started.

Finishing the daytime loops with Collin (L), Scott (far R), and a mystery man.

Unfortunately, I started falling apart in rather disastrous fashion on the final 24-mile loop.  My new leather saddle had stretched so much that I was riding almost an inch lower than I should have been, which prevented me from recruiting leg muscles properly.  I had the wrench to re-tension it, but I couldn't use it without getting dropped, which would have been game over.  And, due to what I later realized was my grabbing a wrong bottle from the crew, I was incredibly nauseated and dehydrated, to the point where I felt like I was wobbling down the road.  Note: I know now what happens when I accidentally drink 1,000 calories of sludge in an hour instead of water, and I have no desire to repeat it.

The three of us agreed to take a bit longer at the checkpoint before setting out on the nighttime loops; we needed to get our bikes set up for the night.  This brief rest was pretty much my only hope of staying with them, but almost as soon as I got the tool to fix my saddle, they were shooting off back down the road.  I guess we'd had different ideas of what "a bit longer" meant, but in truth I was relieved to see the back of them.  I'd ridden harder in 12 hours than I thought possible, and I knew there there was no way I could keep up any longer.  Their taking off was doing me a favor, because I took a few needed minutes to down a couple of bottles of water, re-apply chamois cream, drink some hot soup chased with Red Bull, and eat as many Fritos as I could stomach.  Living the dream!

Dad and Amy preparing my nighttime spread.

Amy, ready to go with my nighttime gear.  Perfect!  What a crew.

Actually, no dream.  I desperately wanted to call it a day and go back to the hotel, crawl into a warm bed, and watch World Cup games.  I was a total wreck; I reflected that my 50-mile breakaway stunt had been a serious mistake, and I was sorely tempted to say, "Hey, I rode 268 miles in 12 hours -- my day is done."  I knew intellectually that a very dark moment would come sometime during the race, but knowing that fact doesn't really help you cope with it when it happens.  It's always possible to rationalize that, "Well, I knew it would be tough, but I couldn't have anticipated going this hard or this fast, so my previous resolve to keep going wasn't really very informed."  But there I was, in rural Michigan, with parents and a gf who'd traveled across the country to stand on the side of the road for me for 24 hours; I couldn't imagine the thought of telling them that I was quitting after 12 hours just because a bike race that lasts all day and night was tougher than I'd anticipated.

And so, with a distinct feeling that nothing good would come of this, I decided to roll the bike around the 7.3-mile short loops a couple of times to see whether I could salvage anything out of this pacing debacle. The last thing I wanted to do was be on my bike shivering at 16 mph all night, which is what had happened at Sebring.

Loop 3 ("It's just you and me!")

The 7.6-mile nighttime loop is basically a flat drag-race around a rectangular course.  There's one lovely, cruising downhill and chippy uphill on each loop, which actually is great in terms of providing some variety.  Otherwise, with quiet roads, good pavement, and no navigational requirements, it's just about perfect for nighttime cruising.

One challenge that I recognized from Sebring is that, when you see your crew every 7 miles, it's very easy to stop and chat with friendly faces often, and that's deadly to a fast pace.  The beginning of each loop is a small battle of will with one's self to roll out into the night once again, away from the friendly embrace of loved ones and hot soup.  But, as much as seeing my crew frequently represented a challenge, in a greater sense it was the main thing that kept me going.  When you're on your bike for an unreasonably long time, the only way to stay sane is to find things to look forward to in the near term, be it a swooping section of road, a downhill where you can relax, or an amusing mailbox shaped like a manatee.  For me, the biggest of these things is that I looked forward to seeing Amy and my parents; each completed lap met with their cheers and constituted a small victory.

In the first several of overnight loops, from 8:00 until sundown around 9:30, I was content merely to make steady progress around the course, and to try to rejuvenate myself with the savory delights my crew handed me.

Some people bring knives to a gunfight.  I bring Pringles.

The best of these unexpected treats was an entire Pringles can full of crumbled Pringles and Fritos.  It fit wonderfully into my downtube bottle cage, and it was more delicious than I can convey with words.  That's definitely a trick I'll repeat in future events.  The bottles of hot chicken broth also were divine.

The Michigan sun sets on N24HC.  But the fun starts after dark!

Red sky at night, a cyclist's delight.

Around 9:30, as the sun was setting, I was getting a little drowsy.  Riding with a headlight can have a mesmerizing effect, and after a long day in the sun, I was having trouble focusing.  Two things brought me around: a quick rest stop in which I had a bottle of Coke *and* a Red Bull, and firing up my new toy for this event, a Scosche Boombottle.

The Boombottle.  Badabing, baby!

N24HC had a "no headphones" rule, which was sensible in light of the pack riding.  (Although some riders ignored this rule and used headphones and radios to communicate with their crews throughout the event.) For me, though, music is pretty key for getting into a flow state on extremely long rides, and I don't think I'm the only one; the top RAAM guys almost uniformly have massive speaker system strapped to their follow vehicles.  Jure Robic, the great RAAM champion, was known to blast Slovenian military marches for days on end.  (Oh, his poor crew.)

So, I went with a non-headphone music solution -- the Boombottle -- which I pre-cleared with the race organizers.  It's pretty cool, a bluetooth speaker that fits into a bottle cage.  Its volume isn't massive, and it can be hard to hear when you're riding fast if it's not near your head, but putting it in my "between the aerobars" cage was perfect.  It more than exceeded its 10 hours of predicted battery life.  I'd just hit the pause button whenever I was riding near anyone for more than a moment.  Otherwise, I got some whoops from people I passed at 3:00 a.m. while channeling Bon Jovi.  And hey, if nothing else, it let people know I was coming.

Amazingly, only an hour or two after I'd been at my lowest point and considering whether to continue the race, I found myself at my highest point, feeling great and just flying down the road as I sang along to whatever embarrassing thing was coming out of my speaker at the moment.  I held 21-22 mph for a couple of hours straight, which was incredible given the state I'd been in not long before, and I felt invincible.  Of course, I knew that that high, too, would pass.  That's the thing about ultracycling: no matter how good or bad you feel, that'll change.  You just have to ride things out, as impossible as that task may seem in the moment.

600k (375-mile) split: 17 hours and 50 minutes (21 mph) (PR)

I'm happy to report that I rode strongly throughout the night.  I didn't see much of Collin or Scott, but I played a solid 10-hour game of "catch the rabbit" with the headlights in the distance ahead, often overtaking them with surprising speed.  Even at 2:00-3:00 a.m., the traditional witching hour when any trace of fun drains from the event, I felt capable of pushing hard; there was no "Sebring drift" going on here, and my morale was good.  I guess my inevitable black period had occurred earlier in the evening.

From 3:00 a.m. until dawn around 6:00, the number of riders on the road diminished substantially, but when the morning rays broke in the east, suddenly the crowds came back out to play.  It was a glorious morning, and the last two hours felt positively easy.  Making it through the night was the mental challenge; after that, it was just a matter of finishing it out.

The glorious morning hours.

I started my last lap at 7:25 a.m.; only partial laps counted, and given that my best lap times were around 20 minutes, I knew that getting two more before 8:00 was impossible, but one more was a gimme.  I cruised it as a victory lap, soft-pedaling and chatting with fellow riders about the day.  It was a reward for a very long day's work, and I drank it up.

Finish line in sight!

Touchdown!

It's all done, but for the sleeping.

Amy, sensibly hesitant to touch me.  She learns quickly.

Concluding thoughts

I finished at 7:50 a.m., 23 hours and 50 minutes after I'd started, with a total distance of 488 miles (20.5 mph average).  My goal had been 450 miles; what a day!  The tally was good for 1st place in the age group by 60 miles or so, and 3rd overall.  Collin broke the old course record with 503 miles, and Scott smashed it with 511.  (Good grief.)

I took a quick rinse the public showers, then headed to the awards ceremony, which turned out to be an endurance test in of itself.  The announcers were in great cheer, and they'd put together a very nice raffle. The trouble was that the raffle took fully 30 minutes to complete, and the riders had long lost any ability to stay conscious.  I felt especially sorry for my crew, as they'd been up all night on my behalf and I'm sure were simply hoping to get to bed as soon as they could.

Can you identify the riders in this picture?

Clearly the best part of the race.

Gold medal, M35-39.

Left: Scott Luikart, the new course record holder.

Me with Collin, with whom I'd ridden much of the day.

On the whole, I couldn't be happier with how this race went.  I successfully fought through the black period I encountered around 12 hours in, which is much more difficult to do in the moment than it sounds in the abstract.  I don't think I could have done a damned thing more to keep up with Scott and Collin on the day.  It's possible -- ok, it's almost certain -- that I screwed up with my 50-mile solo effort on the first loop.  Maybe without torching myself that way I'd have had more to give later on, but I don't really regret it; it was fun to make a move and see what happened.  I'm still very new to these 24-hour events, and this was my first draft-legal race, so I have a lot of learning to do yet, both about myself and about race strategy.  If I were going to make a mistake, I'd have wanted to make it in the direction of riding too aggressively, so I'm at peace with it.

And, frankly, it didn't hurt me all that badly.  I rode 268 miles in the first 12 hours and 220 miles in the second 12 hours.  That's a big dropoff in pace, but I don't think there's any such thing as even-splitting or negative-splitting a 24-hour race.  Taking a global view, that's still a 350k in 12 hours, which is very solid.

From this point, I think my main goal has to be to continue to work on my wattage.  My endurance is okay, and I'm figuring out the nutritional and mental aspects of the race, but the fact is that the people I'm competing with are often more powerful than I am.  I'm usually more aerodynamic than they are, which is how I'm able to compete, but I think I'm still leaving a lot of time on the table.  It's only in the last few months that I've really started to focus exclusively on my power output, and I'm making steady progress.  There's a lot more to do, but life wouldn't be any fun if there weren't.

Next up: a return to the Saratoga 12/24 in July, which I last raced in 2012.  I'll most likely be taking on the 12-hour event there, although it's possible I'll jump into the 24 at the last minute.  Who knows? Maybe I can even win one of these things...

Warrenton 600k Ride Report: Riding through the night is hard, Barbie.

There's only one thing that I like, and that is whistling in the dark.

This ultracycling experience started with a decision I wish I hadn't faced.  The DC Randonneurs' only 600k ride of the year started on a Saturday at 4:00 a.m.  I needed to ride it, both to complete my first official Super Randonneur series (completion of official 200k, 300k, 400k, and 600k brevets in a calendar year), and to qualify me for Paris-Brest-Paris in summer 2015 if I choose to do it.  PBP is the grand-daddy of the 1200ks in the world, a 750-mile rolling party of 5,000 cyclists; like the World Cup, it's held only once every four years.  I'm not sure whether I'll do it next summer, but I wanted to have the chance if I so elected.

The problem was, I'd also committed to attending a wedding the same weekend as the 600k.  It started at 11:00 a.m. on Sunday, i.e., 31 hours after the start of the 600k.  Considering that the average time to finish a 600k in this region is probably in the range of 35 hours, I really only had one way to make everything happen: treat the 600k like a race, and hammer it out quickly enough to get a quick nap before driving home and getting dressed for the wedding.

The plan was audacious, risky, and probably stupid; it left almost no margin for error or misfortune.  But I didn't want to decline a wedding invitation for a bike ride, and I thought a hard effort would be a helpful dress rehearsal for the National 24-Hour Challenge I'll be racing in June.

The good news is it went reasonably well: I finished in the mid-25-hour range, i.e., at about 5:30 a.m. on Sunday.  But there was a lot of very bad news along the way.  Since I was trying to move as fast as possible, I have few pictures and no video; indeed, my impression of the whole affair is a random set of fever dream-like experiential distillations of a mind long gone delirious.  Therefore, in lieu of the traditional narrative ride report, which I'm sure many others will offer, I'll recount some key impressions that have stuck with me.

NEW EQUIPMENT

After spending so long this spring riding in cold weather, I'd resolved never to be caught out again on the clothing front.  I wanted a vest -- when paired with arm warmers, it's as good as a jacket, but the lack of sleeves extends the usable temperature range by a huge margin -- but a warm one, and one with pockets.  There are very few of those out there, but the Assos iG.falkenZahn is one, and it's arguably my new favorite bit of ultracycling kit:

Like all Assos stuff, it's extremely form-fitting; a Medium is very snug on me, at 6'0" and 165ish pounds.  The inside is fleece-lined for warmth, but the back ventilates extremely well.  When combined with good arm warmers, I found it very comfortable from the mid-40s through the mid-60s, that is, all the way across the very difficult range between winter and summer wardrobes that characterizes brevets on the East Coast.  Best of all, it has three highly functional pockets, plus a smaller zippered pocket, which means there's no longer a need to wrestle clothing out of the way in order to access jersey pockets.  Highly recommended (and cheaper on sale).

The second piece of new gear was a very large seat bag, the Revelate "Pika".

I'd ridden brevets and other ultracycling events with a "trunk bag" before, and until now I'd used the Arkel Tailrider, an extremely popular choice with the randonneuring set.  My quibbles with it are twofold.  First, the mounting hardware only works on traditional round seat posts,  which makes it useless for a tri bike like I was using on Saturday.  Second, and more important, the Tailrider's many laudable attributes come with the significant downside that it alters the bike's handling.  Specifically, when climbing out of the saddle, the weight swinging left to right makes it feel like the bike is about to be flung to the ground by a malevolent deity.  The Arkel is actually better than most in that regard but I found the Pika to be even better despite its far less elegant appearance.  It expands dramatically when needed -- the back flap unrolls until it looks almost indecent:

This Pika is excited for the ride.

PRE-RIDE

My models suggest that dropping your ass would be highly efficient.

Just before my alarm went off, I had a dream in which I was sitting in the office of Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman.  I don't know why; I'm not an economist, and I've never met him, though I do read his NYT columns regularly.  My trepidation at his inexplicable meeting request dissipated when he revealed that he's actually an avid randonneur who that very afternoon was planning to ride from New Jersey to Vermont.

I have no idea what kind of nerd this makes me, but I will say that I was far happier chatting with Krugman about randonneuring than I was when my alarm went off at 3:00 a.m., only a few hours after I'd crawled into bed.  Reality makes me cranky.

REFLECTIONS ON THE DAYTIME LOOP

Start: 4:00 a.m.
Finish: 6:30 p.m.
Distance: 245 miles
Time: 14 hours and 30 minutes
Average speed (including all stops): 17 mph

Winning.  My first missed turn occurred 50 yards into the ride.  It was the first turn.  I was winning in the Charlie Sheen sense.

The aliens have landed.  I've often wondered what a peloton of randonneurs at night would look like to a random passerby.  I found out 20 miles in.  I'd missed another turn around mile ten (two points make a trend, you could say), which sent me a couple of miles off course.   A few miles after that, I spied on the dark horizon what looked like an inexplicable traffic jam in the middle of nowhere, a giant glowing red mass drifting silently in the night.  As I approached, the mass differentiated into clusters of individual glowing dots, which only at the last moment revealed spectral riders illuminated by the front lights of the riders behind them.  It was a little spooky.

An inscrutable portent.  I saw three turtles crossing the road today.  Three!  In my previous years of cycling, I've seen a total of zero.  Was it an omen, and, if so, of what?  Hopefully not my progress.

My precioussssss.  I was saved by the kindness of strangers.  At mile 125, Bill Beck, the ride coordinator, who had been taking pictures, was waiting for me with a gift: my control card, which apparently had fallen out of my pocket at the first control.  Another randonneur had found it and given it to Bill, who'd driven up the road to find me.  For those unfamiliar with this sport, one of the clearest rules is that you must get your control card initialed at various points along the way; if you don't, it's as if your ride didn't happen.  I would probably have been forced to drop out after 125 miles if not for sheer good karma and my apparent failure to alienate every other randonneur that day by dressing like I was from the planet TriDork.  In fact, if Bill hadn't been along taking pictures, I would have been forced to ride despondently back to the start -- about 110 miles away.

The light!  It burns!  The day was utterly, completely perfect.  It feels churlish to complain about the sun on a 70-degree day, particularly after the winter we've had, but the truth is that, riding through open plains for hours on end in the middle of the day, I was baked and suffering.  Having ridden 170 miles already that day might have contributed to that sensation.

The new food pyramid.  The second-lowest point of my ride occurred around mile 175, near 2:30 pm -- that is, 10.5 hours into the ride.  I was getting mentally fuzzy and my legs suddenly had nothing in them.   (This is somewhat expected; it's near the end of the 300k mark, and I'd had no real food to eat all day.)  Drifting into Louisa on fumes, I parked myself outside a Shell station and consumed, on the spot, everything in the store that appealed to me.  Disturbingly, that consisted of 2 Little Debbies Fudge Rounds, a large bag of salted mixed nuts, a large pack of Skittles, a 20-ounce bottle of Coke, and a 32-ounce bottle of V8 juice.  For dessert, I had a gel, a mental image of a disapproving Michelle Obama, and acid reflux.

Echoes of the past.   Riding around Culpeper, I realized I'd seen certain places before in rides years ago, back in my early days with Team Z.  I'd encounter random decrepit buildings and would suddenly be certain I'd previously viewed them from another direction.  And then, just as suddenly, my mind would associate with utterly insignificant remarks made by people I haven't seen in years as we were riding by those places.  For example, I saw a country store and immediately recalled that, while standing outside it in 2008, I'd remarked to another rider that there appeared to be something wrong with the valve stem on her wheel.  It's incredible what random things are stored in one's mind.  Ultracycling must have certain elements in common with regression therapy.  Random places imbued with memories.

James Madison did not believe in progress.  Here's my impression of the James Madison Highway, which the route seemed to cross about ten times before I lost track.

Shortly after leaving that traffic-laden artery behind for the final time, I encountered the world's longest train, which was moving at the speed of government.

Randonneuring is slow.  I know this intellectually and experientially, but it always surprises me.  I think it's common for competitive cyclists and triathletes to look at the average speeds for a randonneuring ride -- meeting time cut-offs usually requires averaging around 10 mph -- and imagine that it's easy.  In fact, though, it's incredibly difficult to make good time in these events.  The routes are almost universally challenging, and they are entirely unsupported, which means no getting bottles from volunteers or SAG drivers.  Quite the opposite, they require you to stop periodically at control points whether you need to or not, and the clock keeps running at every stop light and stop sign.  At some point you develop an irresistible craving for actual, hot food.  You're often required to ride at night.  And, finally, due to brevets' length and unsupported nature, you're compelled to laden your bike with pounds of clothes, lights, nutrition, and other supplies.  The result is moving, shall we say, deliberately.

Yesterday I was on my time trial bike, wearing an aero helmet, and trying to make good time wherever I could; the result was a 17 mph average for the first 245 miles (400k), which meant I finished in around 14 hours and 30 minutes.  That is quick by randonneuring standards -- previously, my stand-alone 400k times had been in the 18- to 20-hour range -- but compared to race splits, it's very pedestrian.  Somehow, in randonneuring events, nothing moves quickly even when you want it to.

My kingdom for a burrito.  The end of the first loop, at mile 242, brought us back to the host hotel, where most people would sleep for a few hours before heading out at dawn on Sunday morning to tackle the last 135 miles.  I hit it at about 6:30 p.m. on Saturday and had a full night of riding ahead of me.  For this, I'd devised a secret weapon: stashing the world's largest Chipotle burrito in my hotel room's refrigerator.  As I sat there scarfing it down, feeling every inch the exhausted biohazard, I tried to pretend I didn't have ten hours of nighttime riding ahead of me; it felt inconceivable.

REFLECTIONS ON THE NIGHT TIME LOOP

Start: 6:45 p.m.
Finish: 5:40 a.m.
Time: 10 hours, 55 minutes
Distance: 135 miles
Average speed: 12.4 mph (ugh)

Some roads are better than others at night.  In my experience, the nighttime portion of brevets can either be meditative and beautiful, or stressful as hell -- and not much in between.  In last year's 600k, I spent the overnight portion barreling along a relatively flat, straight country road with great pavement, bright lines on the side of the road, no traffic, and a sea of stars overhead.  It came as a welcome respite from the searing heat of the summer sun, and I later thought if it as the reward for a hard day's work.

This route was different.  Many of the roads around Frederick were distinctly busy on a Saturday night, even though they seemed rural.  When roads were sufficiently remote to avoid the traffic problem, they were so remote that they were narrow, winding, sketchy affairs through a dense canopy of trees that blocked out the moonlight.  Often there was no center line or line on the right of the road, steep hills and tight corners that made it difficult to see far ahead, and rough, broken pavement that forced constant concentration in order to stay on the road.  It was very slow-going.

One road wasn't there at all.  On Thursday night, heavy rains had swept through the region, and in several places on the ride signs warned of danger from high waters.  In fact, in a couple of places, the road near rivers was covered with dirt, a sure sign of a recent flood.  But that was the extent of it... until mile 285 or so.

Around 10:15 at night, I was winding through an odd series of neighborhoods in downtown Fredericksburg when the cue said to turn left on King Street, which was along the Rappahannock River.  Barring the way, though, was a "Road Closed -- High Water" sign.  I figured maybe it was a holdover from recent days that posed no current issue beyond walking my bike across some wet pavement, but no.  Not at all.  The road ahead simply disappeared underwater.  Doing some research after the ride ended, I realized that King Street is also called River Road, and I found a daytime picture of what I saw in front of me that night:

Do not pass go.

And so it was that I had a true randonneuring experience, sitting on the side of the road at night, pecking away at Google Maps to try to find a way across the river.  Living the dream!

A nighttime wildernesses walk.  At one point, the route took us through a battlefield in Fredericksburg, complete with signs warning that the park was closed from dusk to dawn.   Feeling quite the scofflaw, I moseyed on down the road until it ended.  And I do mean ended -- dead ended into a split-rail fence, beyond which lay a gravel path through the woods.  Checking the cue sheet with a "surely you can't be serious" expression on my face, I found that it was very serious about my continuing onward.  And so it was that I hiked for about 1/3 of a mile through the woods in the middle of the night, with my triathlon bike, wearing a skinsuit and aero helmet and visor.  Apparently this is the life I've carved out for myself.

I think I'm done with solo nighttime adventures.  Not to put too fine a point on it, but there were many times in the overnight portion of this ride that I would have very seriously considered quitting if I'd had the option.  (I didn't; I had to get home in time for the wedding.  Heck, there was only one way to get home, period, and that was to keep going.)  I realized at about 1:00 a.m. that I was utterly alone, miles from anywhere, on roads with cars likely driven by people heading home from bars, with a single headlight.  I realized that if the headlight failed, or fell off my bike and broke, or if I got side-swiped, it could be an exceedingly long time before any help arrived.  I'd been alone on my bike for more than 20 hours, and I still had 70 miles to go.

Not only that, but I felt like I was struggling to get the ride done.  My odometer was completely inaccurate by then due to various electronic mishaps, and there were long stretches of roads without turns, which meant that I had no idea what my true mileage was.  That was tragic insofar as we were forced to find "information controls," i.e., signs on the side of the road at certain mileage points -- but, on several occasions, I realized that due to my wonky odometer, I was unsure whether I'd missed a particular sign or whether it lay ahead.  On at least one occasion I convinced myself that I must have passed the sign miles before, but due to my slow progress, I didn't think I had time to go back and look for it; I resigned myself to failing to complete the ride's requirements and not getting credit for it.  And then, several miles later, I came upon the information control I thought I'd missed.   It was a bewildering and disheartening process.

I realized at some point that I was no longer having any fun at all, not even in the "embrace the challenge" sense.  I just wanted to be done, to go home, to have a hot shower and solid meal, and to get myself off the road in a safe place.  I felt like I'd be lucky to escape the situation, and I decided at that point that I don't think I'm going to do a ride like this again.  I don't mean that I'll never do a 600k or nighttime ride; many events I'm targeting require riding at night.  But riding alone, at night, in very rural areas, with no support anywhere to be found, seems to me to be an unacceptable risk at this stage in life.  There's no reason to put myself in that situation again.

No soup for you!  There are several types of controls in randonneuring rides.  The most common is a normal control, which is a designated commercial establishment, often a gas station, where you're required to have your control card initialed and time-stamped by an employee.  There's also the aforementioned "information control," which requires you to describe something on the route to prove you traversed it, and the "secret control," which is an unannounced control on the side of the road staffed by a ride official.  Finally, there's the "open control," which requires you to get a receipt from a business somewhere in a designated area; usually they amount to, "get lunch somewhere in this town and prove you did it."

The last two commercial controls on the route were at a 7-11 at mile 284 and an open control in Spotsylvania at mile 317.  (The total ride distance was 376 miles.)  I knew of no businesses between miles 317 and 376, so, at 12:30 a.m., I was exhausted and desperately looking forward to some light and warmth at the last open control at mile 317.  The cue sheet suggested the Fasmart at the Valero station.  Here's what I found when I got there.

DOH!!!

Incredulous, I rode up and down the street in Spotsylvania (there's only one) several times, thinking that surely I must be missing the Sheetz, 7-11, or other all-night establishment.  But I wasn't.  Spotsylvania was dead to me, and I to it.  In my despair, I stopped for a minute and doodled a self-portrait.

I also took a few pictures to prove I was there; I wouldn't be able to produce the receipt required from open controls, but I figured that if I were DQ'd on that cruel basis, I'd just write the ride off and drink heavily at the wedding.

It turned out that, as I feared, there wasn't a single open business the rest of the ride.  And so it was that, at the end of an absurdly long day, I didn't refuel or see another human being between miles 284 and 376 -- 92 miles, and about 7 hours.  Yet another "character-building experience," I suppose.  All I wanted was a bag of Fritos, some water, and maybe a cup of coffee; I'm a simple man.  But no, the world denied me even those basic things.

Make it to the church on time! After one of the longest and loneliest nights of my life, I found my way back to the host hotel at around 5:30 a.m. -- 25 hours and 30 minutes after starting the ride the previous morning.  Including bonus miles for navigation issues, I was nearing 390 miles, and it had been a long time since I'd had anything to eat or drink.  Happily, in the last couple of miles, I passed a steady stream of randonneurs who'd slept for several hours at the overnight, and who were then heading out on the final 130-mile stretch I'd just completed.  I even saw Mark about 50 yards from the hotel, and wished him well.  What I didn't say was, "Good luck -- I really hope you don't suffer as much as I just did."  I figured that might not be the most supportive advice to offer at the moment.

My time of 25:42 wound up being pretty quick as an historical matter.  Here's a graph -- albeit a couple of years out of date -- showing the historical distribution of finishing times for DC Randonneurs, as well as for American randonneurs more broadly.  The average is about 36 hours, and the top 25% cutoff is 32 hours or so.

After spending a couple of minutes chatting with the brevet officials in the conference room and enjoying a bowl of chili, I headed upstairs and walked into my shower fully-clothed, where I proceeded to sit under a stream of warm water for about 10 minutes in a cleansing of body and soul.  After a quick hour's nap, I made my way home and enjoyed a gorgeous outdoor wedding in Glen Echo Park, sipping Bellinis and wearing my sunglasses as much as possible so as not to disturb anyone with evidence of what I'd just been through.

CONCLUSIONS

Looking back on it with a couple of days' perspective, I'll say this: the ride was utterly gorgeous and immaculately managed.  The weather was impossible to beat.  But riding solo, and hard, for 25 hours straight was one of the most difficult things I've ever done, particularly mentally.  There were many times in the middle of the night where I would have very gladly stopped had I had any opportunity to do so; I was exhausted, famished, lonely, and felt totally exposed.  At those times, it wasn't remotely fun and I just wanted out.  I think the only sane way to do these rides is to sleep through some of the night and leave at dawn on the second day, or to ride through the night with others who are on a similarly aggressive schedule.  I'm glad I emerged unscathed, but this one's a learning experience for the ages.

"The Tartar Steppe" -- A great read for athletes and beyond

No one will be surprised to learn I read a fair amount about endurance sports.  Sure, there are lots of "Get Psyched Up!" ghost-written biographies out there that amount to, "Me train hard go fast.  You no go fast; that ok."  Some of them are decent, but they do tend to blend together.

The thing is, I'm only modestly interested in hearing tales of glory recounted.  I'm more intrigued by the psychological side, specifically, why endurance athletes are driven to be weirdos.  They do objectively unreasonable things at great expense along every relevant dimension -- physical, financial, and interpersonal. And, when you ask many of them, they'll have a hard time telling you why; they'll often admit that training can dominate their lives and races are often stressful, but somehow putting those two negatives together creates a positive, and an addictive one at that.  Why?

Endurance athletes' biographies are largely unhelpful in answering this question, although it's really the reason that their books exist.  Behind the hand-waving, mostly it seems to boil down to (i) proving something to oneself or others, (ii) the desire to set and meet goals, and (iii) the search for meaning that's so often missing from life in a cubicle.  Fair enough, but it sort of begs the central question: When the point is proved and the goal is met, does that lead to happiness over the long term?  Is the searched-for meaning ever found?  I suspect that, for many people, it might be painful to think honestly about the answers to those questions.

I've struggled a great deal with this stuff, sometimes publicly.  My posts here, here, and here ruminate explicitly about it.

In the past few months, I've been pleased to discover a few books that are helpful in thinking about why endurance athletes do what we do.  The thing is, the most insightful books on endurance sports I've found haven't been about endurance sports at all -- at least not literally.

Here's one of them.

Although it's a bit obscure, several creditable lists identify The Tartar Steppe, written originally in Italian, as one of the best novels of the last century.  The dust jacket accurately describes it as "a meditation on the human thirst for glory."  A young military officer, Giovanni Drago, is posted to a remote fort in mountains that overlook a vast desert.  He intends to leave as soon as possible, but gradually becomes entranced by the romantic notion that an invading army will someday materialize in the mist-shrouded distance to allow him to achieve glory on the battlefield, and his life will then be purposeful.  Drogo dedicates himself and his life to visions of this distant dream, only to find in times of doubt that he no longer has any choice but to continue, as his years in the fort have rendered him lost anywhere else.  When at last the enemies amass at the gate, Drogo is old and infirm, and he is transported from the fort in preparation for the dreamt-of battle.  Having dedicated his life to the pursuit of a vision, he finds that it has materialized too late.

A "meditation" is the right description here: The Tartar Steppe is a novel that compels one to think.  It's an enigma.  For most of it, almost nothing happens, but that "nothing happening" is largely the point.  In literal terms, the book has nothing to whatever to do with running or riding a bicycle, but I think on some level it has everything to do with those things.  How often do we, as endurance athletes, sacrifice aspects of our lives in pursuit of a distant vision of glory?  How often do foresake opportunities to do memorable things, all because we're "training with dedication"?

So once more Drogo is climbing up the valley to the Fort and he has fifteen years fewer to live.  Yet he does not feel that he has changed particularly; time has slipped by so quickly that his heart has not had a chance to grow old.  And although the mysterious tumult of the passing hours grows with each day, Drogo perseveres in his illusion that the really important things of life are still before him.  Giovanni patiently awaits his hour, the hour which has never come; he does not see that the future has grown terribly short, that it is no longer like in the days when time to come could seem an immense period, an inexhaustible fund of riches to be squandered without risk.

Will we be faster next year?  Will we go farther?  The year after that?  Then what?

Frederick 400k Ride Report: Lesson Learned

Beautiful scenery.  Off-screen to the left, something wicked this way coming.

Bad Idea Bicycling

I'm discovering that, for me, there's a diabolical sort of momentum to any particular endurance sport, and it goes something like this:

Anxiety --> Familiarity --> Laziness --> Spankage

It's certainly been true of Ironman racing.  For my first couple of races, back in 2006-2007, the sheer intimidation factor of the distance ensured that I completed virtually every workout, and I obsessed over the details.  Then, as years passed, the distance itself stopped being daunting; it was about getting the best time I could, but I ceased to sweat the small stuff.  I reasoned that missing workouts here and there wouldn't matter much if there were something more interesting on offer, and I found that I was no longer planning meticulously for the events' logistics.  I'd show up to races without goggles, and often I'd find mechanical problems with my bike moments before the races started.  I'd ride 1200ks only weeks before an Ironman, which is pretty much the worst possible time.  Many winters I'd take half a year off of swimming, knowing that I could get back to "good enough" swim shape with only a couple of months of hard work.  In other words, I was half-assing triathlon, and my results eventually reflected that reality.

Saturday's 400k (250-mile) brevet has me thinking that I need to start paying more attention on the ultracycling front, because I'm starting to take for granted that I can just roll through these things as long as I eat and drink enough.  In reality, it takes a little more than that.

For the first few years of my ultracycling career, I'd roll down the road prepared for anything short of Biblical plagues.  I'd carry 5 pounds of bars and gels despite having refueling stops available every hour or two, load myself down with doubly-redundant backup batteries for my lights, and carry a trunk bag stuffed with enough spare clothes to weather an unexpected ice age.  Invariably I'd use almost none of it, which meant I'd spend 20 hours or so waddling down the road like a constipated bison while my riding companions zipped along without a care in the world.  It was irksome.

This year I've taken a more minimalist approach, basically setting out for brevets like I'd do for a local shop ride, with the exception of putting a little bit more nutrition in my jersey pockets.  In the 200k brevet about a month back, the weather promised to be disastrous, so I put on my rain gear at the start and kept it on all day -- no problem there.  Similarly, on the 300k in mid April that I'd ridden with Mark (link to Mark's excellent ride report), the weather was forecasted to be spectacular, and so it proved; the temperatures were supposed to be in the 40s at the start, so I put on a light vest and armwarmers, reasoning that I'd just be a little chilly until sunrise.  And, indeed, things went off without a hitch, and I felt sorry for the guys with overstuffed sacks affixed to their bikes while I played in the sunshine.

400ks, though, are tricky beasts.  This was to be my third, and the first two involved considerable drama.  First, in 2012, a buddy and I tacked a 400k brevet in the Fingerlakes region of NY.  Unfortunately, the first six hours of it were spent wading through an extremely cold, soaking rain, meaning that we spent a considerable amount of time huddled in gas stations, trying desperately to drink enough coffee to keep ourselves from shivering.  Needless to say, that's not really ideal for a 20-hour day.  Then, in 2013, we tackled a 400k closer to home, only to find that when dusk fell on us with 35 miles remaining, almost all of our lights had inexplicably died, as had our routing computers, which meant we spent a solid three hours picking our way uselessly along pitch-black country roads, all while getting profoundly lost.

400ks are challenging, I think, for two main reasons (apart from the 250-mile distance, which is considerable).  First, they take place in springtime, which is to say that you really don't have a clue what the weather will be from one moment to the next.  Second, unless you're scorchingly fast, they involve two significant chunks of nighttime riding: one from 4:00 a.m. until sunrise, and the other from about 9:00 p.m. through whatever time you're done (the average being about 1:00 a.m.).  In other words, there's a lot of time and opportunity for things to go wrong.

My mistake on this occasion was using the promising weather forecast to pack lightly -- just a windbreaker vest and light arm warmers.  I figured the first couple of hours would be chilly, but after that it would be smooth (and light) sailing.

Social-lite

My goal for this ride was only to finish it; I figured I'd ride with Mark, who was attempting his first 400k brevet, enjoy the scenery, and get to know some fellow riders.  I've recently been on a kick of not finishing each ride exhausted from racing up every incline, and I was optimistic enough to think I might finish this ride without getting too beaten up.

Because I slept in my own bed the night before (rather than driving an hour to the ride start and staying in a hotel), my alarm went off at 1:45 a.m., which is pretty perverse.  Driving out of my parking garage at 2:00, I noted that pretty much everyone else in Logan Circle was awake; it's just that they hadn't gone to bed yet.  On the upside, waking up that early is basically the equivalent of just taking a nap -- it's too early for your body to get indignant, because it doesn't understand that that's all the sleep it's going to get.

Turnout for this ride was pretty amazing -- 45 riders, give or take.  Just a few years back, there would have been less than half that number.  The number of crazies is growing!

The first couple of hours, riding through downtown Frederick and the countryside in pre-dawn hours, was as surreal as always in these events.  There's nothing quite like a 40-person peloton, each bike with blasting headlights and glowing red taillights, and each rider festooned with reflective clothing, to make passersby believe in aliens.

Mark on the left in downtown Frederick.  Photo credit to Bill Beck.

After a couple of hours of rolling along to the sounds of morning birds, whirring tires, and clicking shifters, dawn broke and we made our way over a couple of long, grinding climbs out of Thurmont and into southern Pennsylvania.  The roads were spectacular, often lined with trees bedecked in their vernal finery.

Photo credit to Bill Beck.

My progress through this portion was constantly interrupted by my need to find a private tree seemingly every 10 minutes.  I didn't get it; I'd had all of one espresso to drink that morning, but I seemed to be a miracle of modern science.

As we made our way further into Pennsylvania, the forested climbs gave way to never-ending, rolling fields of the sort of electric green that one associates with the British Isles, not the mid-Atlantic.

Fields of glowing green.  Photo credit to Bill Beck.

We made terrific time through this section, and who wouldn't -- lightly rolling hills through beautiful countryside, with descents that snaked off into the distance in a way that invites one to pin the ears back and let it fly.

It's impossible to go slowly here.  Photo credit to Bill Beck.

The happy warriors!  Photo credit to Mary Gersemalina.

The scenery was post-card perfect.

This is why we ride bicycles!  Photo credit to Bill Beck.

Cruising merrily.  Photo credit to Mary Gersemalina.

Mark and I reached the first commercial control a little before noon, having been on the road for about 8 hours, and having covered a leisurely 110 miles.  Somehow, in the course of those 8 hours and 110 miles, I'd consumed only two bottles of water, which seems absurd, but every step of the way I'd felt extremely hydrated, so far be it from me to understand the mysteries of the world.  All I knew was, I was damn hungry.  So pizza it was, and pizza I did.

Pizza #1 of the day.  Photo credit to Bill Beck.

After a leisurely lunch, it was back on the roads, where we headed east through central PA, basking in the early afternoon sun as we followed rivers to lands unknown.

Trout fishing anyone?  Photo credit to Bill Beck.

During this stretch, from miles 110 through 130 or so, I found myself wondering why so often, as cyclists, we feel a need to hammer through a ride as fast as we can, with each turn of the pedals being a war of all against all.  I'm as guilty of it as anyone -- my Big Wild Ride solo effort is evidence of that -- but lately I've taken real pleasure in just enjoying the journey, knowing that I could go faster, but instead choosing to strike up conversations with cows.  And Mark.  But the cows laughed harder at my jokes.

Mark and I rolled through the 200k point (halfway) in 9 hours and 30 minutes, which was a pretty solid time for a ride with front-loaded climbing.  In fact, I think it was close to Mark's fastest time for 200k, which was pretty audacious for the first half of a 400k.  That pace seemed no problem to sustain at the time, but the third 100k -- from miles 124 through 190 -- came with no planned breaks, and that part of the ride is always a slog.   You've been riding for 12 hours after getting very little sleep, it's the hottest part of the day, and the end is nowhere in sight.  Psychologically, I think it's definitely the hardest.  Mark seemed a little less chipper than he had been earlier in the day, so I did my best to pull when I could and otherwise didn't badger him too much.  The objective was simple: to get to dinner, which was at the 190-mile point.

Well, we almost made it.  The weather had never been convincing, with the morning chill giving way to real warmth only for an hour or two around noon.  The afternoon had been overcast and blustery, and as we approached the dinner stop, our luck ran out.  Suddenly we were fighting to keep our bikes on the road as we were battered by driving gusts from the west, and what little sun there had been gave way to this:

Ah, yes -- that's the sky I associate with my long rides.  Photo credit to Bill Beck.

And soon thereafter, we were being soaked to the gills.  I'd put my vest back on, but when you're drenched and rolling down the road without putting out real power, it gets pretty miserable.

We finally arrived at dinner -- another pizza place -- and sought refuge from the cruel world.  Depressingly, they ran out of the corn soup just as we arrived; I was close to tears.  So, Mark and I took solace in a meal that can only be described as a Fat Fest: salted peanuts, potato chips, fried mozzarella sticks, and a large pizza.  Disgusting, but so tasty.  Mark had remarked a couple of times that he didn't understand how, in a previous long ride I'd done, I'd single-handedly eaten a large pizza.  But I think he finally got it.  I'm not sure if that's comforting or troubling.

The pizza place didn't have coffee, so I asked the waiter to keep bringing me large cups of hot water, all in an effort to keep my soggy self from shivering through dinner.

As the miles increase, so do the pizza sizes.  Photo credit to Bill Beck.

Sitting in the pizza place and contemplating the rest of the ride, I recognized that I was in a uniquely moronic position.  Pretty much everyone else who came in the door was sporting full-length jackets and tights, and many of them had rainproof caps.  I had nothing but my rapier wit, which turns out to be less useful than one would expect.  Perhaps sensing and enjoying my discomfort, Mark headed out to his bike, then to the restroom, and emerged remarking that it was really a good thing he'd thought to bring a dry pair of socks.  Dem's fightin' words.

Setting out from dinner at mile 190, we had 60 go.  It really says something about the size of an undertaking when 60 miles can be considered tying up loose ends, but that's what I hoped it would be.  Unfortunately, there was a big problem: it was still raining, I was soaked, it was getting colder, and I couldn't think of how on earth I was going to ride another 5 hours without falling off my bike with hypothermia -- at nighttime, nonetheless.  Plowing through the dark, we'd cross fields where suddenly the temperature would plummet ten degrees, and then jump up again only after making life thoroughly unpleasant.

I realized that I couldn't keep riding at Mark's pace, as much as I wanted to; he was better prepared for the conditions, whereas my only play was to work hard enough to generate body heat.  Doing so, of course, would mean pulling away, which I didn't want to do.  It's safer to ride together at night, and that had been the plan all day.  So, I struck upon the approach of letting Mark ride ahead for a few minutes while I stopped on the side of the road.  Then, I'd sprint as hard as I could to catch him, which would get me warm enough that I could ride with him for a few minutes before doing it again.  

That "randonneuring as intervals" approach worked for 10 miles or so, but it was a losing battle.  Eventually, it got too cool to just stop by the side of the road, so I found myself doing sets of pushups and burpees before taking off after Mark again.  

Eventually around mile 210, I realized that, at the pace we were going, it might well take us 3 hours to ride the final 40 miles, and I had no idea how I'd make it that long.  I just needed to get myself to the finish as fast as I could.  So, I apologized to Mark profusely, and he graciously agreed that it made sense for me to ride on ahead.

With that dispensation, I set out like a man on a mission: hammer to the finish.  And so it was that I ripped off a 40-mile solo time trial starting a little after 10:30 at night.  As it turned out, it was uncomfortable weather for riding, but it was perfect for racing, and I was happy to find that I felt as powerful at mile 220 as I did at mile 20.  Every now and then I'd encounter another randonneur who'd set off from dinner ahead of us, and I'd blow by with an apologetic explanation that I was just trying to salvage my situation.

Happily, I navigated successfully and found myself rolling through the broken social scene of downtown Frederick after midnight on a Saturday night.  I clocked into the finish at about 12:30 a.m., 20 hours and 30 minutes after we'd started, and 23 hours after I'd woken up.  I chatted for a few minutes with the other riders hanging out at the finish, then shot a text to Mark explaining that I had to hit the road in order to get home before I passed out.  He wound up finishing about an hour later, having fought through a very challenging first 400k, and having set a 60-mile personal distance record for a single ride. 

Final thoughts

400ks... bloody hell.  I've done three, and each one has reared its head in ugly fashion.  This one posed the question: "You're exhausted, shivering, have no more clothing, have been riding for more than 18 hours, and have 40 miles to go.  Discuss."  In that sense, it was a "brick in the wall" ride, so to speak -- the kind of experience you can draw from in future challenging situations.  And, in a real way, I think it was a useful kick in the ass, one that will ensure that, in future rides, I always carry some contingency clothing, regardless what the weather forecast says.  I even ordered a new, warmer vest with pockets, all because of this experience.

I'll get a chance to test the new gear in two weeks, when I'll take on a 600k (375 miles).  That ride will be a real trick, as I'll be attending a wedding only 31 hours after it starts -- the time limit for finishing the ride is 40 hours.  Basically, I'll be forced to treat it like a 375-mile unsupported race, which promises to be eventful.  But hey, that's how amusing stories happen!

To RAAM, Or Not To RAAM?

The 2014 Race Across America route (~3,000 miles)

Long before I began dabbling in randonneuring, I knew of the Race Across America (RAAM), upon which Outside Magazine has conferred the title of  "The World's Toughest Sporting Event."  In its 30-odd years of existence, only 200 or so riders have finished it solo.  About 10 times as many people have summited Mt. Everest.  It's a 3,000-mile bike race that, in its present incarnation, begins in Oceanside, CA and ends in Annapolis, MD.  It involves over 100,000 feet of vertical elevation, including stretches below sea level in the desert and mountain passes approaching 11,000 feet.  Temperatures in the day can reach 100 degrees, and at night can plummet to near freezing.

Racers have about 12 days to complete the journey.  By contrast, Tour De France riders travel about 1,000 miles less, and take twice as long to do it.  (Of course, they are going pretty freakin' fast.)  At root, the question is: can you ride 250 miles a day, on average, for 12 days in a row?  The distance is obviously unfathomable, but the even bigger challenge is the lack of rest.  Last year's winner, Christoph Strasser, apparently was on his bike for about 23 hours and 15 minutes a day, for just under 8 days.  That is, he slept less than an hour a day while riding about 400 miles a day, on average.

There's nothing healthy about it.  Hallucinations and profound confusion are ubiquitous, and there's a medical condition, Shermer's Neck, that exists nowhere else on earth.  It involves certain riders' neck muscles becoming unable to hold their heads up any longer -- they simply give out, and riders' heads flop around like a rag doll's.  Not that this is enough to stop victims, as many times they prop their heads up so that they can continue riding.  (The condition can last a couple of weeks.)

In all, despite extremely demanding qualification standards (for example, riding 400 miles or more in a 24-hour race), each year there's about a 50% DNF ("Did Not Finish") rate.  For a great insight into the challenge and the motivations of those who do undertake it, the award-winning documentary Bicycle Dreams is well worth checking out.

Each summer for the past several years, I've followed the event pretty closely. Live GPS tracking is available online, and certain online forums provide regular insight.  The race is always an object of fascination to me.  RAAM is to competitive ultracycling what Ironman Hawaii is to triathletes.  It's the best of the best, taking on an unfathomably difficult event -- one as difficult mentally as it is physically -- in which there's no prize money and precious little press coverage.  Only a couple of people in the world are able to make a full-time living off of RAAM and other ultracycling events.  For the great majority -- not that there are many to begin with -- it's a labor of love that they undertake in addition to full-time jobs, commitments to family, and the like.

In short: RAAM is the sort of thing that, if you have to ask why people do it, you'll never understand. It's climbing the mountain because the mountain is there.

For as much as I've followed RAAM over the past few years, until recently, I've never really imagined it as something I'd want to do, much less something I'd be qualified to undertake.  It was only in the summer of 2012 that I rode more than 200 miles for the first time, and that was in a brevet, which isn't competitive or time-pressured.  I remember when, in 2011, a close friend told me he was attempting the inaugural 1200k (750-mile) Big Wild Ride in Alaska, and I thought he was utterly nuts.  I'd long loved extremely challenging all-day rides like Mountains of Misery and the Diabolical Double, each of which is 125 miles of insidious mountain climbing, but I'd never reached the end and had any desire to keep going for another 11.5 days.

In the past couple of years, though, I've begun to dabble in longer cycling events, and for whatever reason, I've yet to hit any sort of wall.  In my first 12-hour time trial, in Saratoga, NY in 2012, I was hoping for 220 miles or so, but I wound up with 256, which was a little beyond the old course record (although I took second to Matt Roy, who set a new one).  Last year, I completed my first 600k (375-mile) brevet, a solo effort, and then took on the Big Wild Ride 1200k (750-mile) Grand Randonnée.  Each event was crushingly hard and took absolutely everything I had in me, but I finished each well ahead of the cutoffs.  Most recently, I competed in my first 24-hour time trial at Bike Sebring, and, despite being monumentally undertrained, somehow did well enough to come within shouting distance of an AG course record.  I wound up with 441 miles, which was comfortably more than the 400 required for RAAM Qualification.   I also wound up ahead of several riders who have finished solo RAAM in the last couple of years.

THE PRESSURE OF STRANGE PEERS

I've long observed that the triathlon social scene -- for better or worse, but probably for worse -- has a subtle but distinct pressure to it.  For most (privileged, first-world) people, attempting a triathlon is a worthy ambition.  Those who do it, though, and decide to stick with the hobby, quickly come to find that there's a pressure to go longer.  There seems to be a subtle assumption that everything short of Ironman is merely a prelude to the real challenge.  (For the record, I think this is completely insane.  I have huge amounts of respect for those who work hard at the extremely painful task of going faster at shorter distances.)

But it turns out that doing an Ironman's not the end of it, either.  Sure, it may start as a once-off "bucket list" item, but it often doesn't stay that way.  Crossing the finish line of an Ironman is a singularly intoxicating experience.  There aren't many times in life when we're surrounded by crowds cheering a huge undertaking, and the glow is real.  Regardless how well one does, though, the glow inevitably fades, and one's left with a firm conviction:

I can do better.  I can go faster.  I have more to give.

And there's certainly pressure to try.   The more time one spends training with the tri crowd, the more it becomes one's social scene as well.  That's a great thing in many ways, but it can become a cycle that robs one of perspective.  You come to realize that the conversations are no longer, "you're doing a triathlon?" or even, "You're doing an Ironman?  Crazy."  Instead, they are, "Cool, which ones have you done?  What's up next?"  Twice-a-day workouts become the norm, and the pattern of one's life comes to revolve around an event or two each year.  It's a metaphorical treadmill that's every bit as real as one upon which one might train for a winter marathon, and it's hard to get off without worrying that life will lose its momentum and meaning.

There are at least three problems with this.

First, the endorphin rush of endurance racing is an addictive drug.  The drug may be benign compared to some alternatives, but it's every bit as real.  The first rush of an Ironman finish line is an amazing high, and one wants more.  Years down the road, though, it becomes clear that the thrill of finishing is no longer enough -- the question is whether one is getting better.  If you're disappointed in your performance, you want to avenge it the next year.  If you're thrilled, that's great, but it doesn't last, because you suspect you can do even better the next year, and you start to associate your self-image with being an athlete of a certain caliber.  From that perspective, to cut back is to regress, to fail, to die a little bit.  The shape of one's life begins to coalesce around racing and training -- where you can work, whom you can date or marry, and the rest of it.  The phenomenon of triathlon divorce is very real.

Second, endurance athletes can sometimes become monomaniacal and forget the concept of opportunity cost.  The pursuits take so much time that it's difficult to maintain other hobbies.  And, when one's recreational satisfaction comes primarily from a single pursuit, that pursuit has to be maximized.  Put simply, if a meaningful part of one's happiness is triathlon performance, it's important to keep on the trajectory of performing better.  But the law of diminishing returns applies here: going a couple of hours faster in an Ironman might require doubling one's training time.   It may in fact be true that one would be happier with three hobbies, each of which one does less well than one might with exclusive focus on a single pursuit.  But it can be hard to see that forest from inside the city walls.

Third, there's a telling pattern in my mantra above: I can do better.  I can go faster.  I have more to give.   The common word is "I."  One's performance is inherently a self-regarding thing.  Going faster, going longer, and doing better makes no one but the athlete better off (and the athlete part of it is questionable).  Past a point well short of Ironman, racing triathlons doesn't improve the world; that 8th Ironman probably doesn't provide much additional inspiration for one's sedentary friends to get off the couch.   In fact, it turns out that the field of positive psychology explains why such a pursuit rarely leads to meaningful long-term happiness: helping others is more important to one's happiness than focusing on one's self.  It's important to be healthy, but no reasonable person can argue that training for Ironmans for years on end is necessary to achieve that.

In short, I've come to think that Ironman triathlons are fundamentally self-regarding endeavors.  To be clear, I don't think that, by any stretch, Ironman athletes themselves are generally self-absorbed.  I mean only that -- in my opinion -- for people with other responsibilities, such as commitments to a "civilian" family, Ironman training falls far beyond what's necessary to be a healthy companion and role-model.

ULTRA-DISTANCE BIKE RACING IS EXACTLY THE SAME

Why all the talk about triathlon?  It's what I know.  I signed up for my first Ironman in the fall of 2005, thinking that the race in 2006 would be a one-off, Herculean adventure.  But I did better than I thought I would and wanted to give it another go.  My brother passed away at the the same time, and triathlon became an indispensable part of my coping strategy.  Somehow, in 2013, I found myself having founded a triathlon team, and I was toeing the line at my 9th Ironman.  In all those years, I had trouble finding a relationship that was happy for more than a few months at a stretch, and I found myself thinking of career opportunities and romantic prospects in terms of whether they'd be compatible with training for 20 hours a week.

Over time, it has become clear to me that that isn't the future I want.  It isn't how I was raised.  My parents made huge professional sacrifices in order to spend more time with me and my brother, and when he passed away in 2007, it was obvious that they felt they'd chosen wisely in spending every moment with him that they could.  I want that same relationship with a family, and for me at least, Ironman training is largely incompatible with that vision.  At some point, one has to get off of the treadmill, and I've found something of an alternative in long, meditative cycling events.

As it turns out, though, ultracycling has the capacity to be an "out of the frying pan, and into the fire" proposition.  If one completes 200k and 300k brevets, it's very difficult not to dream of the epic adventure that is a 1200k -- it certainly happened to me.   One can complete a 1200k with much less training than Ironman requires, but if you happen to be on the faster end of things, people notice.  After my strong performance at the Big Wild Ride 1200k, my ride report made its way through the local ultracycling community, and I began finding myself on local rides with people I'd just met telling me that they'd read it, and opining that "RAAM is clearly in your future."  I took it as a compliment, if not very seriously.  But with each success in ultracycling events, the pressure and allure grows.  The ultramarathon bike racing community is a very small one.  Everyone knows one another, and the annual reunion of the most talented people is at Race Across America.  RAAM is the ultra-racing pinnacle, where the best of the best come out to do battle with the impossible.  For those who finish it, there is nothing more to say and nothing more to prove -- you're in the books for all-time, and much as one can always call oneself an "Ironman," one will always be a "Solo RAAM finisher," a finisher of the toughest race in the world.

I'm not going to lie: there's very serious appeal to that notion.  For whatever reason, I seem to be good at this whole ultra-marathon bike racing thing -- I'm competitive with people who have finished solo RAAM multiple times.  Although Sebring intimidated the hell out of me, there's no question that I belonged there, so to speak.  Heck, had I ridden my bike for the last hour, I'd have broken the age group course record.   As a result, I have a "golden ticket" to compete with the best in the world in a sport I'm passionate about.  Such opportunities are vanishingly rare in life.   It's extremely tempting to get swept up in the enthusiasm, and to plan my life around RAAM in 2015, with the idea that it's a "once-and-done, once-in-a-lifetime" adventure that I have to try before life obligations make it impossible.

And yet, and yet... well, that's exactly what I said about Ironman in 2005.  I wanted to do (what then seemed to be) the impossible by finishing that absurd event, figuring that life would make more sense on the other side.  In fact, merely more Ironman races lay on the other side.  RAAM is just the same: many, if not most, of those who finish it come back in successive years to try to improve on their performances.  They're RAAM finishers -- they're somebody, the few, the anointed -- and, from there out, their race results are often described in terms of "Solo RAAM finisher So-And-So."  So few people in the world know what RAAM is, much less appreciate it, that it seems (from my current perspective on the sideline) that it would be difficult to leave that world behind once one's crested the summit.   It would be hard to return to civilian life afterward.

There's also this: entering RAAM is phenomenally expensive -- the effort would cost $20k-$30k, most likely -- and it takes a village.  You're required to have a crew; in practice, you need 6-9 people who will agree to take 12 days off of work to follow you across the country very, very slowly as you gradually become an insane nightmare of a human being.  To the extent I've described Ironman as narcissistic, RAAM turns the volume to 11.  I wouldn't even know how to ask people to do such a thing without feeling like an ass.  And you have to be willing to commit a very serious amount of time to training in the six months leading up to the event.  Not as much as some people like to pretend, but it's a very real undertaking, and I would never dream of entering RAAM without being committed to finishing it and doing well.

SO HERE'S WHERE I AM

Having written far too much already, here are my present thoughts, in no particular order.

(1)  I'm presently interviewing for a couple of jobs that would require substantial travel commitments.  If I get one, it may be difficult to prepare adequately for RAAM.  If things work out that way, it'll be okay; there are plenty of ways to get into trouble without finding reasons for my neck muscles to disintigrate.

(2)  If I don't wind up accepting a position that would make adequate training impossible, I will assess the situation toward the end of 2014.  This year I'm planning another 24-hour race, another 1200k, and very likely an attempt at the Furnace Creek 508 (a 500-mile race in Death Valley in October).  Furnace Creek, which is a "mini-RAAM" with a massive amount of climbing, would give me a much better sense of whether I have a realistic shot at RAAM.  A flat 24-hour race gives one vanishingly little information; Sebring is not in the same galaxy as RAAM and the sheer physical and mental fatigue that it entails.  From everything I know, solo RAAM finishers tend to think that qualification based on a 24-hour race is a dangerously misleading thing.  It's like running a good 10-mile race and thinking oneself qualified to race the Badwater Ultramarathon, a 135-mile Bataan march across Death Valley in July.  The 750-mile Big Wild Ride, in which I got 3 hours of sleep in the course of my 67-hour solo voyage, is a little more analogous, but at the end I was in no condition to keep going.

(3)  Regardless how enthusiastic I may be about RAAM, and regardless how well prepared for it I think I could be, I will not consider racing it if I am not utterly confident in my ability to lead a balanced life while preparing for it.  To be specific: if preparing adequately would require real sacrifices at work, or would require that I be anything less than a good and present significant other and friend, I won't do it.  It isn't worth it.  End of story.  There are other ways to have fun.  In fact, if my significant other isn't on board with my making an attempt at RAAM, I won't do it.  It's a team effort or nothing.

(4)  I would only consider entering RAAM if I had a crew of volunteers who are truly enthusiastic about the undertaking.  It requires a massive commitment.  If I have friends who think of it as an appealing adventure, terrific; if not, then not.  Friends should not have to make unwilling sacrifices in order to perform unreasonable favors.  Narcissism must know a limit.

(5)  If all of the above considerations somehow point to "yes," I'll think very seriously about racing in 2015, with the absolute understanding that, no matter what happens, it would be a one-off attempt.  Regardless whether I were to DNF in the first 10 miles (hopefully not) or win the race (*snort*), that would be it.  I want things in life that are incompatible with a lifestyle of perennial RAAM racing.  The idea would be to take the opportunity to toe the line with the best in the world and then to move on without regret, come what may.  And, if everything did line up in such a way that an effort at RAAM happens, I would be damn well prepared, and would head into it ready to put in a performance commensurate with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

So that's where I am.  However things play out, I'll continue to think RAAM is a phenomenal undertaking without parallel, and I look forward to following my new friends as they do battle across the country this June.