My clock radio wakes me up with NPR every day. On the morning of the RGR, the first phrase I heard from the radio was “once again, there is a heat advisory in effect for Western Oregon. We advise you to minimize your time outdoors today, and if you must go outside, don’t do anything strenuous.”
Forty-five minutes later, I was in a van heading to Forest Grove, Oregon for the start of this year’s iteration of the race that had pretty thoroughly wasted me the year before.
I was emboldened by the shorter distance of this year’s race. Certainly 124 miles was nothing to fear after doing 141 last year. Sure, there were a few humps in the race profile map, and some of that climbing was going to be on gravel, but hadn’t we done gravel sections last year? No sweat.
So we rolled out onto the winding roads of Oregon Wine Country in good spirits.
One run-in with a dump truck later, we turned onto the road to Vernonia.
The grade increased noticeably. This is where I should mention that I was playing the part of anti-rabbit. I was to be the anchor that would keep any of my 5 younger, fitter teammates from getting into what Phil Ligget would call “a spot of bother.” This is not because I’m more vigilant, or a better coach. It’s because I’m slower, and they’d have to wait for me. So when a team began to pass us and two of my teammates jumped on their wheels for a few strokes before looking back, they saw me not chasing. Despite this course looking decidedly tamer on paper than last year’s route, I had learned not to trust race organizer Slate Olson. I had all kinds of faith that he had something horrible in store for us, and I was not going to let it catch me by surprise. So in this fashion we covered the first 35 miles to Vernonia at a decent clip, refilled bottles in town and turned onto the first gravel section at Pittsburgh Road.
Whoa.
Gravel?
This was not your garden variety quarter-minus. These were more the size of shattered baseballs, shattered golfballs, crescent ice cubes, or the heads of claw hammers. None of us expected this – certainly not I, with my 23c road tires. We soldiered on. Team Gründelbrüisers wears an all-black kit. Top and bottom. Three or four miles up Pittsburgh Road, I began to entertain the idea of a white summer jersey. Six miles up, I began to recognize the road. I had seen it before on “Axe Men”, filled with logging trucks that were rattling like my bike was at that very moment. Near the top, we had our first flat, then almost immediately, our second. Somehow, my Maxxis Re-fuse tires were holding up beneath my Clydesdale-Category body and my bike as we started a fast, uneasy descent through the Coast Range over stuff that no sane person would venture into with a road bike. The road was lined with riders fixing flats, fixing broken wheels, fixing teammates.
The heat had begun to assert itself. Shoulders began to protest. Hands and forearms began to tire from constant gripping and braking. More flats. More crashes. More stranded riders.
Speed increased. There was a lot of unintentional drifting, and I was getting accustomed to my bike sounding like a pinball machine. Ding! Ding! Clack! Rocks smacking carbon. Rocks smacking titanium. Chain slapping titanium. Rocks careening off of spokes. Ping! Clang! Clack! For about an hour.
We emerged from Pittsburgh Road with all of my bottles empty. Teams were regrouping in small patches of shade where the asphalt began. Every team seemed to be missing riders. There was a kid standing out by a barn with bottles of water.
“How much?” I asked, ready to throw down 10 bucks each.
“I’m pretty much giving them away,” he said.
This was not the last surreal thing I would see that Saturday.
“No you’re not,” I said, and gave him a few bucks.
Another 10 miles down the road, we descended the east side of the Coast Range and in the span of less than a quarter mile, it went from hot to feeling like someone had swung open a blast furnace door. Whatever heat we had been experiencing on Pittsburgh Road was like spring weather compared to this.
The first store we came to was also a barbeque restaurant, and it was there that we began to see the first true casualties of the day. Riders sitting against the outside wall with blank, vacuous stares. Guys apologizing to teammates.
Inside, most of the Gatorade and water was gone already, and we got some of the last bottles before the supply was coming uncooled from the storeroom.
We drank by the quart. We drank water and Gatorade until it hurt.
I chased it all with more Cliff Bars and wondered at the riders who were eating barbequed ribs and chicken.
Then we saddled up and headed for Scappoose. Five miles later, I had gone through another bottle of water. Ten miles later, we stopped for more water, more Gatorade, more food.
I took inventory of my teammates.
Brian looked great. To this day, I don’t think he exerted himself at all during the RGR. He is from another planet. Larry, Chip and Steve were equal parts fatigue and resolve. They were feeling it, but they were not letting on too much. I was beginning to wonder about the next two gravel sections. I have no idea what I looked like, but I’m sure it can’t be described in polite company.
The bank on the edge of town showed 101 degrees on its thermometer. Chris sat on the curb, shivering. Not a good sign. More water. More Gatorade. More salty crackers. More energy bars. I drank all I could and bought additional bottles to stuff into my already-bulging jersey pockets. If Chris was going on, I was going on.
When you’re sitting at a gas station in Scappoose, you know that it’s not that far to Cornelius Pass Road and Sauvie Island beyond it, and then it’s just ten flat miles back to Portland. And that would have been fine. That would have been a nice 75-mile ride that any of us could have been proud of on a day of rock shards and triple-digit temperatures.
But that’s not what we were doing.
We turned south and climbed farther and farther from the beautiful flatness of Highway 30.
Slate Olson was sitting on the back of a van at the entrance to Otto Miller Road, and he was smiling like he knew something we didn’t.
My first thought was relief that there was shade. But what Otto Miller lacked in direct sunlight, it more than made up for in dust clouds and traction-murdering gravel. Where Pittsburgh Road had been lined with big, shattered rocks, this was more like riding through someone’s garden path. Tiny sharp pebbles, several inches deep. And we were climbing. Hard.
You couldn’t stand up to climb, as it would un-weight the back wheel and you’d just spin. Some of the turns functioned like those doodle bug holes that insects fall into and slide to the center.
My teammates were pulling away from me and I did not begrudge them that; everyone had to keep whatever pace worked for him in this stuff.
Climb, slip, climb.
“How much more of this shit can there be?” I asked myself. It was a phrase that would become my mantra over the next 90 minutes.
Climb, slip, climb, slow to a crawl, repeat.
Do I save this last bottle until I’m really desperate, or do I drink it soon?
I did both.
Otto Miller also gave us the day’s third and best redneck encounter, and I’m no stranger to rednecks. I’m a transplanted Southerner with honest-to-God Confederate ancestry, and whoever that asshole was in the white pickup truck was a nice reminder for me that the South has no monopoly on asshole rednecks. 65 mph on a gravel road through a pack of cyclists. You’re not just born with those feelings for your fellow man; you really have to work at it.
Otto Miller Road was the gift that kept on giving. Long separated from the rest of my team and totally out of fluids, I had begun to stop for short breaks. I had begun to wonder how I was going to tell my teammates that I was going to ride home in the sag wagon. Where was the sag wagon, come to think of it?
How much more of this shit could there be?
Climb, slip, slow to a crawl, repeat, stop.
I was leaning over my handlebars, both feet firmly planted in the gravel. I was pushing my helmet against my forehead and making little Jackson Pollack patterns on the dry ground with my sweat when I heard a vehicle approaching.
The sag wagon appeared like an answered prayer out of a cloud of dust. A few smudgy faces peered out at me from the cool darkness within.
“You alright, man? You need a ride?”
The question hung in the air for a few seconds.
“Nah, I’m good.”
And they were gone.
“Who the fuck said that? I’m good? I am decidedly un-good.”
Click, click, pedal pedal. Nothing else to do.
I could taste dust. I could taste the rocks. How long since that last bottle was gone? 30 minutes? 45? An hour?
How much more of this shit can there be?
A few miles later, it was clear that Otto Miller was starting to level off and I caught up with one of my teammates just before the checkpoint.
Water. Coca-Cola. Sandwiches. Men and women in salt-crusted spandex were thrown randomly across the grass and pine needles like a bus crash of Mouseketeer colors all over the landscape and at the far edge of it, I found my team.
“You guys, I don’t know…” I began.
“They’re cutting this thing short” Chip said from behind his water bottle. They’re making us just ride in from here. You were saying?”
“I…don’t know…where the sandwiches are.”
If I’ve had a more satisfying can of Coke, I can’t remember the circumstances.
The rolling of Skyline, the mind-bending descent of Newberry, and bit more hideous traffic on Highway 30 later, we found ourselves in an all-out battle with another team for the last few miles and managed to edge them at the finish. We finished with all six riders, which was something not many teams managed, so that felt good.
I can already feel it slipping away, the memory of all that sucked about the day. Sometime around May or June, the Rapha Gentlemen’s Race might even sound like a good idea again.
