On the Road Again

Wish me luck! I'm training for a four-day bicycle tour in Maryland.

I've been bicycling for decades, and my "holy grail" of cycling is the multi-day bike tour. Mr. Y and I took one together in Vermont in the early 1990s, and I loved it. Not sure he loved it as much as I did, but he loves ME, and we had ourselves a nice little vacation together, along with our bikes. It's true what they say--"Vermont ain't flat." But it's also true that what goes up a long, murderous hill with what you'd swear is an 80% grade must come down the other side, crunched into a racer's crouch and flying at an unbelievable screaming pace. I swear I heard the music from the witch's ride through the tornado in The Wizard of Oz playing in my head as I flew down the steepest hills, grinning like a fool--savoring my reward for having scaled that mountain at my back.

That tour featured lodgings at a charming New England B&B (the setting, in fact, for the Newhart show). This being Mr. Y's first experience with a B&B, he was surprised to find our room had no television, no telephone, no mini-bar, and, in the cool New England mountain summer, no air conditioning. (Guess I could've warned him, but what fun would that have been?) His initial dismay vanished, however, after our first day in the saddle. As he told our fellow riders over ice-cold beers at the end of the day's ride, "No TV, no phone, and no air conditioning, but boy was I glad to see this place after a 40-mile day on my bike!" Roger that.

Fast forward to 2002. We hadn't been on a bike tour since that first one. I'd done a few metric century rides (100k or 65 miles in a day) for charities, but no multi-day tours. It was the year of my 50th birthday, and I wanted to mark it somehow--somehow other than the big birthday party that Mr. Y and friends made for me. So I signed up with Womantours, a company that runs bike tours exclusively for women, for a week-long tour on the Katy Trail--a Rails-to-Trails bike trail of 200+ miles in Missouri. I was enormously excited, and kept to a strict training schedule so I'd be able to enjoy the tour to the fullest extent possible. Rail trails are relatively flat--generally no steeper grade than about 5%--but I WAS almost 50, and I figured the easier the riding, the more fun it would be.

But again, that was the summer of 2002. Remember what happened in September 2001? In many ways, the pall of 9/11 still hung over our nation 6 months later and travel was at an alarming low. People just weren't signing up for bike tours very much that summer, so my tour had to be cancelled for lack of participation.

I was crushed.
I was heartbroken.
I was 50 without a bike tour.
I settled for a metric century in September, and figured I'd go for it again the following year--surely people would have begun traveling more by then.

Between health issues and family responsibilities, almost 4 years have passed since then. But this--this is my year. The tour I'm taking is only 4 days--not quite the week I'd originally hoped for--but this is what I can fit in, and I'm not going to miss it again just for the sake of 3 days. Also, with the back problems I've dealt with in the last couple of years, 4 days is probably more appropriate (read "do-able" LOL). Still, I have to keep myself on a solid training schedule. On the tour, mileages for most days are flexible, but our shortest day is 21 miles, while the other days offer mileages from 25 all the way up to 73 miles. Not sure whether I'll want to do the 73, but certainly I'd like to do 30 or 50. And I only have 6 weeks left to train.

The weather has just turned glorious here in the Florida panhandle, so my training period has begun. I've been doing "experimental" rides of 5-6 miles for a week, just getting my back and legs loosened up and checking for unusual aches and pains, gently reintroducing my muscles and joints to this particular activity. And today I did my first 10-mile ride in months. I averaged about 12 mph, which is pretty dismal by racing standards, but not too bad after a winter of almost no riding but what I did on the stationary bike at the gym. My back feels OK, my knees aren't screaming, and though I've availed myself of modern pharmacology in the form of a little Naproxen Sodium tablet, still I don't feel overstressed.

I saw a flock of guinea hens, several pitcher plants (carnivorous plants native to northwest Florida), and a peacock sitting on top of a fence, its long blue-and-green tail cascading down over the bike trail! It was a glorious warm, dry, sunny day with a sky so blue it could break your heart. And I felt like I was 18 again. That's where my body wants to be--on my little bike, flying down a trail.

Anyway, wish me luck in my training efforts and on my tour. Stay tuned for more developments of this particular Work-in-Progress!