“I can’t deny that cancer got a piece of me last time,” Armstrong said. “A big piece of me. I think about it every day. But once I got done with cancer, it was nowhere to be found. It disappeared. Well, cancer, you know where to find me. I can beat you again in six—no, in three months.”
“I want cancer,” Armstrong added. “I want cancer so bad I can almost taste it.”
Cancer, the much-feared disease that has defeated legendary athletes such as Floyd Patterson, Lyle Alzado, and Walter Payton, is the second-leading cause of death in the United States, and is 0-1 when battling Lance Armstrong.
First, the basics for those who might be interested in the story but not so interested that they’d entertain the notion of getting on a bicycle themselves for three or four days and pedaling from long before dawn to well after dark: The Colorado Last Chance Randonée is a 1,200-kilometer ride from the Boulder, Colorado, area to north-central Kansas and back; the event has a 90-hour limit, meaning you have to finish the 750 miles in six hours less than four days to have your result recognized by the people who recognize such things. What that boils down to is the necessity to ride 200 miles a day, on average, day after day after day after day. And you do it because? Because it’s a challenge to get it done and I’m not doing other challenging things like — well, you can fill in the blank.
As I explained earlier, I was riding the event in a two-part formal: a 1,000-kilometer (623-mile) portion that would allow me to qualify for a long-distance cycling award, and a finishing 200-kilometer portion. For whatever reason, my left Achilles tendon became very painful about 40 miles from the end of the 1,000; I managed to finish that, but didn’t do the final 200. I finished riding Friday, September 15; I went to the Last Chance dinner in greater Boulder on Saturday, the 16th; I flew home to Berkeley on Sunday, the 17th; on Saturday, the 23rd, I took my bike out of its case and put it back together and went for a ride, wanting to see how the Achilles is doing. Still hurts. It might be a while before I do another long ride. We’ll see.
Anyway, here (follow the link) is the rest of the Last Chance story, all however-many episodes.
Here’a a Flickr photo album I just put together of last week’s ride: Colorado Last Chance Randonnee. It begins to give a flavor of the thing. More (words, if not pictures) to come.
A line of thunderstorms rolls across plains north of U.S. 36 east of Denver, September 2006.
For now, I mean.
My ride actually ended Friday evening. I was doing the 1,200 kilometers as a two-part event: 1,000 kilometers — 623 miles in plain American English — followed by 200 kilometers (125 miles or so). The reason that option is offered is that people unbalanced enough to want to try this kind of thing in the first place will take recognition for their efforts where they can find it; and one place they can find it is the Audax Club Parisien, the group that sponsors Paris-Brest-Paris and sanctions all the qualifying events for PBP all over the world. ACP has an award called the Randonneur 5000 medal that’s bestowed upon riders who have done a specified series of events within a 4-year time frame: PBP, a 1,000-kilometer brevet, a full brevet series (a 200, 300, 400 and 600) during a single year, and a 24-hour ride called a Fleche Velochio that covers at ledast 360 kilometers; the total of all that and other qualifying rides done in the four-year qualifying period needs to total 5,000 kilometers or more. Arcane enough? So: Clubs put on 1,000s, or offer a 1,000-200 option during their 1,200s, to accommodate riders trying for the Randonneur 5000 award. In my case, I’d done all the other rides but the 1,000, so completing that will get me the medal once I jump through the paperwork hoops set up to make sure you’re really serious about getting it.
So, my ride ended Friday, not Saturday, when the 1,200 officially ended, and here’s why: About 40 miles before reaching the 1,000-kilometer mark of the ride, my left Achilles tendon began to hurt. By then, just about everything else was hurting to some extent, too. But this pain gradually made it harder for me to pedal. I made it to a checkpoint 20 miles short of the 1,000 mark and iced down my heel, then started to ride again. The pain was worse. I knew I could make 1,000, but I was getting slower and slower. My riding partner for most of the event went on, since she had a deadline of her own to make. At one point, I had to get off the bike and walk it to the top of one of the hills on the route, then coast down the other side. But at 5:15 in the afternoon, I made it to the little crossroads of Last Chance, Colorado, the designated finish for the 1,000.
I tried using my cellphone to call in to the next checkpoint, a motel about 35 miles away, to see if it was possible to get a ride out. I couldn’t get through, so I continued west. A couple of hours later, one of the ride support people showed up in a pickup to give me a ride into town. But I’d covered another 15 miles in my halting, soft-pedaling fashion, had been enjoying the view of a big line of thunderstorms moving across the route about 10 miles ahead, and had started to feel like I could ride into the checkpoint. The support guy, Ben, said to go ahead and try, and he would just hang out until I decided to bail or go for it. I covered another 5 miles. I flatted the front tire after hitting a rock on a fast descent. I changed the tube and went on, but the leg problem was getting worse. So at about 7:30 or so, and still about 15 miles from the checkpoint, I “abandoned.”
Got the 1,000 covered, though, and that’s what I came for. Glad to have it done. More on this coming after I fly back to the Bay Area this afternoon.
Eve of the Last Chance Randonnee: The drop bags are all packed, my bike is ready, and in an ideal world I would have been asleep hours ago for my 3 a.m. ride start here I’m always surprised at how many details there are to take care of and how damned slow and/or disorganized and/or frazzled I always seem to be as zero hour approaches. Things always get better when the ride starts, at least until my ass starts hurting. Which reminds me I thought of writing a nice little post on the Top However Many Dreads that afflict one before starting a long-distance ride. There’s no time now for the wonderful artful one I composed in my head, but here’s the outline:
1. You’re just not up to the ride. Not fit, not physically prepared. The ride will be pure misery because of that and you won’t manage to finish.
2. You’ll suffer some bad physical breakdown: maybe your knees, though my thoughts tend to settle on the sitting part of my anatomy.
3. You’ll hit some dreadful weather that will turn the ride into a trail of tears. The two top characters in my awful weather fantasy — given I’m a habitue of mild California — are rain and headwinds. Of the severe, unceasing variety of course.
4. Your bike will break down. It’s happened to me once or twice.
That’s enough. I need to sleep. If I can check in from the road, I will.
Uni is what’s left of United Airlines after you subract Ted, whatever that is (I’ve never flown Ted, but gather it’s the kinda cool pared-down Southwest-like version of United; one shudders at the thought). I’ve flown United for years and years; one of the big things it has going for it is that it has skads of flights between San Francisco and Oakland to O’Hare, and it’s usually cheaper than those alternatives that don’t force you to connect or fly overnight.
To save money and help cut its workforce, Uni (and most of its competitors) push online reservations and checkin. That’s great if you don’t need to check a bag; you print out a boarding pass at home and go directly to the security checkpoint when you get to the airport. If you’re one of those who needs to check bags — more and more of us in the new no-fluids-in-the-cabin era — the check-in process is pretty bad, at least in Oakland.
On the Friday before Labor Day weekend, United’s “Easy Check-In, with Baggage” lines were ridiculous — at 5 a.m. It only took a minute to see why. The scores of people waiting to check bags were being served by three or four clerks. Luckily, I got moved through the line because my flight was only an hour off — only an hour! — and they wanted to get all the baggage on board.
Today, the Easy Check-In, with Baggage line was a lot less intense at first glance. Maybe 15 people in line, some who had already gone through the automatged check-in process and were just waiting for some kind Uni soul to come along and tag their bags so they could go to their gates. This time, though, just one person was working the half-dozen kiosks at the counter. She was doing double duty trying to take care of someone whose flight had been canceled. Another worker was dealing at length with the two people in the first-class line; she wasn’t in a hurry to address the plebeian mini-throng growing at the counter. Meantime, a supervisor type and another worker were standing behind the counter beneath three signs that said “Economy Check In/Position Open.” When I approached them and asked whether I could check in at that counter, the supervisor guy gave me a look like he had caught the scent of dog crap and said, “No.” After a few more minutes of conversation, he went over and talked to the lone worker at the Easy Check-In desk, then said, “See you later,” and sauntered past the people waiting along the counter without a word to them.
In the end, it was really no big deal to me. The reason I have time to sit and write about it now is that my flight to Denver, where I’m going to ride my bike, is two hours late. And the experience was not entirely negative: I admired the patience and aplomb of the single counter worker who managed to deal with a lot of impatient stares without losing her cool; it was pretty impressive. But Uni — what are you trying to do? Make me find another airline?
It’s very quiet here. Thom just returned to Oregon; he and Kate left with a minivan-load full of stuff yesterday morning, and he’s busy getting his house set up in Eugene. Kate’ll be back this evening. Scout, the dog, is morose.
I just came back from Chicago — well, I came back on Tuesday. Tomorrow, I’m flying to Denver to do a 90-hour, 750-mile ride, the Colorado Last Chance 1200. That’s a staggering thought, actually; I was on a waiting list and didn’t really expect to get in. Then on Thursday, I got an email saying a spot had opened up. I trained to do one of these long rides this year and was hoping to do the Cascade 1200 in Washington state. But I fell off my bike three weeks before that event and wasn’t really healed completely when the time came to ride (what I missed was four days of very tough and very, very hot riding). But over the summer, I got back into a pretty good riding rhythm and now I’m going to Colorado.
The route is through eastern Colorado and out into northern Kansas, principally on U.S. 36 ((the Kansas portion of the route has its own booster’s association, which is planning a weekend of garage sales from one end of the highway to the other starting next Friday: “The First Annual Great U.S. Highway 36 Treasure Hunt.” The easternmost point in the ride, Kensington, Kansas, is in Smith County; back in America’s 48-state days, the county was the site of the geographical center of the United States, near the town of Lebanon. This is a part of the country that has been losing people for over a century. For instance, census numbers show Smith County’s population fell more than 75 percent between 1900 (when there were 16,384 residents recorded ) and 2005 (4,121, down 9 percent just since 2000). You could pick almost any county out there in the dry Plains and find the same story. So then you get attractions like the Great Treasure Hunt as a way of drawing people out there to see what they’re missing (lots of fresh air, lots of room, lots of quiet, lots of homes that look cheap by comparison with what big-city folks are used to. The problem is, people who say they’d like all that, and I’m one, would like all that in moderation or in carefully controlled doses; and they still need someplace to go to work to support their wide-open-spaces lifestyle.
Looking forward to seeing it all, though, even though I think I’ll miss the Great Treasure Hunt
Looking for route information for a Chicago-area bike ride, I came across this dark, ironic and bitterly funny highway-safety site from the Chicagoland Bicycle Federation: drivewithcare.org. It pitches “Bob Fuller’s Roadside Memorials,” a service that promises careless drivers a way to show they regret killing people along the road:
“If you drive carelessly in the City, eventually you’ll kill somebody. When you do, turn to us. Just call from the scene. We’ll deliver a fitting handmade Roadside Memorial in 30 minutes or less. Choose from our handcrafted collection, or personalize your own. A Bob Fuller Roadside Memorial is a tribute to the person you killed. A way to say, ‘I’m sorry.’
Motorist/killers can choose from several themed memorials, including “The Jogger” ($19.95 — comes with a pair of used running shoes draped around a centerpiece cross).
Saturday I drove up to Napa to spend the night at my friend Pete‘s house. The idea was to get up there so that we could get an early start for this morning’s Tour of Napa Valley, an annual 100-mile ride up and down the valley and in the hills to the east and west. We hit the road with Pete’s friend and wine-industry colleague Peter Marx at just after 6:30 a.m. Pete’s half-serious goal was to finish the ride in six hours, which is a little faster than I’ve ever done a century.
The route starts with about 10 miles of perfectly flat valley-floor road for a warmup — a warmup needed especially this morning because it was foggy and chilly. Then it heads up Mount Veeder, a long gradual climb (about 1,300 feet in all) that gets steep in the last mile and a half or so. That’s followed by a short descent, short climb, then a long, steep, twisting, technical descent, another very short rise, then a long, straightforward downhill run back into Napa. After that, you cross the valley and head up one of the two main north-south routes, Silverado Trail (the other is Highway 29). It’s a flat to slightly rolling ten miles, followed by a short, gradual climb on Highway 128 up to a small reservoir (Lake Hennessey), then a longer but also gentle uphill along one of the creek’s that flows into the lake. The lunch stop was at mile 66 in Pope Valley, a still pretty remote ranching and wine-growing area; after that, there’s a moderate four-mile climb up a road called Ink Grade (rule of thumb: anything with “grade” in its name means you’re going to work), and after that two or three miles of hilltop rollers before a long, very fast descent back toward the valley. Eventually, you wind up back on Silverado Trail, southbound this time, and it takes you nearly all the way back to the start.
Did we make it in six hours? Not quite. There was just enough hill-climbing to keep the linebacker types, like me, from going real fast. I descend like a safe coming down the road on casters — very elegant. But my advantage comes on long, flat stretches where I can just get out and motor; I’ve gotten pretty good at maintaining a pace — not racing speed; more like taking-care-of-business speed. We all worked pretty hard all day and made it in just over six and a half hours. Bottom line: We were still having fun at the end.
This is where sports is headed: The World Anti-Doping Agency, a Big Brotherish creation of the International Olympic Committee set up in 1999 to ensure that athletes don’t use illegal steroids and the like. The agency’s motto: Play True. The unspoken part: Or Else.
Of course, the aim is noble. “Play true” is a wonderful sentiment, and one that every competitor and fan would embrace. The “or else” part is troublesome, though. You have to wonder whether it’s any more possible to create an absolutely clean, level playing field in sports than it is to keep drugs off the streets. How far do you go, how intrusive do you get, in pursuit of that goal? Do you throw out the notion of due process or the presumption of innocence — quaint notions, those — in the hunt for bad actors?
True or False? If a Doping Control Officer comes to your home to conduct an out of competition test, it is okay for you to leave the room alone to make a cup of tea or run an errand.
False. It is important that you protect the integrity of your sample by staying in full view of the Doping Control Officer at all times until the test is complete. If you need to leave the room, tell the Doping Control Officer who will go with you.
