The End:
"I’m sorry, Jan, but I’m done for the day." I finally say what I have known for the last 10 miles since we left Shohomish and my stomach reverted to an all-too-familiar nausea. I am only 36 miles from the finish of the SIR 400k, but the cost of finishing has risen beyond my threshold. I’m sitting on the sidewalk in front of the Chevron station on Paradise Lake Road. Jan has just come out of the store, walking past his purple Jack Taylor tandem, bringing me a cup of ice water. He’s not surprised by my announcement and his reaction is completely reasonable. "OK. What do you want to do?" I explain that I will call my wife, Jane, who can pick me up and take me home. Jan can ride the tandem alone to the finish and drive my car to his house. I’ll pick it up tomorrow. Everything will work out fine. Our experiment with riding a tandem fast and far will conclude with negative results, but what is the use of doing experiments if one always knows the outcome? Obviously, some of them turn out in ways you don’t prefer.
I call Jane on the telephone and she sounds concerned but not overly so. I have to hurry the end of the conversation because my stomach is churning. I hang up the phone, kneel on the concrete and vomit. "I guess that means I made the right decision," I think to myself. When I had vomited back in Snohomish my nausea had eased and I thought that my stomach would be able to handle plain water, taken little sips at a time. Clearly I had been wrong.
Jan offers to stay with me until Jane gets here, but I don’t know what he can do to help, and daylight is wasting. I tell him I’ll be fine and send him off to pedal the tandem up the hill alone. I do feel a little better, but every sip of water is a struggle with my stomach. I start thinking about what I’m going to do when Jane gets here. The options seem to be getting narrower all the time.
The Middle:
Riding a tandem down a long mountain-pass descent is almost like cheating. The speed comes easily and we are tucked and flying down the moderate grades and easily spinning out a 54-13 gear on the sections where the gradient decreases to relatively mild levels. The altitude gains that took big chunks of time spin away in mere minutes as we leave Swauk Pass behind and rush north toward Highway 2 and a left turn to Leavenworth. It’s a beautiful day, the warmest this year in Washington, and I can smell the distinctive scent of the dry pine forests of the Eastern Cascades. It’s a different world from the rampant green moistness of the West-side that we had left behind this morning after climbing Snoqualmie Pass and will enter again after crossing Stevens Pass.
I’m disappointed to see the junction with Highway 2. The descent is over and another uphill stretch awaits us. Still, the true climbing won’t begin for awhile, and the flats go by quickly on the tandem. "Two down and one to go," is my optimistic thought, although I know that shorter, steeper hills wait for us on the greener side of the mountains. We are about 100 miles into the ride and are averaging over 19mph. It’s still easy to be optimistic at this point.
Jan is eager to press on and we make a short stop in Leavenworth. I always marvel at the fake Bavarian atmosphere that has been created to lure tourism to this little town founded on timber and fruit orchards. Not much time to soak it in today, although it seems that we hit every red light in town.
It’s about 50 miles to the next control in Skykomish and I make a rough estimate that my bottle and a half of Gatorade will be enough to get there. I don’t take into account the rising thermometer or the amount of climbing ahead. My thoughts are up the road. I’ve been meeting my goal of eating and drinking at a good rate, and I slurp a can of Ensure at the first sign that the climbing toward Stevens Pass has begun. One of the beautiful things you can often experience on mountain highways is a clear, boulder-strewn river running alongside. The Wenatchee River is no exception. It roars over falls in white boils and runs clear and slightly green like old bottle-glass in the deeper, slower sections. For some reason, the road looks like it runs downhill in some places here, but the effort required to pedal and the unending flow of the water argue adamantly otherwise.
The climb up Stevens takes place in full sun and is taking longer than I had so flippantly estimated back in Leavenworth. My bottles are empty and there are more than six miles to climb. Jan and I talk about the snow on the slope above the road on our left, and the rivulets of water running off the rocks. He suggests that the water will be fine and I willingly agree. Traffic is light and we angle across the four lanes of highway and stop on the shoulder. Without thinking, I almost dip water out of the main stream running down the ditch alongside the road, but Jan shouts and points to a small waterfall a few feet away. The water is icy and soaks my gloves as I fill a bottle. Then it’s back on the tandem, across the road, and up the unending gradient. The cold water tastes good, but I’m tiring and getting hot. I touch my temple and my fingers come away white with salt. The dry air of the East-side absorbs sweat quickly and I’ve been losing more liquid than I’ve realized. The optimism of the Swauk Pass descent is fading fast.
The Beginning:
Riding with someone who is faster than you is a lot like being in High School and hanging out with a richer, more sophisticated crowd of kids. In both cases you end up spending resources you don’t really have, you rationalize away well-founded doubts, and sometimes you end up puking in public.
Jan had asked me if I wanted to make an attempt on the Cannonball tandem record back in the fall. I was flattered and intrigued, but a bit hesitant as well. Part of the reason I had started doing rando brevets was to try and find a better balance between my competitive instincts and my enjoyment of simply riding a bicycle -- now I was being offered a chance to set one of the highest goals I had ever attempted. Jan has had high finishes in many of the long rides in the region – Cannonball, S2S, RAMROD – so he was clearly both serious and capable. We have similar riding styles and although riding a tandem slightly muted our mutual strength in climbing, it added greatly to our speed on the descents and flats. After some hesitation, I said I’d do it, with the mutually agreed-on condition that we would ride the 400k together as a test. Now that day is here.
It has not been the ideal training year for record attempts. I was doing well through January and February, but even with my lofty goals, bicycling is not the highest of my life priorities, and those higher priorities have intruded on training time and intensity. This is a new attempt at balance for me. The last time I really set a high athletic goal was in 1991 when I completed Ironman Canada. That year training was my priority. In the past months I have sometimes wished to return to that single-minded focus, and sometimes wished that I had no purpose for getting on my bicycle except the very ride I was about to take. I really was seeing the ride as a test. Not only of how well we would do, but how it would feel. Would it really be fun?
The Epilogue:
About an hour after Jan rides off I’m in the emergency room at University of Washington Medical Center and a liter of saline with dextrose is draining into my arm. Even in the emergency room where strange occurrences are everyday events the nurses give you funny looks when you tell them you got dehydrated riding 210 miles on your bicycle. Adding the small detail that the ride had also included three mountain passes doesn’t help the situation.
A liter of saline takes about 25 minutes to drain into my arm, and I spend enough time on the bed to empty three bags. The doctor gives me some anti-nausea medicine that causes drowsiness and I sleep through most of bag number two. I get up to pee halfway through bag number three, which feels like a pretty big milestone on this very long day. Pretty soon thereafter, I walk out of the emergency room feeling like a very different person than when I came in. A short drive home, a shower I barely remember, and the feel of my cheek on the cool pillow of my bed end the day.
Although I called Jane from Paradise Lake, my experiment as a tandem stoker had really finished on the rollers between Sultan and Snohomish. I wasn’t prepared for the combination of warm weather and exertion. I’ve never been at my best in hot weather, and in retrospect it is also pretty clear that the times I have done events lasting longer than 9 or 10 hours I often seem to have problems. These signs are too foreboding to attempt Cannonball, a race that spends the majority of its 275 miles in the Eastern Washington Desert. It’s hard to give up the goal, but there is also a sense of relief. I learned a lot on this ride. One thing in particular that I will strive to remember in the future is that dehydration is sneaky -- it doesn’t take super-human willpower to push into a dangerous zone. I used to assume that the people who ended up hooked up to IVs were pushing themselves a lot harder than I do. I won’t assume that anymore.
A couple days later, I’m fine. In fact, my legs feel better than they have felt in the past after such a long and hard event. I’ll be back to ride the 600k later this summer, but I’ll be a different rider – a slower, healthier, more realistic rider, enjoying riding my bicycle.