Sally and I did the 2011 New York City Tour de Cure last Sunday. As I’ve mentioned before, the Tour de Cure is a charity bike ride done to support the American Diabetes Association (ADA), a research and advocacy organization that seeks to end the threat of diabetes in America. Sally and I aren’t diabetic, but when we learned that my company was putting a team together for the ride, we joined up immediately. Really, it was a no-brainer. We like to ride, and especially in the wake of my mother’s death, I find it easy to support all manner of health conscious causes.
Fund Raising
By far the hardest part of the ride, at least for me, was finding sponsors and raising money. Going hat-in-hand to look for money just wasn’t easy. I mean, I don’t mind doing fundraisers like selling Girl Scout cookies, but when you do that, you are at least selling something. Folks get something in return for their money. With the Tour de Cure, we had to straight-up ask people for donations, and I found that awkward. Granted, the ADA is a good cause—I wouldn’t have ridden the ride if it wasn’t—but still… You never know what someone’s family financials look like, and I definitely didn’t want to put anybody in an awkward position.
With that said, I realized early on that successful fundraising was going to require a lean-forward-in-the-saddle approach. I mean, putting up a couple of Facebook posts and hoping that someone would donate is fine and all, but it wasn’t by any means all that there was to raising money. That said, I also didn’t have to go door-to-door much. Several friends donated generously, and some whom I suspect had to struggle to make a donation still came through. I quickly passed the minimum goal of $150 and increased my goal to $250. But even that soon fell by the wayside, and in the end, I wound up with a full $500 in donations—and a presumably awesome commemorative biking jersey as a “thank you” gift from the ADA, though that has yet to actually arrive at the house.
Pre-Ride
The weirdest thing about the Tour de Cure was that it wasn’t a race. It was a ride. No time was kept, nobody paid attention to where we finished, and there were at least a half-dozen rest stops sprinkled intermittently across the route. This encouraged us to sign up for relatively long rides and feel good about doing it, but at the same time, it was a weird approach to riding—at least for me. But it didn’t suck or anything. Honestly, it was kind of a nice change of pace. Knowing that we weren’t racing, Sally and I went ahead and worked out per our normal schedule during the week leading up the race, and I even put in some speed work in the pool followed by a short run on Saturday before the event. After that, we ran errands, worked around the house, and generally did what we normally do… despite the fact that we both had a daunting ride ahead of us Sunday morning.
We got up Sunday morning at our regular 5:00 am wake-up time, loaded up the bikes, and got on the road by 5:30 am. I drove us down to the City without issue, and by 6:45, we were parked at the 54thStreet Pier and ready to start setting up for the ride. I ended up making multiple trips back and forth from the car to the staging area—and to the bathroom, given the amount of Gatorade and coffee I put down before the ride started—but by 7:30 I was lined up and ready to start my first metric century. For better or worse, Sally’s 30-miler started 90-minutes after mine, so I can only assume that she made the car-bike-car trek an additional million times given all the paperwork and whatnot we had to turn in before the race.
The Ride
At last we lined up, stretched en-mass, and then studied our route sheets briefly before heading out. Up to this point, I’d been wondering how fast I was gonna need to ride in order to keep up with the peleton, figuring that any group of 62-milers was probably gonna average at least 17.5 mph for the course of the ride. I kind of figured that I’d just do my best to hold the wheel of the next closest guy, and if I eventually fell off the back, well, I’d survive the experience. Certainly it wouldn’t be the first time I’d been ejected off the back of a fast-paced group ride.
Which is why I was shocked when my first mile out of the gate put me easily out in front of the rest of the peleton. And I didn’t head out fast at all! I took it out at an easy 17 or maybe 17.5 mph, looked back, saw everyone kind of malingering back there, slowed down to wait and see if folks were gonna catch up, and then, finally, just started riding on my own at a comfortable pace. I figured that if folks wanted to come on up and help with the pace-making, then that was fine. Otherwise I’d just ride out at my own tempo, the same as I do most every other time I ride. Eventually a couple of guys did show up, and we road together some, but it was still a kind of a solitary day.
The route took us up Riverside Drive in Manhattan to the George Washington Bridge. We crossed the footpath on the Upper Level and then headed down and around and onto 9W. From there, we continued north for maybe 10 miles—all the way to Nyack. It was pretty. The guy I road with at this point let me do most of the pace-making, but he led some, and it was nice to get a break. Still, I don’t think he was comfortable riding close enough to actually use my draft because he kept falling so far back that he then had trouble keeping up, even when I was going the same pace he’d been going previously. In the meantime, we talked—triathlon, the civil war, standard cavalry tactics. Whatever. He told me he’s getting ready to go to Penn for his MBA. Up to this point, the ride was gently rolling hills with one beautiful, screaming decent into the first rest stop where we actually stopped, the one at around mile-20.
After the break, we mounted and rode through Nyack, which on that day was a literal biker’s paradise. Maybe 5-miles in, we hit our first real climb—steep but short—and I felt strong enough to power through it out of the saddle. Still, by the time we hit the 35-mile mark, we’d done several more little climbs, and I was feeling it. There was a rest stop scheduled for the 37-mile mark, and I found myself awaiting it eagerly. Only I rode past it and didn’t see it. So then I had to wait for the next one, at mile-43, and by that time I HAD to stop because I was out of Gatorade.
At this point, things got a little weird. I was the first one into the rest stop, and I stopped and stretched and looked for Gatorade, but they didn’t have any. In fact, they didn’t have any supplies at all! So I eventually filled up with water from a hose and just hoped that my one remaining Gu would be enough to get me through the last 20-miles or so without bonking.
Eventually, we headed out, me and my friend from before, with him leading. He led maybe 5-miles, and then I took over and started riding, and when I looked back, I’d somehow managed to drop the poor guy. Damn it! After that, we hit the only real climb of the day, a climb that MapMyRide.Com claimed was 1.5-miles at about a 3% grade (Cat-5, if you’re wondering). Now ordinarily I would take that in stride, but as this was now mile-50 of a 62-mile effort, I’ll confess that I ended up having to put it in my Granny Gear and creep up the hill rather than powering up with anything like confidence or panache. I hated having to do that—and lose the accompanying style points—but I was tired.
Part of the problem, I think, was that I’d had to switch over to water from Gatorade, meaning that I was no longer refreshing my blood glucose at the rate I usually use when I ride. According to the May issue of Competitor magazine, a guy about my size and weight needs to take in between 61g and 87g of carbohydrates (mostly sugar) per hour during an extended period of exercise. I’ve been a triathlete for a few years, and what this means for me in practice is that I need to put down at least a full 22 oz bottle of Gatorade every hour, and I need to eat a Gu about every 45-minutes. And if I don’t, my blood sugar is gonna fall off a cliff at about the 90-minute mark, leaving me feeling “dead” as Hell. So, bottom line, I made it up the big climb okay, but it took most of my blood glucose reserves to do it, and after that I had one 25g Gu left to get me through the next hour of riding. This was not a great way to end the ride, and unfortunately I didn’t have the math-power left in my brains to figure out all the implications at the time. If I had, I’d have slowed down right then and there.
But I didn’t. And by the time I got to within about 12-or-so-miles of the finish, I felt good enough to start picking up the pace. I soon latched onto the back of a random group of riders heading back into the City and let them tow me the last couple of miles to the GWB. A cute girl latched onto my wheel in turn, we exchanged a few words, and I found myself to be pretty happy with how the day was going. But eventually I got bored with that, and as we turned onto Riverside Drive—maybe four miles from home—I attacked. We came around a corner, I got up out of the saddle, and I dropped those chumps like they were standing still. But that, unfortunately, burned pretty much all of the rest of my blood glucose, and by the time I’d covered another mile, I was getting passed by not only the cute girl from before but also by one of the other guys in the 62-mile Tour de Cure! So here I was, having led the ride for at least 50-miles, and now I’d exploded myself—out of pure idiot boredom—with less than five miles to go!
My man made his move on a little hill, and I just could not follow it. I watched helplessly as he pulled away, and in fact, with or without this one rival those last 3 miles were destined to be pure, unadulterated Hell. By the time I got into Pier 54, my legs were cramping, and my butt was rubbed raw. My bike computer read 64.77 miles total for the day. All things considered, it was a rather inglorious ending to an otherwise perfectly enjoyable day.
Post-Ride
I was the second one back from my group, and when I got back, barely anyone from any group—mine or anyone else’s—was anywhere to be seen. I got a massage, ate an apple, listened to the band, and watched for Sally. And I watched for Sally some more. And I watched. And watched. Etc.
As it turns out, Sally’s 30-mile ride group got lost in Manhattan, and they were literally the last group in. Which gave me time to get a rub-down, of course, but still… By the time she showed up, I was thoroughly concerned.
Final Thoughts
There’s not much else to tell. This wasn’t a race, no one kept time, and no one cared that I was the second one in. I got a couple of nice T-Shirts, one from my company and one from the race itself. And, of course, they still owe me a cycling jersey. But really, all in all, this was nothing but a long training ride for me, albeit one that I did for a good cause. At this point, I feel good about the way I’m riding, and I feel ready for my next race, whatever that happens to be.
Everything beyond that is gravy.
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