Bike (Down to Franklin and Then Back Up North) to Work Day

One of my resolutions for this year was to ride my bicycle in to work at least one day every week ... at least, for those weeks that I plan on coming in to work. I mean, we're going to take a week at the beach in July, but I'm not planning to bike in to the office from there that Wednesday.

So far this year, I've met my goal for all weeks but one, and that time I had a medical excuse. A bicycle-human contact points that shall not be named developed something that the doctors had to put me on antibiotics and anti-inflammatories to combat, and I wanted to heal up enough to do a 400K that weekend. Since I've had a couple of other weeks when lots of people didn't even drive to work, and other weeks when I had already doubled up on my bike rides in to the office, I'm not going to count that week off.

As someone who regularly commutes by bike, then, you can imagine my reaction to the League of American Bicyclist's Bike to Work Week. As an English major and a grammar nut, my initial reaction is to tell them to hyphenate properly ... Bike-to-Work Week. But nobody listens to the English major, just as nobody pays attention to the cyclist on the shoulder of the highway.

Waa-waa, boo-hoo. Somebody call a waambulance.

Back to the point, though. I actually do get a little excited about Bike to Work (sic) Day ... oooh, that makes it a Sic Day ... so I don't have to go to work?

I get excited about ... well, that day ... because there are a lot of people that actually do bike in to work that normally do not, either on that day or on some other day of Bike Week. As a human being (really ... I have papers) I prefer to immerse myself in a society, and a Society of Cyclists is not just good alliteration, it's a safety buffer. If there are other cyclists biking in to work with me, then motorists are more likely to be aware of us, and maybe give us a little more room on the road. Maybe this is because at some point we constitute a Bike Gang, and everyone knows that you can't just have a fight with just one Hell's Angel. You start something with one bicyclist, it's very possible a whole bunch of us will start flailing at you with our vestigial arms, and that will tickle.

So, Friday being ... you know ... the folks at Walk/Bike Nashville asked some of the more experienced cyclists in the area to lead groups of commuters in to downtown. I was the best that they could come up with on short notice, so they got me to lead the group coming in from Franklin.

Now, the RandoCave is not in Franklin. It's actually in East Brentwood, hidden beneath a glacial lake in a dormant volcano. (I won't say any more than that ... too many clues and it won't be a secret lair, eh?) I suppose that I could have put a bike on the back of the Watzzwagon and driven down to Franklin for this, but that seemed contrary to the spirit of the thing. So, I got up ridiculously early Friday morning, and rode my single-speed commuter the 15 miles to Franklin.

Keepin' it real, man.

I have to admit that, on the way, I was thinking that this was a fool's errand. When I lead this ride last year, nobody showed up, and I felt pretty stupid leading myself in to downtown. The whole thing was made even more ridiculous by the fact that I don't even work downtown, and so ended up retracing my ride 10 miles southeast from the capitol before I could begin my workday.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I got to the Starbuck's in Franklin just before 6 am and there was actually a cyclist waiting. Imagine my shock when I realized that it was ultra-cyclist George Hiscox, who lives in Jackson, TN.

George is a high-school physics teacher in Jackson, but was in town for a curriculum conference at the capitol. He had heard that I would be leading this ride, and had stayed the night in Franklin just so he could ride in with me.

After grabbing a coffee refill, we started north on Hwy 31. We were running a little behind, but didn't pick up any other riders until we got to Brentwood. There, Dave Perrault -- another ultra-cyclist -- joined us.

As we continued north, the three of us saw a lot of other cyclists with backpacks heading south, obviously commuting to work. Cars passed us with a decent gap, the weather was excellent, and the world seemed a pretty good place. Soon, we got to the park on Church Street, just down from the capitol building, where Walk/Bike Nashville had a tent with more coffee and Krispy Kreme donuts.

We stood around and chatted with the other riders, periodically telling homeless people passing by that no, they could not have a donut. Then, Mayor Karl Dean came down and gave a speech about bike lanes and greenways and healthy initiatives, and how Tennessee was one of the most obese states in the nation, and that we needed to find alternative methods of transportation. It was definitely preaching to the choir, but there were also news cameras, so hopefully the message will stick with somebody who needs it.

The crowd then broke up as we left for our offices. Some folks actually worked nearby, but Dave works near where he had joined George and I. We rolled back down Hwy 31 for about five miles in light traffic, and then I split for the bike route on Thompson Lane.

Sure, my normal ride to the office is 27 miles shorter, but it was nice having company on the way in Friday, and it felt good to "make a statement" regarding alternative transportation and the rights of cyclists to use the roads. Maybe I'm fooling myself, but it's possible that Friday showed some more folks that they really can get to and from work on a bicycle. One less car is worth one less hour of sleep for me.

Missing the Turn

I hate missing a turn on a brevet.

For those of you who aren't randonneurs, when you miss a turn on a brevet you usually end up retracing your steps back to where you screwed up, and then get back on the route. We call it "bonus miles." You may be at the control, but if you didn't get there the way you were supposed to get there, you have to go back. On really long brevets, this can mean an extra 20 miles or more ... that's not just 20 miles more in your legs, it's the lost time that it takes you to ride those 20 extra miles. That's hours of sleep that you won't get or -- worse of all -- missing the closing time at a control, and not getting credit for the ride.

Fortunately, this past weekend I didn't ride any brevets, because I missed a lot of turns.

Saturday, RandoGirl and I rode the tandem on the Big Hill Challenge out in Watertown, TN. This is the annual century hosted by the Veloteers, and uses some of the same roads as a 200K that we often run.

It was a drizzly day, but we like to support our fellow cycling clubs, so a bunch of us from the Harpeth Bicycle Club went out. Most of the time, RandoGirl and I were with Jeff Bauer and Fredia Barry on Jeff's tandem, although we did a couple of long stretches either by ourselves or with some other HBC folks. It was just RandoGirl and I when we went up Big Hill Road, and we preferred that since we like to keep our suffering to ourselves. After that, we were chased by possibly every dog in Wilson County as we zipped along the ridge, and thus decided to find strength in numbers for the last 50 miles of the ride.

About mile 90 (I think), it was just the tandems, and we somehow missed a turn. We knew that we had missed it when we got to an intersection and there were no arrows.

Now, again, if this was a brevet, we would have turned around and gone back looking for the correct turn. But this was a "t-shirt ride," and the sign at the intersection said to turn right to get back to Watertown.

So we did.

Of course, the road was a little busy, so we soon started looking for arrows indicating where we were supposed to have turned. About two miles in, we found the painted road markings and turned left, thinking that we were now back on the route.

Maybe we were, and maybe we weren't, but after a couple of miles the route looked familiar. I recognized a turn from our outbound trek in the morning, and kept looking for other arrows indicating "Inbound" or "Return." Nothing. Finally, at mile 100, we pulled out RandoGirl's GPS and checked it, just to discover that we were steadily moving away from Watertown.

Uh-oh.

After a brief discussion, we decided to retrace our route. We then started down another way, thinking it might be the turn that we had missed. The GPS advised against it. So we decided to head back to the busy road that we knew went to Watertown. The GPS said that it would be shorter to make an unmarked left turn. Since the arrows from our outbound route that morning came from that road, we opted to follow the commands of our new robotic master, and turned left.

Eventually, we got back to Watertown, with a nice 111-mile century under our belts. Hooray.

You would think that doing 111 miles on a blustery mid-May day would have been enough, right? Well, Sunday morning Jeff and I drove out to Cookeville -- through lots of rain and wind and unseasonable cold -- to ride.

This time, the goal was to test some roads that I want to use on my as-yet-unfiled Honest Abe 200K permanent. Basically, I wanted to see what a road looked like that Google maps had suggested.

The weather was dismal, so we hedged our bets and drove down to Gainesboro rather that park at the "official" start location in Cookeville. As we turned on the new part of the course, Big Bottom Road (makes you think of that Queen song, doesn't it?), I thought that we had a winner. It was beautiful ... running within sight of the Cumberland river, with just enough roll to make things interesting, and plenty of trees to keep it cool. We could hear the rain start up again at times, but the trees kept us moderately drier as we cycled down the traffic-free road.

About nine miles in, we discovered why the road had been so empty when the pavement suddenly ended. The surface was fairly good, with well-packed gravel, so we kept going. A truck came along, and stopped just past us to move a fallen branch. We talked to the driver, who told us about the bridge that had been washed out and replaced up ahead, and where we should keep watch on the right for some nesting eagles. He then drove on, heading for some early Sunday fishing.

The road was still gorgeous ... just not paved. We shifted down and stayed there, riding more like mountain bikers than randonneurs, avoiding the loose gravel patches and feathering brakes down most of the short descents. We forded one rocky stream, and walked our bikes over two rickety bridges. It was muddy -- as you would expect after three days of rain -- but not so bad that it gummed up our drivetrains or other components.

We continued straight off of Big Bottom Road onto Brimstone Creek Road, and then came to a field where dogs were chasing two horses, trying to get them back to a corral. A lady on a four-wheeler passed us, told us not to worry about the dogs, and then zoomed off after her horses. Just past this, the pavement returned, and one of the dogs trotted after us as we started up a mean one-mile climb. He wasn't looking for trouble so much as he was looking for company, and turned back for home just before we all reached the top.

After rolling past more farms, we soon reached the store that I had planned to use as the control for this route: Cherry's Grocery in Moss, TN. Run by Mr. Cherry and his wife, he fixed Jeff and I an excellent turkey and cheese sandwich, then hung out on the front porch for a while talking about working for a Nashville grocery chain 40 years ago, and a girl that he had met before the war. A customer came in, and we had to roll on down the road, so he headed back inside. We told him we would be back.

There were times on the gravel when I thought that we might have made a wrong turn, but we stuck with it. What Jeff and I found is that sometimes a wrong turn is the right way to go.