It Was the Best of Roads, It Was the Worst of Roads

This weekend was an opportunity to wander among the myriad roads that flow through middle Tennessee -- sort of like the buffet at the Bellagio, but without George Clooney and Brad Pitt hanging out by the fountains out front, and the pit bosses are dump trucks who think you're counting cards, and some of the entrees are rotten and full of gravel and broken glass.

OK, it was nothing like the buffet at the Bellagio. Actually, cycling probably has absolutely no relationship whatsoever to the buffet at the Bellagio, since the buffet at the Bellagio will tempt you to gain so much weight that you will henceforth push your bicycle up any hill with an incline above, say, that of a buffet table at the Bellagio. I was going for a metaphor here, alright? Plus, this diet has me fantasizing about the buffet at the Bellagio. Especially the dessert table. Mmmm ...

Anyway, something that is almost as pleasant as the buffet at the Bellagio is Spring in middle Tennessee, when it finally turns warm and everything begins to bloom. Of course, that's not what we had this past weekend, since the weather just barely got to 60 degrees and the trees know that if they start anything now the winter that we have had so far will come back with an evil Terminator vengeance and kick their candy roots. So, we had the buffet at Sizzler this past weekend in middle Tennessee.

The soft ice cream at Sizzler is OK, but there's this coconut cake at the Bellagio. Mmmm ...

While I was out and about, I had the chance to ponder some of the finer points of the types of roads that we have here in middle Tennessee.

Crappy Busy Ones

Saturday morning I got to ride on a crappy busy one. I was running late to meet some friends, and had to take Hillsboro Road for a couple of miles.

Now, there are parts of Hillsboro Road that all cyclists should avoid like the plague. I was south of there, on a section that cyclists should avoid like a head cold. There are two lanes, cars are zipping by at 55 mph, there's not much shoulder, and the shoulder that there is has a lot of crap in it.

I rode the mile from Murray Lane down to Sneed. I got the flat just as I was turning onto Sneed. Needless to say, this made me even later to meet my friends.

Good Busy Ones

About an hour later, flat tire fixed and having met up with my friends, we were tooling down towards Leiper's Fork on Old Hillsboro Road, hoping to catch up with another group of cyclists there. Old Hillsboro is a more quiet and winding road, but still busy. Cars come upon you and seem kind of surprised that you are there -- being so audacious as to make you slow down a bit. And then they pass you in less-than-optimal locations.

At this point, it was about 8:30 am. There's no good reason for anybody to have to be hurrying towards Leiper's Fork at that time on a Saturday. They weren't going there for business, and I doubt they were heading home from the grocery store yet. These were, probably, people that were going out to enjoy the warmer weather -- people wanting to have fun. Maybe even fellow cyclists. Would it kill them to be a little more patient, then?

Mean Streets

When we finally got to Leiper's Fork, the group ride had already left. Fortunately, I was with Vida Greer, who knows every road down that way, so she figured out an alternative route that would let us meet up with the big group.

Now, I had foolishly decided to ride my single-speed Salsa Casserole that day, since we were going to try to take it easy. This was fun for most of the route, but in order for us to catch up with the group that we had missed we had to do a few climbs. One of them was cruelly steep -- I got up most of it before chickening out and walking a bit. Fortunately, it was a quiet empty road (I like to think it was too steep for cars, but that's just vanity), so I had a nice walk.

Just before we met up with the rest of the group, we went over another mean little hill with a house right next to the road. Three dogs came boiling from beneath the front porch just as I got to the top, and chased me halfway to the bottom. Fortunately, this put them out of their territory when Vida and Jeff Bauer came along, so they slunk home. This is another example of a mean, quiet road.

Like Butter

Sunday, RandoGirl and I went out to test a 50-mile route that I put together for the Tennessee Tandem Rally in June. We had a couple of Crappy Busy Roads early in the route, followed by a Good Busy Road. Later, we went over Owen Hill Road and then Pull Tight Hill Road, which are both Mean Streets (we didn't have to walk, though, since we had real gears). Then we turned onto a new road I found last summer: Choctaw Road.

Smooth asphalt. Great views. Easy swooping curves. A pretty good climb heading toward Giles Hill, but short enough and steep enough to just be fun.

We came down off of that to Giles Hill, and then headed west on Flat Creek Road (with a name like that, you know it's a good tandem road). A couple of miles later, the sun finally broke through the clouds, and we turned north towards the market at Bethesda.

I got a Zagnut bar there. Maybe not as good as the coconut cake at the Bellagio, but right then it was perfect.

The Guys That Got Me Into This

Saturday, I rode the Watertown 200K with 21 other mildly insane randonneurs, including two of the three Americans who have ridden Paris-Brest-Paris six times: Johhny Bertrand and Tom Gee. I'm not going to say that we all had a great time, because it was still pretty chilly and windy all day, and the Watertown route has some tough hills. But we probably had more fun than the eight folks that rode the 200K earlier this month out of Murfreesboro, in sub-freezing temperatures and near-gale force winds.

In the winter of Snowmageddon, it's all relative.

The real fun part of this brevet for me, however, was that I got to ride most of it with the two guys that I blame -- er, thank -- for getting me into randonneuring:

Bill Glass:

And Jeff Bauer:

No, wait, wrong picture. Here's Jeff:

You can see where I might get confused, however.

Here's Jeff and Bill together:

I'm not going to go into the story of how they lured me into a life of ultracycling. As with most addictions, it began innocuously ... you do a century or two, and then one day you get lost on a century and find that 110 miles isn't that bad. They just showed up at the right place at the right time, telling me that if I enjoyed a century, I would love a 200K. Then, if I thought that was fun, I had to try a 300K.

They never tell you about doing these things in the middle of winter, or about a 400K in a spring hailstorm, or about a 600K in 100-plus temperatures. It's not that they hide the hideous underbelly of this sport ... they just wait until you're addicted to the pain. Then it becomes a matter of bragging rights, and who has survived the worst sh*tstorm.

Anyhow ...

Speaking of surviving, Bob Hess from Knoxville and Steve Phillips from Birmingham decided that this would be a fun brevet for a fixed gear bike. Here's an over-the-should shot of Bob, when he still had knees and could smile.

The Watertown brevet is really one of the prettiest routes that we have. The stretch right past Center Hill Dam is really incredible.

Here's Phil Randall, who came down from Kentucky, crossing the dam.

Followed by Jeff, Bill, and Dave Penegar from Knoxville.

After going through the forest past the dam and back up onto the ridge, I got to talking with Phil, and we missed a turn. The good thing about bonus miles is that they let you see neat things like this funky cabin:

This dog really did not want me to take pictures of his cabin, though.

He stopped barking just long enough to let me get his picture.

Once we were back on route, we caught back up to Jeff and Bill just past Temperance Hill, and rode in with them to the little town of Liberty.

I was starving by the time we got to the control. Here's Bill again, and the middle Tennessee RBA Jeff Sammons.

I don't know who the other two guys were, but they were hanging out there when we came in, and were still there when we left. You seem to get a couple of guys like this at a lot of little convenience stores in small southern towns, and I'm pretty sure that this is their lot in life.

The road from Liberty to Woodbury starts out nice and flat, but pretty soon you've got to go over a nasty little ridge. Bob Hess and I ended up dropping Jeff and Bill here for a bit, and I tried to capture the steepness of this grade with another over-the-shoulder shot.

It gets really steep at the top. Since Bob only had two gears, he had to walk the last part of it.

As I approached the top, I saw that Steve Phillips had been forced to dismount for a bit, too, but was doggedly starting back up. He told us later in the Subway at Woodbury that he was not going to walk it, and he didn't.

Coming down, the wind was blowing up the hollow and making it a rough go. Bob and I stopped a couple of times to admire the ice on the exposed rock along the side of the road.

This frozen waterfall was particularly nifty.

Just past this, Jeff and Bill joined us, and we rode into Woodbury together. After a big sandwich from Subway, we turned north ... where we still had a headwind. All I can figure was that it was blowing from the northwest, and that the hills on Stones River Road had been funneling it.

After a quick break at the Norene control, we headed out for the last eight miles. The sun was setting, which quieted the wind and lit up the hillsides. 

I've done this brevet faster and in much better weather, but I really enjoyed riding it with all of these good old friends. As I've said before, cycling is one of the most intimate forms of travel, and it's even better when it's shared.