Lessons learned

Things you learn when you ride your bicycle 450 miles in five days:
1. Bringing an extra chain is a good idea.
2. The farther you go, the bigger the hills get.
3. There are more ways than you would expect to sit on a bike seat.
4. Number three really doesn’t matter, because by the middle of day two sitting on a bike seat hurts no matter how you do it.
The last time I wrote a column for this space I knew it might very well be the last time I ever wrote for the Independent. As that newspaper arrived in mailboxes around Farmington, I was on my way with my dad and my brother to Hayward, Wisc., to begin a bike trip that in less than a week would take us across northern Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to Mackinac Island, a city that exists solely to fill tourists with fudge and caramel corn. In five days of riding we covered distances of 95, 89, 93, 83 and 68 miles. This is what happens when my family plans vacations after a few drinks.
I didn’t know what to expect from the trip. I’m comfortable riding my bike long distances, but I didn’t know how I would feel riding so far so many days in a row. And there were some trying times. There was a while toward the end of a hilly, windy third day when I started mentally divvying up my earthly possessions (a disappointingly brief exercise, at least when we’re talking about things anyone would actually want) and wondering whether my riding companions would roll me into the ditch or just leave my body on the shoulder after I collapsed. Other than that, though I felt pretty good.
Even better, thanks to big breakfasts and bigger dinners I managed to burn all of those calories without actually losing any weight. That’s when you know you’re eating well.
We rode through a lot of remote forests, but we didn’t exactly get back to nature on this trip. With my step-mother and my brother’s girlfriend meeting us at our hotel at the end of each day, the closest we got to roughing it was staying in a bed and breakfast the fourth night and not being able to watch TV.
We all made it through the ride in pretty good shape. I broke my chain 93 miles into the first day’s ride, requiring me to walk the remaining two miles to the motel and forcing our support crew to spring into action a day earlier than they planned. They drove late into the night to meet us with a replacement. My brother broke his crank somewhere along the way, but that wasn’t as painful as it sounds and he was able to finish without any other major problems.
We were even lucky with the weather. While my co-workers back in Farmington dealt with a broken air conditioner in 90-plus degree weather, I was riding my bike in temperatures that never got much above 80. There were occasional threats of rain, but even the thunderstorm that greeted us on the morning of the fourth day cleared up early enough for us to ride and provided a nice tailwind for most of the day. Altogether we rode in the rain for about 15 seconds.
I don’t know that I’ll be in a hurry to try a bike marathon like this again anytime soon, but it’s at least nice to know I’m capable of doing it. Next time, though, I’m bringing a cushier seat.