e^(2 Pi i) is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do

I dropped my laptop on the floor last week and so I’ve not been able to post a recap of the IronNat bike ride to Provincetown, and in the intervening week most of that day has smeared in my memory into a homogenous blur of lactic acid and chocolate-covered espresso beans. Fortunately Robert posted a brilliant play-by-play of the event as it transpired.

Beginning

End

On the eve of the ride, I was so hepped up on my own juices that even after three pasta dinners, try as I might, I could not fall asleep. I just sort of lay there in bed, tossing around. Around 2am, I decided that this was a dire problem, and that some sleep — any sleep — would be preferable to attempting the single greatest athletic feat of my life completely sleep-deprived. So I took three doses of NyQuil and prepared to bed down for the night.

Sleep did not come. But 4am did, and rested or not, it was time to go.

Leaving at 4 was smart. There was no traffic on the road and it was cool. On Alex’s advice, I told myself that the first thirty miles were just a warm-up, and cruised pretty easily down the totally untrafficed route 53 before forcing myself to stop and send a video to Robert’s waiting mailbox. Just before, I passed the largest piece of copyrighted art in the world.

Anyway, thirty miles quickly turned into fifty and I was on the Cape. From there, the hills were gentle and rolling, and it was just a matter of staying on route 6A/6 for another 60 miles, and the ride was over. Cars whizzed by pretty close, which was often scary, but the cape is sleepy and the roads were nearly empty till about 10:30 in the morning.

The end of the ride was hot, and I was sweating profusely, and at one point I think I ran out of salt because the sweating stopped abruptly, until I ate pretzels and started to sweat again. Or maybe I was just freaking out.

Critical equipment included: my GPS (not the Forerunner), which continuously reassured me I was heading in the right direction, allowed me to relay my location to Robert on the phone, and made it really easy to make last-minute changes of plan (I decided to take a bike path for 12 of the last 20 miles); my telephone; and my awesome LeMond bike, which I can pick up with one finger, and which I no longer feel like a total poser for owning.

All in all, it was a lot easier than I expected, and I felt like a titan when the ride was over. The whole thing took me nine hours of clock time, and 7 hours and 20 minutes of bike time, with an average speed of 16mph. Various people have expressed disappointment that I didn’t do the full 240-mile roundtrip, so maybe I’ll try to do that later this summer. Better would be to find some other seemingly implausible achievement and go for that. Like getting four root canals in one week. Oh, wait…