Another orphaned post…
Seattle to Portland Bicycle Classic – a venerable 200 mile bike ride from, you guessed it, Seattle WA to Portland OR. It’s been around since the late 70s, and every year attracts thousands of two wheel aficionados. It’s viewed as a rite of passage for Northwest cyclists; whenever two or three are gathered together, they will always want to know, “Well, have you done the STP?” Once your bona fides are established, then you’re asked, “One day or two?”
Because, you see, the ride starts at 4:45 AM from the University of Washington Husky Stadium parking lot, for those going the whole way in one day, and 15 minutes later for those staying overnight along the way. It is quite macho among beginner/intermediate cyclists to be seen as someone who can go 200 miles at one sitting, although why one would want to sit for 10-16 hours on a bike is quite beyond me. The one time I did the formal ride, I did it in one day. But because it was actually the GHTP (Gig Harbor to Portland), my distance was about 175 mi, in about 11 hours. Way boring, resulting in a semi-sprained ankle from overuse. Of course, the fact that I had done TWO half Ironman races in the previous two weeks had nothing to do with that. My son was starting Reed College, in Portland, in the fall, and he and my wife drove down there to check out the area one last time that weekend, giving me a ride home.
The usual ride follows a route avoiding most hills along the way, and incorporates a number of rest stops, about every 20-40 miles. Long pace lines develop, seeded by bike clubs who train all winter and spring for the event. They roll down the highway with about 5-15 trading the lead, and sometimes twice that many sucking along behind. For the two day riders, belongings are trucked half way to Centralia/Chehalis, for camping or moteling Saturday night. Once in Portland, you are on your own for the return trip.
A few years ago, my company, Group Health Cooperative and our associated medical group, took over the title sponsorship of the ride. This year, a local TV personality, John Curley of the Evening Magazine, decided to devote one night’s segment to the STP. Now, Curley is famous for being an “Everyman”, trying activities which the rest of us would like to do, but don’t have the resources or time to attempt, like sky diving, entering a frog jumping contest, or, in this case, riding the STP in One Day.
This being television, there had to be (a) commercial tie ins and (b) a human interest story. The commercial tie ins included: Soft Ride bicycles, who would provide Curley with his bike (their rep riding with him); the Cascade Bicycle club, who provided some race team members and route finders; and Group Health, who provided a mess of doctors and our own cycling team (women’s). The human interest was two fold. First, would Curley make it all the way in one day without breaking down? Second, they filmed (at another place and time) the story of a benighted family who tried tackling the Oregon Coast on recumbents for their first ever extended bike tour (what this had to do with the STP I never did figure out.)
I somehow parlayed my past life as the Cooperative’s Medical Director, and my current reputation as a serious biker into a spot as a hanger-on/supercargo. After a couple of group rides to establish my ability to draft as well as anyone at 19 mph, I met up with another GHC doc from Tacoma at 3:45, and headed thru the morning mist to UW. There, it was dark and raining. We slowly coalesced, and under the glare of the parking lot lights and the TV spots, we slowly picked up steam towards the Montlake cut.
Our entourage included the aforementioned cycling teams (GHC and Cascade); a guide car from Cascade; the KING5 minivan with cameraman, sound guy, producer, etc; GHC’s cycle team trailer and union driver; Damien, the guy from PR/Marketing in charge of GHC’s bicycle initiatives, driving a sag wagon; and a mechanic’s car, filled with wheels, tubes, pumps, and (we would learn) the endless conversation of a chain smoking mechanic. And, oh yes, about 15 GHC docs and managers, desperate to participate in this magic media event.
Since I had the Coeur d’Alene Ironman coming up in two weeks, my plan was to bike no more than 140 miles, and hopefully no less than 120, but in segments, not at one stretch. I figured 60/50/30 would do just fine for me. The first segment went well, through a sleepy Sunday morning along Lake Washington and down towards Renton/Kent/Auburn. Near Peasley Canyon on the Valley Highway, we approached a traffic light, turned red. I thought I could get my jacket off, rolled up, and around my waist before it turned green (the morning’s rain had turned to a warming day, and I was starting to feel a bit sweaty). We’d been doing a good imitation of a peloton for most of the day, or maybe a lead pack and following group, but we were all together for these first few hours. I had the jacket half off when the light turned green, and everyone else rode on. I figured, how fast can these guys be, I’m an IRONMAN, for crying out loud, I just did an Olympic Distance triathlon the weekend before, 40 K at 22 mph. I forgot that was on my TT bike with race day clothes and taper. They had a 30 second head start, and while I could match their speed, I never could catch them. And they were certainly less tired than I was. The GHC sag wagon rolled up, asked me if I wanted to ride, I said, “No, why don’t I just draft behind you?”
They didn’t tell me they’d never followed a bike tour before, much less had any experience with motor pacing. Which was OK, because while I’d seen “Breaking Away”, and watched the Tour de France for a decade, I myself had never actually ridden fast behind a vehicle before. The were driving a standard van, so they provided a fair wind shield. One guy looked out the rear window; Damien, the driver, watched nervously in both his rear view mirrors. At about 22-24 mph, on the flat road, I was spinning my wheels easily, like there was NO CHAIN. This was pretty cool, as long as Damien didn’t slow down suddenly, and I didn’t try to speed up.
We managed to survive our mutual inexperience. As easy as the pedaling was, it had been quite nerve-racking, so I was glad to get back to the more friendly environment of a pack of cyclists. We bounced through the rutted streets of Sumner to our first pit stop. The GHC cycling women were all decked out in their team colors, including windbreakers and shorts with “Group Health Cycling” along the thighs across the upper hips. Now, the rest of us had been given GHC cycling jerseys, and free GHC water bottles, but I wanted the full kit. I asked one of them how I could get some of the shorts. She said, “Well, I think first you’d have to be a woman.”
“Um, I’m a gynecologist; does that count for anything?”
She looked non-plussed, and drifted away warily.
Curley was outfitted in a bright red cycling jersey with his name in five inch high caps across the back. Just so the camera would know where he was at all times, I guess, or maybe he really did have an ego that big. The whole point of this ride, we were told, the reason GHC was putting over $10,000 into the event (remember the commercial tie in – nothing’s free!), was to get Curley to Portland in one day, riding the whole way. I suppose they could have put him into the van and driven him from set-up shot to set-up shot, but the man has some pride (and some chops). It was clear he was not only going to ride the whole way, but he was going to do it at a serious pace.
So off we went to our rendezvous with The Hill. There is one hill of note on the STP, about 350 vertical feet over a mile and a half or so, south of the Puyallup valley to the top of (inventive name here) South Hill. As hills will do, the group was separated into the climbers and the posers. On this day, I was a poser, and chugged in with the stragglers to an impromptu rest stop up on the plateau. By this time, several of us had learned the value of the one tandem we had with us, and quickly fell in behind that duo. Biking near them was a bit strange, and they had helmets with built in radios, and were constantly talking to each other at a very soft level, unlike the elevated decibels bikers often use to overcome the wind and traffic noise around them. It was un-nerving to feel them glide past, each whispering a bit like someone on a semi-secret cell phone conversation.
About 65 miles into the ride, we crossed the “Y” in south Parkland, where highway 7 splits to the east, and a narrower road shoots along the edge of Fort Lewis. Somewhere in there, my bike started developing chain/cassette issues. Rather than worry myself over trying to fix it, and then catching the group again, I just hopped a ride with the mechanic, who eventually found the time to jimmy a fix for the stuck chain. However, I did have to endure his stream-of-consciousness monologue, which went something like this:
“Jeez, these guys are worse than the race I followed last weekend. We did that one in our regular mechanical van. I’ve got everything I need in it; I keep it all organized, and can always find whatever I need. We lost that one though, because the IDIOTS running the race suddenly STOPPED in the middle of the road when the peloton got to the bottom of the hill, they didn’t even flag or signal or anything like anybody normally would to, those guys must NEVER have followed a race before I had to swerve off the shoulder just so I could keep going cause I NEVER get caught way behind the racers they depend on me, and if they get a mechanical, well, they EXPECT me to be there to get them going again, whether its a wheel or a chain, or a derailleur, or whatever, so I had to [here he lit up another Marlboro] swerve through a ditch off the side of the road into some farmer’s FIELD and hit a patch of potholes in the dirt from the COWS or something [pause for breath] – know what I mean?”
“Yeah, I was in a race once when…”
He was asking but he wasn’t listening: “So I popped out the differential in our van, they’ve STILL got it in the shop and those guys at the race, that race director, he just won’t admit any responsibility so I don’t know how we’re going to pay for it, I mean, the shop just basically VOLUNTEERS me and the van on the weekends for the races, I don’t think they get any useful advertising out of it, but hey, I LIKE to follow races, I’m GOOD at it, and the racers come to EXPECT me to be there, you know what I mean?”
I didn’t, but I didn’t dare tell him, for fear I might miss his drift.
“But like I said, these guys are even worse this week, they don’t seem to have a plan, but what do I care, at least we’re getting PAID this week, and this rental they’ve got me in is covered too, but so what, ‘cause it doesn’t have near the room the van does, so that’s why I don’t have an extra chain for you. I think I can get it going the next time we stop.”
Well, that he did, but by the time he fixed things on my rig, the peloton was at least five miles up the road, so I hitched another ride with the Group Health union driver, in a dually pick up pulling the GHC women’s cycling team’s logoed trailer for our bikes. This burly, bearded guy, all smiles (who wouldn’t smile at time and a half, and double time over eight hours on the weekend!) gently placed my bike along one wall, bungeed it tight, and covered it with a quilted moving van blanket. I shared the cab with one of the women’s cycling team members, who was trying out her injured knee with bad results, and so she sat morosely silent along the second row of seats, pondering the breakdown of her body.
Looking ahead, I noticed a clot of our riders milling about a grassy verge along the edge of a newly built mini-mall. “Umm, something’s happened there, I think we better stop.”
The driver pulled into the side street, effectively blocking not only it, but also the entrance into the mall with his truck and trailer combo.
The riders surrounded a downed colleague, who lay dazed, helmet-less, on the grass, blood oozing from a head wound. Piecing together the story, it seemed like one of our docs had suffered a freakish accident. He’d been riding with two others, who had been stopped by the light about 100 yards behind. When they didn’t answer his call, he looked back over his shoulder, trying to locate them. His front wheel had clipped the curb. Now, this should have been just a minor accident – the curb fell down from a wide, soft grassy shoulder, and his landing would have been almost pleasant, except for the street lamp planted in the exact spot where he jumped the curb. Looking backwards at the time, he never saw it, and managed to hit it full on with his helmet. The long and the short: his day was done, the medics were called, and he visited the ER with one of our tag alongs, the official crew physician, who was indeed an MD, but also the wife of one of our riders. After about 45 minutes to sort this all out, we were on the road again. All this happened out of sight of the King5 cameras, so the viewing public was thankfully shielded from the gruesome event.
Serendipitously, this allowed me to jump back into the ride, and on we went to our half-way stop. There, while the rest of us stoked up on food and fuel, John Curley paced under the shade trees in front of a frantically trolling camera and sound crew. Exuberantly exclaiming to his unseen audience, he tried to look at once exhausted from our century ride, and enthused, full of an eager anticipation for the next hundred miles. What he really felt, I’ll never know, as his game plan from the start was to make sure the viewing audience saw him suffer. Kind of hard to do, when the producer keeps fluffing your hair up from the helmeted mess it had become, and powdering the sweat off your face. That reminded me to lather on the sun screen, as I had taken off the sleeves and leggings at this stop – the sun had come out, and, 100 miles south of Seattle, it was starting to warm up in a serious, mid-June sort of way. Remarkably, no one else seemed to have remembered sunscreen. Either they were all serious, early morning only riders, or they had labored too long in the Northwest’s gloom to consider the possibility of excessive exposure on this all day jaunt. Whatever; for a few breathless moments, I was a hero. For naught, it turned out, as the rest of the day was spent either in the shade, or under scudding clouds.
Over the next fifty miles, we wound amidst the rolling wooded valleys south of Chehalis. I put in another 30 or so miles, saving my final set for the end of the trip down the Columbia into Portland. After I’d popped back into the mechanic’s van for a 2 hour rest, we crept up on several stragglers, sweeping them back to Damien’s van for a well-deserved breather. Our modus operandus was to have a “pace” car at the front of the peloton, ostensibly for route finding purposes, although the Cascade boys certainly knew they way by heart. Then the peloton, smoothly rolling at about 19-21 mph, followed by the stragglers, the mechanic, Damien’s sag wagon, and finally, the trailer. In the earlier morning hours, the roads had been quite deserted, and this had posed no traffic hazards. Now, however, the Sunday drivers were out in force, and we become a rolling bottleneck, so much so that people had complained to the State Patrol.
The sharp-eyed mechanic noticed this immediately, and pulled off to the side before the cops could stop him. The bubble tops did, however, make threatening noises to the others in our caravan. The gas powered members all stopped at the side of the road; the human powered vehicles floated on, oblivious. I sidled out to Damien, ostensibly the leader (at least, he was the one who’d have to cover any fines for driving to slow, endangering traffic, etc.
I’d had a bit of experience at vehicle supported group rides, so I suggested the obvious: “You know, you should just “leap frog.”
Quizzical stares greeted me.
I went on, “Just let the peloton go ahead. We’ve got multiple vehicles, and numerous cell phones. Send someone on ahead to the next planned stop to wait, and keep one or more of the other cars at the rear, leaving in time to pull into the rest stop just as the bikers are expected to get there. That way, you can sweep up anybody who has a mechanical or needs to ride the sag.”
They chewed on that awhile, and finally figured it out. I asked to be taken up ahead to the next meeting spot, about 35 miles from the finish. Two others tagged along. My plan was to cruise down US 30 into Portland, and arrive there just as the peloton got to the City Limits. Our little crew headed off, in a semblance of a pace line. My two pace mates were noble, but fatigued. After 10 miles of a decent speed, it turned out that I was the only one with any gas left, and had to pull them the rest of the way into town. And even then, I was motoring along at about 85% of the effort level I would use in, say, an Ironman’s 112 mile bike portion. Probably just what I should be doing, with Coeur d’Alene only two weeks away.
We took a pit stop at a little roadside rest about six miles out, to check the map one last time, and, frankly, give the other two a breather. Then back through the final industrial outskirts into the maze of off ramps leading into the city center. There, we got terminally confused, looking for help from out woefully underpowered STP map kit. I gazed wildly around, trying to figure out just where we were, when I saw the lead car come rising over the hill like a black helicopter. Behind them, the 20 remaining members of our STP in one day team. Perfection!
Our little group merged with the big one, and we spent five minutes or so climbing up to the park where we declared ourselves “Done”. Curley had a tearful reunion with his wife, filmed another five minutes or so, and took off with his family for wherever it is TV personalities go when they’ve ridden 200 miles in about 12 hours. The rest of us couldn’t quite believe we had no more miles to ride. For some, it was a first time experience, and they were, naturally and deservedly, quite pleased with themselves. For others, it was just “Like, where’s the showers you promised, Matt” and “What about the pizza, Damien” and “Why can’t we just get on the bus now?” But there were bikes to load, bags to retrieve, and rides home to organize.
The motor coach was idling, waiting for our tired bodies, to take us several blocks to the Y for showers. Damien scooted off to gather the pizzas. We tumbled up to the entrance of the health club. The bus wheezed, then left the parking lot.
“Where’s he going?”
“To get gas”
“What?! You mean they didn’t fill up BEFORE they came to get us – how dumb is that?”
“Don’t worry, they’ll be back by the time we shower and get the pizza.”
Inside, the front desk attendant started having each of us fill out a guest form, clearly designed as part of the sales pitch package. It seemed a bit much just to take a shower, but they lamely explained it was for “insurance purposes”. Those poor guys – insurance companies, I mean (after all, Group Health IS one, amongst other things) – they have to take the blame for everything. After the first three or four started writing, the rest of us formed a critical mass of resistance to bureaucratic authority, and just strolled right on in while the obviously outnumbered front desk staff gamely tried to deal with each individual one at a time.
“Oh, OK, just show me your ID as you go by,” he said, giving up.
Once showered, we wandered back out to the front, and collectively frowned when we saw (a) no bus and (b) NO PIZZA. Luckily, the beleaguered front desk guy started bringing us folding chairs so we could at least sit down. While we formed two circles, Damien drove up and, sliding back the doors of his van, unloaded about fifty boxes of pizzas and drinks. Two dozen of us managed to go through almost all the food and drink in less than 15 minutes. Still no bus, though.
Turns out he went BACK TO THE BASE to fill the gas tank (company policy). Half an hour later, we’re all loaded up, and half asleep as we cruise in style back up I-5 to UW. The only thing missing was a few DVDs of “The Evening Show” to keep us amused while we dreamed of squeaking pedals, creaking knees, leaking skies, and endless tailwinds.