1. My Big Ride – Introduction

My Big Ride

My “big ride” began with a bout of malaria. It was my second time around with this infectious disease, but that little oddity is a story for another day.  In the late fall of 1997, I was slowly recuperating at home in Ridgefield, Connecticut and feeling that perhaps once again, I had dodged a bullet, malaria-wise.

One day in the New York Times, there was a big ad promoting something called the GTE Big Ride Across America to benefit the American Lung Association. A bicycle ride from Seattle to Washington, D.C. from June 15 to August 2. Only 1000 riders could participate, and each rider had to raise $6000 dollars to make the ride.

It was the perfect thing to get me past myself and the debilitating malaria, to see something really big on the horizon, to help me get well.

Within a matter of weeks, I was signed up and raring to go. Crafting a letter looking for donations. Ordering a new bicycle recommended by the owner of a bicycle shop I had frequented in the past. Coming up with a training plan with the help of a wonderful nutritionist and marathon runner in Danbury, Connecticut named Mickey Harpaz. Trying to convince friends and family that I wasn’t out of my mind.

Regarding the latter, I didn’t totally succeed. Some people actually seemed mad that I was going. Some thought I was just plain mad to attempt such a thing.

I was 51 years old and not exactly a cyclist; I sometimes rode a bicycle. I had given myself a bicycle for my 45th birthday — having not ridden at all since I was a teenager — and I had once ridden the new bike 40 miles in one day — my longest ride ever — on the Cape Cod Rail Trail. The Big Ride was at least 3200 miles over 42 days, minus eight days off. The average ride would be over 90 miles per day in the heat of the summer, over the Cascades, the Rockies, the Appalachians, hundreds of hills and dales.

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A few weeks after seeing that Big Ride ad and making my decision, I went to Rome with my friend Meg for a wonderful holiday over New Year’s. I came home to Connecticut in early January, picked up my new bike, and started training on January 8th. As I remember, there were few days I wasn’t on my bike between January 8th –brrrrrrrh, it was cold — and June 15 — also brrrrrrrh — it was cold, the latter which you’ll understand if you read the account of the first day of the Big Ride, which is Chapter 2 and called, “Oh Lordy, It’s a Big Ride.”

For the training, first I rode five miles a day, then six,….twenty, thirty-five all on the way to one hundred, the century mark.* Before that milestone, I had devised a route of 35-40 miles, all within three miles of my home where I could dash in case of rain or sleet!

On the perhaps fifteen days when snow and/or ice covered the roads in Ridgefield and nearby towns, I had the trainer apparatus that held my bike upright in my living room and allowed the rear wheel to revolve when I pedaled. I recall this as an awful thing, made more palatable by the view of the lake outside my window, sometimes covered with snow and ice with a few skaters breezing by.

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The fundraising was very successful. It generated over $10,000 from a very special group of people. I had over 40 donors, from $25 to $1000. Perhaps not surprisingly, although the amount of it surprised m, the largest donation came from the wealthiest person on my list, a former mentor in Dallas with whom I disagreed vehemently over the years on practically everything political and social — but she sent me a thousand dollars! Two of the smallest donations — not surprisingly — came from the professional colleagues who earned the most on a yearly basis, neither of whom would be considered the warmest puppies in the basket.

Eight of the essays that follow – Big Ride 2 through 9 – are really just emails to all the donors. They were sent on my days off and upon my return home. Sometimes they are downright confusing or grammatically weird, but in order to retain the flavor of the originals and keep them what they were, i.e., emails, I’ve edited only serious spelling mistakes.

Some of you will be reading them for the second time, some for the first. I hope they “move” you as they continue to move me, and that, as the Janis Joplin poster on my living room wall urges us, to “…get off your butt and feel things.”

Those essays are followed by Chapter 10, which is called “A Long Look Back to My Big Ride.” A lot of water has gone under various bridges since then and now, and I have a few random and desperate thoughts about both the water and the flow.

*I rode my first “century” back and forth on the 11-mile-long Minuteman Bikeway between Cambridge and Bedford, Massachusetts. When I arrived back at the Alewife parking lot at the end of a very long day, I had ridden 96 miles, with four miles remaining. I rode those last four miles around and around and around the parking lot, obsessed to the very end. One of the greatest feelings in my life was the first time I saw the odometer on my bike hit 100.