Orny's Cycling Journal

One of the ironies of being hired by Buildium was that they field a team for the Cape Cod Getaway MS Ride. Being well-known for my cycling, I was pretty much obligated to ride, despite having made a big deal about quitting the PMC—the big charity ride I’ve been involved with for 14 years—last year. Nonetheless, I was looking forward to the MS Ride, which took place a week ago.

Another interesting bit is that it is kind of a clone of my yearly Outriders ride. Both go from Boston to Provincetown, and the two rides take place on consecutive weekends. The big difference is that Outriders is a single 130-mile day, while the MS Ride is 175 miles over two days. Or at least it’s supposed to be…

The day before this year’s ride kicked off, the weather report was bad enough that the organizers decided to pre-emptively cancel Sunday’s 75-mile leg up Cape Cod from Bourne to Provincetown. They expected driving rain and winds above 50 mph, which made it impossible for the ferry to run and bring riders back to Boston.

Since the storm wasn’t going to arrive until Saturday night, they decided to still hold the first day’s 75-or-100-mile leg from Boston to Bourne. It dawned comfortably cool and somewhat overcast. After getting up early and packing my bag, I hopped on my bike for a 4-mile warm-up ride down to the start at UMass Boston.

At the start I met up with the rest of the Buildium team, including former Sapient colleague Andrew Blackwell, whom I hadn’t seen in more than a decade. In addition to local and remote employees, our 60-person team included friends and relatives, people from the Seattle-based company we recently acquired, and investors. I also spoke to old friend Johnny H, who was manning the Quad Cycles repair tent.

Finally the starting time came, but not before some speechifying. Near the end, the captain for Team Velox Rota spoke in memory of Bobby Mac, the Quad Cycles ride leader in whose memory I’d devoted last year’s final Pan-Mass Challenge ride. He quoted two of Bobby’s most famous sayings: You can go fast, you can go long, but you can’t go fast for long; and: Ride with love in your hearts and smiles on your faces. I was taken completely by surprise, and had to stifle the tears it evoked.

Finally we took off. The team rode together for the first 20 miles, giving me a chance to socialize and take photos (Flickr photoset). One of my favorites is of Sapient alum and Buildium founder and CEO Mike Monteiro riding the first dozen miles in his rubber Crocs, having forgotten to bring his cycling shoes.

When we reached the first rest stop, I took one look at the line for porta-potties and got right back on my bike. I was destined to leave the group behind at some point, because I was the only person who planned to do the 100-mile route rather than the 75, and it made sense to push on now, rather than hang around in line at the rest stop. But as I rode through the far end of the rest stop, my bladder was gladder when I saw another whole row of porta-potties with no lines, no waiting! After a quick pit stop, I took off, picking up speed to ride ahead at my own pace.

Over the next couple segments I paid the price for having ridden slowly with the rest of the Buildium team. I skipped the second rest stop and sliced my way through packs of hundreds of riders, getting myself up toward the front. Then I saw three team members at the side of the road, fixing a flat. While I stopped to make sure they were all set, I watched as hundreds of riders I’d just passed returned the favor. Hoping not to lose too much ground, I set back off again in pursuit.

I pulled into the lunch stop at mile 40, hoping I was ahead of the bunch, and only stayed long enough to eat a bag of chips and fill my water bottle with ice and cola. I saw two Buildium jerseys there, but quickly pressed on.

Between fast riding and brief (or skipped) water stops, I was finally outpacing the main body of the ride. The roads finally opened up a bit for me, to the point where I was often riding alone, with only a couple other riders in sight.

About 50 miles in, near the point where the 100-mile ride forked off from the 75, I finally recognized one of the roads we were on. For most of the morning, we’d taken a much more coastal route than the more-familiar Outriders ride, which goes inland quite a ways. The route had been interesting, although the crowds hadn’t given me much opportunity to sightsee as we passed through unfamiliar towns like Cohasset, Hingham, and Marshfield.

As I passed (and skipped) another water stop, the road I was on ended in a T. Both the Outriders ride and the 75-mile route went left toward Plymouth, while the 100 turned right, adding an extra 25 miles of new and unknown roads. Those back roads circled around through cranberry bogs and into the sandy woods of the Myles Standish State Forest before popping back out for a short stretch on a familiar favorite, Long Pond Road.

On that extra 25-mile spur, I stopped to refill at the 60-mile water stop in Middleboro, but skipped the next one at mile 74. At mile 82 the routes merged back together again at another rest stop. As I rolled up, I heard someone exclaim that there were just 16 miles left of the ride, and I still had a full bottle, so I decided to just push on, skipping both remaining stops.

Although I’d been riding fairly strong up until that point, I was starting to tire and lose power, and a stiff headwind kicked up in advance of the evening storm. As I plodded my way into Bourne, I passed the scene of an accident, with police attending to a rider lying on his back in the middle of the road. Fortunately, I later learned he was okay.

Just a couple miles later I turned onto Academy Road for the familiar approach into Mass Maritime Academy, where the PMC also overnights. I rode across the line at 1:58pm, having ridden 102 miles in a surprising 6 hours 11 minutes. I checked in and picked up my event tee shirt and finisher’s medal. And in a riding sense, that was the end of my first MS Ride.

Originally, between my company beach day and Outriders and the Cape Cod Getaway, I had been targeting riding over 400 miles in eight days. However, with Sunday’s 75-mile ride to Provincetown cancelled, I wound up with only 350, which isn’t that stellar an achievement; after all, I did 300 miles in three days for last year’s PMC!

More importantly, after spending time in Provincetown after Outriders, I wasn’t going to get back there again after all. A week earlier, I’d said some tentative farewells to Provincetown, and it seemed like those would be my final goodbyes. “P-town” and the ride up Cape Cod are among the things I will miss most about New England when I move.

Having arrived at MMA, I tried to follow my tried-and-true PMC arrival ritual: pick up my bag, shower, and find the massage tent. The bag was easy. The shower was a little more difficult because I first had to find my room in the maze of MMA dorms, but I eventually found the right undifferentiated passageway and the nearest men’s room. The showers were hot and semi-private, and very welcome.

The next order of business was finding the Buildium team tent, which didn’t take long. There were a couple riders there from our investors, but I was the first employee to arrive, and with four idle masseuses, I stepped up and took a well-earned turn on the table.

Then there was some food and socializing, but it was a good two hours before any other teammates arrived. After canceling Sunday’s ride, the organizers had allowed people to ride the 100-mile route even if they’d only signed up for the 75, and a large number of Buildians took advantage of that offer, most of them doing the first century of their lives. I was really proud and impressed with them, and glad to see them finish the day smiling.

By 8:30pm, the promised sprinkles began, the party started getting sloppy, and I chose to go back to the dorm to get a head start on sleep. As usual in the dorm, sleep was a rare commodity. I don’t think I got more than a couple hours of it before loudspeakers started barking instructions at 5am Sunday morning about gathering bicycles on trucks bound for Boston.

I went down to the cafeteria and discovered that some of our team had already hopped buses north, so apparently it was every man for himself. I went back to the room and packed up, then met up with Tora on her way out.

We went straight to the buses waiting outside, but despite having an umbrella, I wound up soaked to the bone by a wind-blown deluge. The wind gusted up to 57 mph, and we set records for rainfall and the lowest high temperature for that date. As we waited for the bus to leave, our company president, Dimitris, dragged himself on board. So much for his advice the night before of sleeping in late and gathering as a team!

After an hour on the bus, I was discharged into the UMass Boston parking lot where we’d started. Thankfully, I immediately spotted my bike and got ready to ride home. Needless to say, I had to fight the rain and the wind all four miles back to my condo, and left large puddles marking my route from the building’s entryway to my unit.

But by 8am I was standing in my bathtub, stripping off my sopping-wet jeans and tee shirt. At least I had the rest of the day to warm up, dry off, and recover from my first MS Ride!

Here’s the Strava GPS log, and here’s my Flickr photoset.

So that’s the story; what about the summary?

Overall, it was a good experience. I’m really proud and impressed by the company, which fielded a team of sixty riders, many of whom rode their first centuries, and who raised about $83,000 this year, making us the fifth largest fundraising team in the event.

The ride itself was nice, and I enjoyed doing a route that covered a lot of new ground. Of course, I’m very disappointed to have missed what was probably my last opportunity to ride up the cape to Provincetown, but canceling Sunday’s ride was definitely the right decision.

Naturally, there are big differences between the MS Ride and the PMC, starting with a fundraising minimum of $500, rather than $5,000, which relieved me of the PMC’s huge fundraising effort.

Starting in Boston allowed me to ride to the start, rather than having to get a hotel out in Sturbridge. Giving each team its own little tent—and its own masseuses!—was different, and seemed to work well. And I have to admit that I’ve always been disappointed that the PMC doesn’t give out any kind of finisher’s medals.

But the biggest difference was that this was the first charity ride I’ve ever done as part of a team, rather than as an individual. Rolling out as a group was cool, as was riding together (at least as far as the first water stop). Seeing other riders along the route wearing our team kit gave one an instant icebreaker. And I was guaranteed to have a big group of friends to hang out with at the finish. Those all made this ride a very different experience from my 14 years as a solo PMC rider.

So overall, despite losing Sunday to a monsoon, I really enjoyed doing the ride, and—for the first time—sharing it with so many of my friends and co-workers.

Follow this link for my full 2014 Pan-Mass Challenge ride report, including writeup, photos, and GPS logs.

The 126-mile Outriders ride from Boston to Provincetown is definitely one of my favorites, but I approached it with some trepidation this year, my fourth time doing the ride.

June’s weather has been absolutely terrible. Two weeks into the month—not even halfway through!—it was already the sixth rainiest June in recorded history. And there’s nothing worse than the prospect of having to spend ten or eleven hours cycling in the rain.

I was also concerned about my physical preparedness for the longest ride of the year. On June 1st I’d barely survived a scorching and miserable Tour d’Essex County (ride report), and in the intervening weeks I’d only ridden one training ride and one easy commute.

Thankfully, the weather turned out to be perfect: sunny, mid-70s, with a light tailwind.

Last year my friend Noah had joined me on the ride, and this year we convinced our friend Paul to ride for the first time. We ambled down to the Cyclorama and checked in, then moseyed out of town on a route that largely followed my commute to work in Quincy.

Along the way, I took some video footage with my new(ish) GoPro camera, which you can see here:

It was a great test of the device I’d assembled to strap it to the back of my hand, which worked surprisingly well. The only problem was that the GoPro devours batteries, and it went dead right after the first stop in Halifax. Next time: lots of spare batteries, and don’t keep the camera on standby.

After inhaling a powdered donut hole, a mini-cinnamon bun, and a handful of grapes, we were back on the road. Noah, who has suffered with back problems for more than a year, started slowing noticeably only 45 miles in, well before we reached the Sagamore Bridge onto Cape Cod.

That put him back to about my speed tho, since I have 20 years on him, and I wanted to take it easy out of respect for the long miles and concern about my lack of training.

My legs were very tight and on the edge of cramping by the time we pulled into the rest stop in Sandwich, and the subsequent traversal of the rollers on the Route 6 Access Road was quite painful. Although I was doing better than Noah, I was deliriously happy to arrive at the 80-mile rest stop in Yarmouth.

The next segment included the long stretch on the Cape Cod Rail Trail. I was afraid it would be a mob scene on a rare beautiful Saturday, but we really didn’t encounter many people. And for me, it was the ideal breather; while I had struggled on the hills, I was perfectly fine on the long, flat stretch of the rail trail.

After crossing the 100-mile mark and a long rest at the water stop at the end of the bike path, we headed off into Wellfleet. I insisted on a brief stop at White Crest Beach to see how much of the beach and the overlooking cliffs last year’s winter storms had destroyed.

The infamous hills of Wellfleet and Truro again sapped our legs, but Noah and I soldiered on together. Although the Truro rest stop is only eight miles from the finish, one’s physical condition after 116 miles means there’s never any thought given to skipping it. Well, that and the brownie bites the organizers always provide! Much better than Paul’s choice: his 9th Slim Jim of the day…

Riding along the narrow strand in Truro between Massachusetts Bay and Pilgrim Lake, the batteries on my Garmin bike computer died just two miles short of the finish line, so I don’t have a complete GPS log. Paul, whose legs (and hair!) were better all day, waited for us at the Provincetown line, and the three of us rode in to the finish together, after 9½ hours in the saddle.

I have to say, the Outriders organizers really do a fabulous job, and this ride delights every year. The food at the rest stops is better than even the largest organized charity rides. The entire route is very scenic and arrowed superbly. The water stops are spaced perfectly: few at the start, but more frequent in the later stages. The ride is a great challenge, and ends at a wonderful destination. Even the event tee shirt is usually pretty well designed. The only negative is that they don’t provide ice for the riders, which for me is a basic requirement. Next time: chip in and buy our own at a convenience store.

This year’s ride was great for several reasons. The weather was perfect. I fared much better than I did in the earlier Tour d’Essex. And I shared the ride with my buddies. This was the first time I’d seen Paul this year, and sharing his first Outriders ride was a blast.

After a change of clothes, we had dinner at Bayside Betsy’s, where it took three tries to get the BBQ sauce I requested for my burger, then some lemon sorbet, then some pizza, followed by a lot of slack-jawed sitting around and gaping at the tourists. At least we were able to keep a delirious Paul from getting a tattoo while he was in town.

After a brief stop at a convenience store for even more food, we hopped the ferry. We managed to stay awake to see the first two periods of the Bruins winning Game 2 of the Stanley Cup Finals before arriving home in Boston and going our separate ways.

It was a good, long, hard day, but very memorable, and shared with good friends. What more could you want?

Follow this link for my full 2011 Pan-Mass Challenge ride report, including writeup, photos, and GPS logs.

This is the next to last posting in my series of hints, tips, pointers, and advice for other Pan-Mass Challenge charity riders. These are the things I've learned during more than a decade of participating in the PMC.

The full list of posts will be compiled and permanently available online at http://www.ornoth.com/bicycling/hints.php

Whether you're a first-timer or a longtime veteran, may you find these ideas useful, and I hope you have a wonderful PMC experience!

Having just returned from the Outriders ride from Boston to Provincetown, it seems appropriate that today I'm going to talk about the second half of the PMC, which covers much of the same territory: Sunday: Bourne to Provincetown!

• Sunday, wear whatever jersey you want. If you're riding with a team, they usually wear their team jerseys on Sunday. I usually wear the jersey from my first PMC.
• There's no organized start on Sunday; plan to leave MMA around 5am.
• Don't believe anyone who thinks that Cape Cod if flat. There are hills. You'll see. Especially Provincetown, Truro, and the Route 6 Service Road in Sandwich, which has rollers you'll want to shoot over, if you can.
• There are usually ice pops at the Brewster (Nickerson State Park) water stop.
• After you leave Wellfleet, expect a brutal headwind on Route 6 all the way to Provincetown. If there's no wind on Route 6, don't worry: you'll run into it when you turn back from Race Point. It's nice to merge in with a paceline for those segments.
• Don't be fooled when you see the Pilgrim Monument and the "Entering Provincetown" sign. There's still several more miles as you loop out to Race Point and back into town.
• When you make the turn at Race Point, zip up your jersey and keep your eyes peeled for the event photographers!
• When parking in the bike line at Provincetown, sling your bike over onto the far side of the fence to avoid having it buried beneath other bikes or having to park at the way far end of the bike line. Loop your handlebars over the fence to make sure it doesn't fall down the other side!
• If you're meeting someone in Provincetown, make sure they're on the road early. Route 6 backs up something fierce on Sunday.
• Be warned that Provincetown has notoriously bad cell phone coverage.
• Don't bring soap into the showers at Provincetown; they provide special biodegradable soaps, since the showers run off into the harbor.
• You can wade in the ocean near the causeway behind the bike line in Provincetown, if you want to cool off.

Look for my tenth and final posting next week, when I share my experience on what you want to do post-ride!

Saturday I finally did the Outriders ride, a 130-mile one-day ride from Boston, down to Cape Cod, then up the length of the cape to Provincetown.

I’d wanted to do the ride for many years, but was put off by such a long ride so early in the year. In addition, since it was mostly a gay a lesbian event, I wanted to ride with someone who had done it before and knew the group, rather than doing it alone. But this year my friend Lynda served as chaperone, and my friend Jay came along for the ride, as it were.

Having ridden a lot this spring, I knew I was ready for the miles, but I wasn’t sure about the weather. That uncertainty was compounded when I came down with a cold the week before the ride. But when the time came, I felt okay and the forecast looked ideal.

So Jay and Lynda showed up at my place and at 5:30am I found myself leading them down to the Cyclorama, where we checked in and waited around for a while before setting out at 6:13am. It was great that the ride began just a few blocks from my house!

The weather was a factor that demanded one’s attention. It was a stunningly gorgeous day, climbing from the low 60s to the mid-80s, with a light breeze that also increased throughout the day. It was one of those rare perfect days, and enjoying it by spending the whole day biking on the cape was a wonderful treat.

I knew the roads we took to get out of Boston, but once we were over the Neponset River and into Quincy, we were in new territory for me. However, the route wasn’t bad, as we kept to suburban roads a bit inland. Jay dropped behind for a bathroom stop at a Dunkin Donuts, but caught up again after a while.

After two hours on the road, the first water stop in Halifax was a bit of a cluster. We arrived at the place Lynda remembered (and where the arrows painted on the pavement directed us), only to find the lakeside parking area being actively torn up by construction equipment. After a few minutes, we pressed on and came to the ad hoc rest area a mile further on.

But that wasn’t all… The truck the organizers used to move food and drinks for the riders hadn’t arrived yet! Just before we left, it pulled up and we grabbed a couple apples to eat as we continued on.

A few miles before we reached the Sagamore Bridge, Jay requested another stop at a Dunkin Donuts, where I stretched and massaged my legs a bit.

We reached the high bridge and walked our bikes across, since there’s no barrier between bikes and automotive traffic. However, that gave us the opportunity to enjoy the breeze and a wonderful panoramic view of the Cape Cod Canal. Painted on the pavement at the end of the bridge was the message, “Welcome to Cape Cod!!”

The second water stop was just another mile up the road in Sandwich, and it represented the halfway point of the ride. Having been on unfamiliar roads most of the day, the remaining miles were mostly on the familiar route traveled by the Pan-Mass Challenge. I enjoyed showing the roads to Jay, who has spent very little time on the cape, despite living his whole life in Massachusetts. That included the roller coaster ride on the Route 6 Access Road, which Jay and I attacked with abandon, and the painfully trafficky Route 6A that got us to the third water stop in Yarmouth.

Then it was time to jump onto the Cape Cod Rail Trail for a long haul down the cape to Wellfleet. During this time, I rode completely alone, having lost Jay and Lynda and the entire Outriders crew. Although Jay had been ahead of us, he missed the turn onto the CCRT and wound up adding six or eight bonus miles to his ride before he got back on route.

For myself, I’d somehow programmed a water stop in Orleans into my GPS, but having seen none, I thought I’d somehow missed it. The truth was that the next stop was at the end of the bike path in Wellfleet, where I stopped and waited for Lynda and Jay.

This was where everyone started really feeling the strain of the ride. For the first 100 miles, we all did quite well, although often I’d fall off Jay’s pace, and Lynda would in turn fall behind me on the hills. It was only after we got beyond 100… 110… 120 miles that we each started to hit the wall, though no one cracked.

The familiar route through Wellfleet took us by a stunning overlook over White Crest Beach, where I made sure to stop and show Jay what the miles of beaches in the Cape Cod National Seashore are like. However, the Outriders route diverged from the PMC route in Truro, avoiding Route 6 almost completely. The alternative was a little hilly, but more scenic than Route 6’s commercial buildup. By this point, I was having cramps on hills, and had to pedal one-legged for a bit.

We enjoyed the final rest stop in Truro, which featured brownie bites, a light massage, and the shade of a big willow tree billowing in the rising wind.

From there, one final short leg brought us into Provincetown to the finish at the foot of the Pilgrim Tower, where we collapsed and sipped on ice-cold cola. I arrived at 4:36pm after riding 130.5 miles in 10 hours and 23 minutes clock time. That was split into 8 hours of riding and 2 hours in rest stops. My moving average was 15.8 mph.

One of the nice parts of this ride was that they had a bag drop, so we had street clothes we could change into. However, after ten hours on the road in the hot sun, we were absolutely grimy. Jay insisted on taking a quick dip in the ocean by the piers, where he surreptitiously slipped out of his cycling bib shorts and into his swim trunks, while Lynda and I opted for the more traditional route of using wet-naps in a restaurant bathroom.

That restaurant proved to be Bayside Betsy’s, a nice place run by a friend of Lynda’s. Although the food at the rest stops had been superb (Twizzlers, Nutella, grapes, apples), by the end of the ride my stomach wasn’t having any of it. I wasn’t thrilled by the prospect of trying to force myself to eat at a restaurant, but somehow I managed to order a steak, and by the time it came, my system had quieted down enough to enjoy it. The waiter provided Provincetown-appropriate banter that made it a pleasant experience.

By the time we finished dinner, time was already running short before our return ferry to Boston, so we walked down Commercial Street and had an ice cream at Lewis Brothers before boarding the catamaran at 8:15pm, with the setting sun providing a brilliant backdrop.

This was my first time on the Provincetown ferry, and it was quite pleasant. The only disappointment was that between the wind and falling temps, it was inadvisable to go out on deck. The ferry moved along at a solid 38-40 mph clip and had us back in Boston at 10pm, where we mounted back up for the comparatively short ride back to my place from Long Wharf.

We said our goodbyes and headed to our respective beds, reflecting on what a beautiful day and what a wonderful ride it had been. The only negative was that we hadn’t had enough time in Provincetown, but I find that’s always the case when I visit the cape. I was dead tired, but in a good way, with no real complaints about the ride or my performance. It’s definitely a ride that I will look forward to doing again in future years.

GPS Track Log: 2010 Jun 19: Outriders Boston->Provincetown
Sat, 19 Jun 2010 05:26:28 -0400

First time doing the 1-day, 130m Boston to Provincetown Outriders ride, accompanied by Jay and Lynda. Gorgeous and perfect and epic day. My longest day in the saddle in a long time. Slight adjustments to route due to construction in Boston and at the first water stop. 8:30pm ferry ride back is recorded in a separate GPS log.
Owner:	ornoth
Location:	--
Activity Type:	Road Cycling
Event Type:	Special Event
Distance:	129.93 Mile
Time:	11:19:22
Elevation Gain:	3,208 Feet

Follow this link for my full 2008 Pan-Mass Challenge ride report, including writeup, photos, and maps.

Follow this link for my full 2006 Pan-Mass Challenge ride report, including writeup and photos.

Follow this link for my full 2004 Pan-Mass Challenge ride report, including writeup and photos.

Follow this link for my full 2002 Pan-Mass Challenge ride report.