Orny's Cycling Journal

Unlike other rides which appear here, I post all my Pan-Mass Challenge ride reports as pages on the cycling section of my personal website.

So if you're interested in reading about my 15th PMC — my first as a virtual rider due to the Covid-19 pandemic causing the real-world ride's cancellation — you'll find my writeup, photos, videos, screenshots, charts, maps, and stats at the following link:

Here’s the PMC video I appeared in, as shown and broadcast at last weekend’s Opening Ceremony for the 2015 ride.

The footage is, of course, from the Saturday portion of last year’s cold, rainy ride. At 2:20 I ride by, clapping, the blue plastic lei I got at the first water stop trailing in the wind.

Amusingly, eight seconds later my riding buddy Tony also appears, wearing his green and blue Quad Cycles jersey in honor of the club and our hero and mentor, Bobby Mac.

Despite those brief appearances, I encourage you to watch the whole three and a half minute video. Entitled “Because of You”, it captures a lot of the emotion and the things that mattered about the PMC.

I couldn’t possibly think of a better video to appear in. It’s truly an honor to be included in it, even for just a brief second.

And I actually appeared in a second video shown at the Opening Ceremony! The second video, “Why I PMC”, closes at 2:15 with a still photograph of the riders leaving the Sturbridge start, with me placed dead center beneath the starting banner: the most prominent, in-focus person in a vast sea of riders.

Although I didn’t ride this year, my ghostly presence making this appearance during this year’s Opening Ceremony was a nice, unexpected farewell to an event I deeply love.

Follow this link for my full 2013 Pan-Mass Challenge ride report, including writeup, photos, and GPS logs.

It’s been a while, but I thought I’d do a quick writeup of the ride I did the day after Thanksgiving, since it was kind of memorable in its own way.

One of the things I wanted to do was test my Garmin Edge 800 GPS cyclocomputer, since it had been acting up since my last big ride, six weeks earlier. I’d given it a complete hard reset, but frustratingly, it wasn’t any better. It’s great when it works, but that’s only about 80 percent of the time. And for $700, I think it’s reasonable to expect better reliability.

Still, with the temperature in the mid-50s, I moseyed out Mass Ave. all the way to Lexington, because I wanted to pick up a Lexington Minuteman newspaper. Johnny H, one of my longtime riding buddies, had posted that he’d seen my photo in it, so I had to check that out firsthand.

After wandering around town a bit, I spotted a handful of cyclists pulling up to a coffee shop, and discovered that one of them was another old friend, Joy. I spoke to her briefly, then stepped inside a CVS and picked up a paper.

I came back out and parked myself on a bench with Joy and her friends while I leafed through the paper until I found the photo of me; the same picture that had graced the Pan-Mass Challenge home page for three months filled a quarter of the second page of the sports section. It was the focus of a thank-you message to PMC riders, although I’m still not sure whether it was from the paper, from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, the Jimmy Fund, or the PMC itself!

And if that ad appeared in a local paper in Lexington, it might well have also been placed in other town papers, although I haven’t gotten any information from the inquiries I’ve sent.

I said goodbye to Joy and rode down Waltham Street to Waltham (my first time down that road), and pulled into my riding buddy Jay’s driveway. I called him on my cell to ask whether he was home, and to open his back door for me. Since I hadn’t seen Jay in months, I figured this would be a good time to deliver something I’d been saving for him: a pair of size 12 PMC-branded flip-flops that I’d grabbed for him at PMC headquarters when I was there to pick up this year’s Heavy Hitter premium (a backpack). He was properly surprised and pleased, which was gratifying, and we chatted briefly.

From Waltham I took Linden Street and Waverly Oaks (another road I traveled for the first time) into Belmont, where I stopped at Belmont Wheelworks, arguably the best-stocked bike shop in eastern Mass. I was surprised to find it very quiet on the infamous “Black Friday” after Thanksgiving. I hadn’t brought a shopping list, but I did wind up walking out with two new tires, since my old ones were wearing out, and my preferred tires (Michelin Lithion IIs with blue sidewalls) are hard to find. So that was good, too.

As I approached Mt. Auburn Street in Cambridge, I had a brainstorm. I was only a couple blocks from Fastachi, a local nut roastery. Normally I wouldn’t stop, but since I was running errands I’d brought my bike locks, and it was Thanksgiving, so why not? I walked away with a mess of freshly-roasted cashews, hazelnuts, roasted corn, and some New Zealish licorice. Oh yeah, and some chocolate-covered caramels, too!

I hopped back on the bike, but hadn’t gone a quarter mile when I felt the tell-tale squidginess of a flat rear tire. Perfect! I popped the wheel off and removed the inner tube. Out of habit, I did what you’re supposed to do, which is run your hands around the inner surface of the tire to see if you can feel what might have caused the puncture, although usually there’s nothing to find, since I typically get pinch-flats. But this time I discovered an inch-long nail that had gone straight through the tire and into the tube. Glad I bothered to inspect the tire!

I installed my backup tube with the speed that comes from practice, and used my wonderful frame pump to fill it up to 100 PSI before mounting up and lumbering home, my bag filled to bursting with two bike locks, two new tires, a newspaper, a huge bag of roasted nut goodies, and a punctured inner tube.

It hadn’t been a particularly long or fast ride, but even despite the flat it was just a nice day on the bike, which was doubly good after a very discouraging Quad ride the week before.

Some interesting stuff that shouldn’t wait for the release of my 2011 PMC ride report.

First and most importantly is that the PMC home page features a photo of me putting the hammer down during last weekend’s Pan-Mass Challenge. I was absolutely floored, because in a field of 5,200 riders it’s rare enough to have one’s picture taken, much less selected for inclusion in the post-ride photo montage!

On top of that, there are so many things about that photo that blow me away. It’s actually a good picture of me, wearing this year’s event jersey. And the jersey’s properly zipped up, a pro move that I teased my buddy Noah about a couple weeks ago. It’s a picture of intensity, with a pained grimace on the guy behind me. I’m down in the drops, leading a paceline, both of which are somewhat rare events. I didn’t even think I’d seen any event photographers on the course! If you look carefully, you’ll notice that it’s the biggest photo in the whole collage, and I’m given more prominent placement and a larger picture than Lance Armstrong and Senator John Kerry! And damn if I don’t have nice legs, too!

So yeah, when my buddy Dave Long pointed that out, I pretty much flipped my shit. Huge moment of pride, excitement, and amusement. Hopefully I’ll be able to obtain the original.

Next items are a couple of new purchases.

The first is a replacement rim for my rear wheel. Two days before the PMC, I found cracks in the rim of the Ksyrium SL that I run. So at the last second, I went to Back Bay Bikes and one of the mechanics let me borrow one of his (personal) wheels to ride the PMC with. I guess that deserves a paragraph in and of itself.

But a few days ago I got my rebuilt Ksyrium back. You might remember that I had a warranty replacement of that wheel two years ago. While they would have done a second replacement, the wheel was two months out of warranty, so I had to foot the bill to repair it. But now she’s back and hopefully will last. I wish I knew why I’m so tough on rear wheels, tho; I’ve destroyed two Ultegra and two Ksyrium SL rear wheels.

I also received the new Shimano cycling sandals I’d ordered. I’ve used two identical pairs of sandals since I started riding back in 2000, and I wore them into the ground because they don’t make that model anymore. However, one of them literally fell apart after this year’s Climb to the Clouds, so I ordered a pair of Shimano’s current model: SH-SD66.

Any time you change anything related to the contact points between you and the bike—hands, shoes, or seat—you risk screwing things up. I’ve only taken a couple rides, but so far they feel good. The most noticeable change is that the soles are stiffer, which is good, since I could feel exactly where the cleat was on my old sandals. Of course, it remains to be seen whether that stiffness is permanent or just a factor of the shoes being new, but I’m hopeful enough to retire the old ones and order a second pair to keep in rotation.

Final item is an interesting article about what it takes to be a pro cyclist, and how integral suffering is to cycling, whether one be a pro or just a neighborhood speedster. You might be interested in the whole article, but here are a couple choice citations that resonated with me:

Everything about cycling is contained in that gesture, including its reigning truism: to race bicycles is to drink greedily from a bottomless chalice of agony. The sport and its heroes are only knowable, and then just barely, once you come to understand that suffering is cycling’s currency. And what that currency buys is the occasional—the very, very occasional—moment of exquisite glory.

The first thing you notice about professional cyclists is that, with few exceptions, they appear to live their internal lives in a heavily padlocked tomb of mental anguish. They are at once astonishingly young and improbably ancient, a result of the fact that they are paid for their agony. They are modern-day ascetics, working in the open-air monastery of the mountains of Europe, with helmets as tonsures, spandex as robes.

There is thus a detachment in their manner that suggests the real world—our world—exists to them only as storybook legend, trapped as they are in another realm, with no corollaries, no points of contact, no common ground. They experience their lives through the tiny aperture of cycling; the aperture is so small because the light is so fierce. They have felt and done things on the farthest shore of the possible.

The reward for being the best isn’t that one takes *less* pain; rather that one is able to absorb *more*. The nature of this process is revealed at the precise instant that we come to know ourselves completely: we learn how far we can push ourselves, and the true mettle of our character. But that knowledge isn’t properly intelligible, nor is it transferable. To mangle Laurie Anderson’s aphorism, writing about cycling’s meta-state is like dancing about architecture. It is a private knowledge, forged in pain’s stables, and belongs to men who are not served by articulating it.

There’s no outward sign that [the cyclist] is one of the best athletes on earth. If you came across him shopping for a Billy bookcase at IKEA, you’d assume he had just returned from an island survival challenge, which he lost. Badly.

Right now my life consists of work, cycling, fundraising, and occasional sleep, so my periodic updates this time of year tend to cover a lot of ground… like this one, which covers the past month.

July was a memorable month, but not for good reasons. Although I usually spend most of the Fourth of July holiday on the bike, with one of those days comprising a century ride, this year a terrible cold hit me Friday afternoon and kept me housebound the entire holiday weekend. Pure suckage!

The next weekend I had to go up to Maine, and convinced myself that I could get some training in by riding the 70 miles from Portland to Augusta. That ride wound up being really difficult, thanks to my lingering illness, a 25-35 mph headwind that hadn’t been forecast, and a mile-long section of muddy dirt road up and over a big hill in Sabbatus. But at least I managed to get some time in the saddle…

Which I needed, because the weekend after that was the CRW’s Climb to the Clouds, a very hilly century that goes up Mt. Wachusett, and is a traditional warmup for the Pan-Mass Challenge.

So CttC was just brutal. Combine my reduced training this year with oppressively humid 96-degree blazing sun and the CRW’s extremely limited idea of what constitutes a supported ride, and you can begin to imagine how difficult it was. Thankfully, I can say that my age wasn’t a factor, as my three buddies (all 17+ years younger) also concluded that they never wanted to do that ride again.

The ironic thing is that I spent half the day hammering, thinking I was chasing them, when actually I was ahead of them. Although I let them go ahead after the first 10 miles, they stopped at a water stop I skipped. I was surprised to see them ride past me in Princeton, where I stopped but they did not. So I got back on the bike and chased, unknowingly passing them *again* when they stopped at a convenience store. So I beat them over the mountain, and they only caught up with me after I’d spent 20 minutes at the next water stop, 53 miles in.

And as I predicted last year, the summit road was closed to us for the third year in a row, which was disappointing.

Toward the end of the ride, I was nauseous and unsafely overheated, and kept pouring water over my head to cool off. I stopped at the little Chinese grocery in West Concord and picked up their last two bottles of water, only to discover on gulping it down that it was seltzer! I sipped what my stomach could tolerate and poured the rest over my head and limped to the finish, where I pretty much just collapsed. But not before getting shit from the ride organizers for asking if I could have some ice. I was too destroyed to muster any argument when the guys decided to go home early rather than take the traditional postride dip in Walden Pond.

Definitely one of my worst days on the bike. There damned well better be some training benefit, after all that suffering!

And to make matters worse, my brand new $700 bike computer / GPS failed to record the quarter of the ride that included Mt. Wachusett and the following descent (GPS data). I had already left its heart rate monitor at home, because it had been malfunctioning. At least Garmin is replacing the HRM strap; hopefully the new one will last longer than the first one.

And then yesterday Boston tied the second hottest temperature ever recorded in the city’s 140 years of keeping records. Thinking I couldn’t get into much trouble in just one hour, I biked home from work in 103°F / 40°C heat. Against a convection oven-like 25 mph headwind, over three sections of stripped/grooved pavement along one of Boston’s biggest and fastest 6-lane arterials, and then stupidly up and over Dorchester Heights, just for fun.

That kind of heat will raise your heart rate 10 bpm no matter what you’re doing, and by the time I was done my heart was pounding and I was feeling very lightheaded. Kinda scary! Hopefully this stretch of intense heat will break and the weather will be more forgiving for the upcoming PMC ride!

And that brings me around to the tiny list of positive things that happened this month. First, Garmin did replace my problem HRM strap, and the new one seems to be functioning well; tho I probably will use it sparingly until PMC weekend.

Second, a question I’d sent in to the RoadBikeRider online magazine was published this week. The question was about how to fit a cooldown, stretching, shower, and recovery meal all into the half hour after stopping that is the optimal window for those activities. You can see the full question and RBR’s response here.

And, finally, the news that really matters: PMC fundraising. Once I finally started getting fundraising letters out, the money came in quite readily. I’ve surpassed the minimum and made the Heavy Hitter level for the sixth year in a row, and have settled at $7,200 for the moment, which is quite satisfactory, although there’ll be additional donations coming in over the next month or two.

Naturally, if you haven’t made your donation yet, please do so here.

And PMC weekend is only two weeks away. I’d normally be excited, but after the difficulties of the Maine ride and CttC and this brutal heat, I’m a little gun-shy about looking forward to riding. It hasn’t been a great year for any of my cycling buddies; just ask Lynda, who canceled her plans to do the epic 745-mile PBP ride; or Paul, who bought a pricey new bike only to have Jay destroy it by driving his truck over it on the way to the 150-mile Harpoon B2B ride that was supposed to be the highlight of his season.

The bad juju is in full force this year.

So we’ll see. There’s two more weekends before the PMC, and I don’t have anything special planned for them. Hopefully there’ll be a couple Quad rides and some hill repeats in there, and then a relaxing, rewarding PMC ride once the calendar turns to August.

Hopefully…

Finally found the photo of me that I'd mentioned in this post. It appeared in the Boston Metro newspaper on 5/12/2009. It was taken at Christopher Columbus Park, where I was attending the kickoff speech given by Mayor Menino at the 2009 Bay State Bike Week celebration.

You can see the full image here (or by clicking on the thumbnail), or you can see it in the context of the newspaper here.

It’s May, so things have started happening.

A week ago Sunday I did the full/long Quad Cycles ride for the first time this year, rather than bailing at Northside (Gammy’s) in Bedford. It only added 10 miles to my day, but it was my first 75-mile day of the year. It being May, I returned home with eyes that were absolutely encrusted with pollen.

While standing at our lunch stop at Ferns in Carlisle, we ran into Billy Starr, the founder of the Pan-Mass Challenge. We exchanged a few words, and he encouraged us to see if we could flush out any more riders for this year’s event. So if you’re on the fence this year, please sign up. There’s many options as far as length and fundraising commitment, and the classic Sturbridge to Provincetown route is still open!

Last Monday I went to the official Bay State Bike Week kickoff ride and press conference. The ride was a bit silly—just from City Hall to Columbus Park, about as far as you could throw a baseball—but the press conference was a bit interesting.

In the photo at right you get to see Mayor Menino (speaking), Mass Highway Commissioner Luisa Paiewonsky behind his shoulder, next to Boston Bike Program Director and former racer Nicole Freedman, lifelong bike advocate Doug Mink in the back, and MassBike director David Watson at right.

Apparently the Metro newspaper also carried a photo of the event that included me! I haven’t seen it yet (I hope to get a copy), but it must be a prominent and recognizable likeness, because both a former coworker and a fellow Quad Cycles rider both commented on it to me.

Amazingly, as I biked back from the press conference, I stopped in a line of traffic at a red light at Commercial/Causeway/No Washington. What’s that on my left? A spuddy-van Zipcar all painted up in 2009 Pan-Mass jersey colors! Last year Zipcar Saran-Wrapped a van in PMC colors, and apparently they did so again this year. Quick like bull I whipped out the camera and took the accompanying snap.

The amusing bit is that about fifteen minutes after I got home, David Hellman, the PMC’s Director of Operations, tweeted the following: http://twitpic.com/4ziqi Zip Car is doing it again in 2009 for the PMC http://twitpic.com/4zish zipcar.com/pmc

Then Wednesday was such a beautiful day that I decided to go even longer, making it my first (100 mile) century ride of the year, something I’m not usually ready for until June or July. And I cranked through it, too, finishing in seven hours clock time, which includes a 30-minute ice cream stop at Kimball’s. I got through it with relatively few complaints, although both my knees and leg muscles required some time to recover.

And yesterday I did the Quad ride, which did 62 miles, giving me a day’s total of 77 miles, although I took it very easy after Wednesday’s stressor. The ride featured a return to stopping at Kimball’s for ice cream. Although a group of over 50 riders began the ride, by Kimball’s it was down to four: Bobby, Paul, Michael, and I. Bobby wanted a reprise of his photo feeding Buff the Powerbar-Eating Goat, so I took care of that for him. Another good day in the saddle.

As I indicated, this is also Bay State Bike Week. They have a mileage challenge this year, and I pledged 150 miles and rode 184, between the kickoff “ride”, the solo century, and yesterday’s Quad ride.

And I’ve just completed editing my first video fundraising appeal for my Pan-Mass Challenge ride. It’ll be up and announced shortly, as I kick off this year’s fundraising drive. I hope it goes over well!

I’m always at a loss about whether to post Pan-Mass Challenge articles to ornoth_cycling or ornoth. Here’s a couple that I posted over there that might be of interest to you if you haven’t seen them already.

2008 PMC Fundraising Letter
Condo Newsletter Cover Story on Ornoth

Sadly, I have to say this is going to be my first bikeless week in over three years. I’ve ridden every week for the past 166 weeks.

The last time I didn’t ride was November 2002. In that instance I was off the bike for over five weeks thanks to major knee problems.

This week’s absence isn’t quite as drastic, but it’s still going to make it impossible to ride: I’ve been in Korea all week, and won’t be back until Saturday. I guess it’s as good an excuse as any, but it’s a bit of a bummer to have my consecutive riding streak end.

Ah well, at least I can take solace in another event that happened today: a coworker in Australia led off an AIM conversation with “you’re a big biker right?”. I think it’s really cool that this guy on the far side of the planet, whom I’ve never met or talked to before, knows that I’m a dedicated cyclist. I guess I now have a world-wide reputation as a cyclist! Not bad, eh?