Login | April 16, 2024
Trial by fire part 2
PETE GLADDEN
Pete’s World
Published: July 22, 2019
Last week, I reminisced about a host of nostalgic follies I committed on my very first cycling trip, Ohio to the East Coast. This week is part-two of that cycling misadventure.
So I ended the previous column with me cycling through an Amish community in eastern Ohio, where on the first day of the trip I imbibed on a 25-ounce Fosters Lager on a hot, 80-degree summer day. Well, by the time my beer buzz had worn off I made my second calamitous nutrition/hydration stop, this one at a little Dairy Whip where I inhaled a monster 40-ounce chocolate milkshake.
Talk about a caustic brew percolating in my stomach. Don’t think I ever belched so much. Lesson learned: Add Big Slurp chocolate milkshakes to the list of strange bedfellows - cycling, hot weather and cold beer.
Must have taken me two more days of riding until I got on State Route 6 in Pennsylvania, a main thoroughfare that runs east-west through nearly the whole Keystone State. Now I’d learned my lesson about hydrating on beer and milkshakes but I still needed a lot of schooling when it came to preparing oneself to ride a bicycle half way across the country.
Yup, by then I was struggling to get a mere 50 miles a day. And that’s because my body was so beaten up from riding my high school clunker bike, loaded down with a pick-up truck’s worth of gear, on legs that had never ridden more than 40 miles in a day. It got to the point to where I’d begun to hoof it up some of the climbs, which had gradually morphed into mountains as I continued east.
And while we’re at it, add mountain gearing to the two-foot-long list of things I’d overlooked. Those big flatlander gears which worked so well for putzing around Summit County were far too big in the unrelenting mountain ranges that lie between Edinboro and Williamsport, Pennsylvania. That gaff, coupled with my dependency on a Triple-A roadmap - great for calculating mileage, but sucks for revealing elevations - were putting my poor legs in a hole they couldn’t ride out of.
Well, by the time I hobbled past Port Allegheny I was sporting a swollen right knee, likely a bad case of tendonitis. And the damnedest thing was that I hadn’t even progressed half way across the state. Lesson learned: Time and distance are exponentially dilated when you’re not in shape to ride a bike across the 403 miles of killer climbs on Pennsylvania’s State Route 6.
A bit further east, on a day when I was too sore and tired to put up my tent, I opted to camp out under a roadside rest picnic table. “No worries,” I figured, “the weather looked stellar.” Uh…the rain began at about 9 p.m. I packed it up, figuring I’d simply do a five-mile ride to the next town and treat myself to a motel. Um…little did I know those five miles entailed a witchy descent that went straight down the side of a massive mountain.
Now I’d never ridden down the side of a mountain in the dark, let alone in the rain. Well, my cheap brakes were totally useless so I ended up wedging my heel between the rear wheel and the bike’s seat tube. That breakneck, out-of-control descent turned to be one of the scariest rides I’ve ever done. I managed to make it to the town - with the heel of my shoe completely worn through to the insert.
It was then that the grandiose notion of a valiant ride into manhood began to fade, and the subsequent next few days of riding on a bad knee had me searching for an alternative, face-saving way of showing my dad how I could make a go of it after having been evicted from home.
Long story short, I detoured north to Waverley, New York, hopped on a bus and set my sights on St. Augustine, Florida of all places. And when things got no better there, I made the dreaded phone call.
Yet Pop was totally cool. Heck, he even wired me bus fare to get back home. I’m betting he figured I’d learned a few important lessons about life. And I think the biggest lesson I learned was this: Dads sometimes let you row the boat straight towards the waterfalls, and then at the very last minute, before you really screw up, they throw you that lifeline.