Chapter 23

As I’m sure I’ve said before, the ‘Cascade Classic’, or ‘Crashcade’ is a three-day event. Or more accurately, it is three mountain passes in three days, for a total of about 280 miles. On a ride like this you get pretty much two classes of riders: the first is the usual assortment of nice folks who want to raise money for a good cause, as well as, how does the flyer put it? Oh yeah, “challenge themselves to excel!” Gotta’ love that copy!

In general, these are the folks that always start the day off worrying about climbing, and then proceed to psych themselves out of having a good climb. That doesn’t mean they don’t enjoy the ride, or that they don’t have a good time. It just means that they mentally take themselves out of the picture as far as climbing well.

The second group are the mostly male, shaved leg, testosterone clouded, ‘me Tarzan you ... uggh!’ club-toters that you really have to keep an eye on. You know, the Neanderthals! Truth be told, the four of us would most probably fall on the outskirts of this cloud all three days. We were young, in shape and rode like the wind. Now all we had to do was stay away from trouble with both herds and try to ride our own ride. It’s funny how things have a way of happening...

The start area for the ride is a beautiful vineyard in the town of North Bend, in the Cascade foothills. Since a lot of little towns in the mountains just can’t seem to help looking like the sets for ‘Heidi’ or better yet ‘The Sound of Music’, it was a bit refreshing to see the main house and wine tasting rooms done up in a very sedate ‘Craftsmen’ style. The main house was simply stunning! Frank Lloyd Wright would have been very pleased.

We dumped our baggage, tent, and sleeping bags at the baggage truck and then headed to the start area. Unlike many of the rides we had had to this point, there was not a staggered start. The entire herd was going to start together, with a starter’s pistol no less! Some poor harried looking young woman had the unenviable job of trying to sort the riders out by the pace. Since a lot of recreational riders have no real idea what their pace is, most of them were probably in groups that were too fast, or too slow. However, the group of egos that made up the ‘shaved leg club’ knew where they rightly (or wrongly!) belonged: at the front.

Knowing we wanted to avoid riding in the main herd, the four of us also rolled up to the front. Along the way the ladies got the usual assortment of subtle, and not so subtle glances, as well as out-and-out stares, and I got the usual even less sly smiles, at least until a wife or girlfriend noticed, then I got what I had taken to calling the guilt look! By the time we reached the front quarter of the pack, we had left a swath of stiff necks, and probably other things, in our wake. The dog pack was about what I had come to expect as well.

To say that we had some raised eyebrows and a few derisive sniffs, might be an understatement. However, by this point in the summer we knew what the four of us could do, and we simply put on our game faces and got ready to roll out. On these rides, you can usually pick out the actual studs (usually a handful), the wannabe studs, and the posers. The poser count seemed a bit high, and the wannabes seemed even higher. Since you had to raise a few hundred dollars for charity to ride the ‘Crashcade’, a lot of the studs simply couldn’t be bothered, that and most of them didn’t have any friends with money to support their habit!

“Nate! Nate!” I turned my head to find the source of the yell. Jake, an old friend from my club team days, came bounding up to me, leaving his ride partners to hold his frame. “Shit man, it’s been a long time, what ten years?”

“Almost” I said with a smile, “It’s been about seven years since we last rode against each other. Just before I went pro.”

“Yeah, man. Hey listen! Me and some of the boys are treating this like a mini-stage race, yeah know? Nothing harsh or anything like that, just a little friendly competition. You up for it?” and then in a whisper he said, “I heard about the ass-whooping you put on, some fool. Sorry, you had to do it, but I heard it was necessary?”

“Yeah, that was one ass that was in desperate need of a whoopin’” I said with a knowing smile. “So what are the stakes for this little event y’all have planned?”

“Nothing big, just beer for the winner. It’s a small team thing, no more than four to a team, just like the club stuff of old. A nice round of cold ones for the winner and his team. You up?” Jake said.

“Let me check with my team. I’ll let you know at the summit, as it looks like they’re finally going to get this show on the road!”

Finally, after the usual speeches about having a good time, and it’s all about raising money for a good cause, the starter walked to the side of the pack and raised his starter’s pistol. At the shot, we gave a good foot surge and then clipped smoothly in. This was what all of the studs, and most of the wannabes, did without thinking about it. The posers usually wobbled a bit and sometimes totally missed the pedals, and usually causing a bit of cursing at the front. At least none of them went bowling for dollars!

Bowling for dollars is a phrase used in the pro ranks to refer to a crash that takes out a number of totally uninvolved racers because of its scope. You’ve all seen scenes from le Tour where there is a crash in the final meters as the main pack pours into the finish area. You see a rider go down and then like a row of dominos riders all around the crash, for reasons that are invisible to the observer, start to fall or worse yet, suddenly appear to ‘bunny hop’ up into the air. The hopping motion means that they have either tried to hop over a bike at their feet, or worse yet, that they have actually ridden over a bike and/or rider at their feet. The dollars part comes from the fact that at the professional level bikes usually cost several thousands of dollars and bikes in this price range are not built for stump jumping! The damage from one of these crashes, not including possible injury, can be pretty steep.

The front of the pack seemed to have sorted themselves out, and the studs started to surge off the front in an effort to create space in which to ride. Since we also wanted space, we surged right along with them. For a while that pace seemed a bit fast, but we weren’t actually climbing yet, although that was shortly to change, so we rode along and held our own. I mean, it’s a charity ride, right? How much like a race was it likely to get?

The route for the first day was along the side of Interstate 90, up Snoqualmie Pass, to the point where the shoulder ended just prior to this beautiful bridge that appears to be simply hanging in space. From there the road moves into actual mountain pass-like conditions, or at least the passes I recall from riding in Europe, with all the switch-backs and such. The ride up I-90 wasn’t much of a big deal, though the pace continued to be solid, and many riders took pulls at the front. A group of about twenty of us had separated from the herd, and Melody, Jane and Beth were the only women in this group. Since Melody and Beth clearly climbed better than I did, and Jane could clearly hold her own, we rolled along in good order and I think the others got in line with the idea that these women at least could climb. By the time we reached the start of the switch-backs, the group had further thinned out to include the four of us and eight other guys. The twelve of us entered the switch-backs and the real pace started to heat up. With only a glance at each other, we held on and rode to the summit to finish as a group of twelve.

One of the truly novel aspects of this ride was the way they treated the summits and rest areas. The local Kiwanis clubs for miles around had adopted the ‘Crashcade’ as one of their community service projects. This meant that a different club was responsible for each of the rest areas, and the lunch stops were all at the summit of each pass. The rest areas were a sight to behold, as the clubs vied with each other to win a vote by the riders for the best rest stop and lunch or dinner stop.

At the top of Snoqualmie Pass was a lunch stop right out of the movie “Breaking Away”. They had a giant pasta feed and really cheesy Italian music playing in the background. Somehow they found a bunch of Cinzano posters and the whole place looked like it was stolen right out of the movie. They served the ‘wine’ (actually red sports drink) from those short round wine bottles you always see in an Italian restaurant, and I just shook my head and marveled that if this was how the three days was going to go we were in for a really good time! Oh, and the food was top-notch!