Chapter 7

One of the bike clubs I belonged to was the sponsor and organizer of the STP. Over the thirty years that they had been doing the STP, they had gotten it down to an art form. As an event, it pretty much ran itself, or at least that’s how it appeared to the riders on the event. To the organizers, it was just this side of a nightmare!

Picture, if you will, trying to provide enough logistical support for roughly eight-thousand cyclists along a two-hundred mile route across two states, over a weekend. Now throw in that in any given year, roughly one half of these riders have never ridden the STP before. Add to this the fact that you have a pretty high level of variation in terms of riding skills, training, and general fitness levels for the cyclists. And you pretty much have a recipe for ‘interesting times’!

We had had numerous team meetings to discuss team strategy and to try to prepare the riders that had never done a big event like this for what to expect. Telling someone what it is like is not the same as actually experiencing it firsthand. This was going to be my seventh STP in a row. None of the ‘ride harem’, as they had taken to calling themselves, had ever been on the STP, and only a couple had ever been on a ride of more than fifty miles before our training rides had started. So, I decided that in the best interest of getting everyone ready to ‘ride the herd’ that is the STP, we would ride the main training ride that was provided as a part of the whole STP experience: ‘The Summer Classic’.

The ‘Slammer’, as it is referred to by those who have ridden it, is a ride with three routes, based on distance. There is a thirty, sixty, and one-hundred mile route. We had already decided that we would ride the century, or one-hundred mile route, as it would be a good training ride in terms of distance and endurance. The big thing to remember about the ‘Slammer’ is that it is a mini-STP in terms of terrain and endurance. In essence, on the century route, you would have to climb more and steeper hills than you would on the actual STP. The thinking being that if you could survive the ‘Slammer’ then the STP would be a piece of cake!

“Okay,” I said as we wrapped up the brief team meeting after our final training ride before the ‘Slammer’, “all we have to do now is show up good and early and get a good night sleep. Trust me; you’re going to need it. As many of you have already found out, riding fifty miles isn’t the same as riding one-hundred miles. There is something about the sixty-mile point that really tests your endurance and stamina.”

“And it really makes my ass hurt, too!” said Meredith to general laughter from the team. “Nate, will you kiss it, make it feel better?” Meredith said in her best little girl voice.

“Tell you what,” I said, “You make it through one-hundred miles on Saturday, and if you still want me to ‘kiss it to make it feel better’, I’m your man!”

“All of us?” asked Melinda with a gleam in her eyes.

Before I could answer, Lizzie said, “Everybody who makes it through the ‘Slammer’ and still has the energy can come on over to our place for a hot tub and rub down after the ride! We’ll provide the tub, rub, and drinks.”

“We’ll take care of the food and stuff,” volunteered Melinda and Melody, “and Tori gives a great rub down. I’m sure she’d be up for it! She’s been bugging me all week about helping out somehow, so I’ll run it by her and see if she wants to be, what did you call it, Nate, our Concierge?”

“No,” I said with a laugh, “the word you’re looking for is ‘Soigneur’, it’s another one of those pesky French cycling words, in this case it means roughly, trainer.”

“Yeah, that’s it; Tori can be our ‘swan-yer’...”

Laughing, I said, “That’s close enough. And yeah, if she really wants something to do to feel like part of the team, we could really use a support driver to carry sports drinks and food. I can let her drive my Jeep with the bike rack, just in case anyone needs a sag wagon. I’ll even give her a new broom!”

“Broom, why the hell does she need a broom?” asked Meredith with a look of genuine puzzlement on her pretty face.

“Well, in the big European races, the sag wagon is also called the broom wagon. Kind of like the last car in the circus because it has to sweep up after the caravan and peloton have been by. She’ll need a new broom to sweep up any of your sorry asses if you can’t make it on Saturday!” Everyone laughed at that, and the fire of another challenge started to burn in more than a few eyes.

Melinda said, “Well, anyway, broom or no broom, I’ll tell Tori she has a job, and she’s now part of the team. She’ll be so totally stoked! I could tell she was trying to figure out a way to go with us, now she has it.”

“Just tell her that I prefer my oil scented with mint and heated to body temperature, okay?” I said with a big grin. More laughter greeted this as we started to break up into smaller groups to head home. Tomorrow morning was going to be a new experience for some of our team.

Saturday morning’s weather was cool and overcast. It was one of those days when one of two things will happen, weather-wise: One, it clears up and gets bright and clear. Two, the clouds thicken up, and it rains all over us. My bet was on option two, as I had yet to go riding on an overcast day when it didn’t rain all over part of the ride, usually the part where you are as far out on the road from home as you can get!

We had agreed to meet at the Velodrome at Marymoor Park at 6:00. Since it was still early in the summer, the sun was just up enough that you could see what the heck you were doing on the road, and traffic should be low. Always a good thing! I had decided to go with the layered look again, since the weather was sort of a ‘tweener’ at this point, and the rule of thumb was if it was below 60 degrees Fahrenheit, to go with leg warmers and such. So, I had on my leg warmers, arm warmers and wind vest. I also had a lightweight rain jacket in my jersey pocket. The heavier rain gear I left in the Jeep, as Tori was going to drive it today as our ‘sag’. I had chosen to wear just a generic style jersey. I always shied away from wearing team kit as I was no longer racing and didn’t want to appear as a ‘poser’. A ‘poser’ is quite often a ‘Fred’ who is all decked out in professional racing kit, all the way down to socks, helmet, the whole shebang, but can’t actually ride worth a damn. But boy do they look good, hence the moniker, ‘poser’.

I had my iPod jacked in, dew rag in place, glasses on, and was getting into my rhythm for the day’s ride when Meredith and Melinda went by looking all over for someone. I reached out and touched Meredith’s shoulder as she passed right by me, and she jumped a bit and started to get defensive, before she finally figured out it was me.

“Nate! Shit, man, you scared me! I didn’t even recognize you. You look so serious and not at all yourself. Are you okay?” Meredith asked, while Melinda looked me up and down.

“Sweetie, I’m fine,” I said, “I’m just getting my game face on, though I don’t suppose I’ll really need it today. Old habits die hard.”

“Shit, Nate,” Melinda said, “Dude, you look like the ‘Terminator’!”

“Okay, okay,” I said with a wave, “I’ll take it down a couple of notches. I didn’t mean to scare you, I’m just used to getting into the game at this point, since the starts are usually the most dangerous parts of a race, well, that and a mass field sprint finish.”

The commotion brought the rest of the team over, and they all looked at me like I had fallen from outer space or something. “Look,” I said, “I’m an old racer, okay? I’ve raced for more than fifteen years. It’s how I earned my living before I retired. It’s just an old habit, and even an old dog like me can learn. I’m not going to bite any of you, unless you like that sort of thing!” This finally got a smile and a bit of laughter out of everyone.

We all got our gear straightened out, put the extra stuff in my Jeep, and got ready to hit the road. We walked over to the chaos that is the start of the ‘Slammer’, and then got into the start area and mounted up. Singing “Back in the saddle again” as we hit the start line seemed to finally lift the mood, and we swung off onto the road in high spirits. Even the clouds parted, just a bit, to let the early morning sun shine down on us.

The first ten or so miles were pretty uneventful, as we all worked out the kinks of the early morning and started off on a fairly easy pace. After that, we began to form up and ran our first pace line of the day, along a river valley with a slight headwind. We moved through our line like a well-oiled machine, and the ladies seemed to love the feel of the open road. I had finally gotten over the need to be ‘all serious’, as Amanda had pointed out, and hit my stride with the dumb jokes about cycling. “You know the kind, like ‘Why did the cyclist cross the road?’ ‘Because the ‘Dan Henry’ pointed that way!’ You know, stupid jokes that cause more groans than outright laughs. A Dan Henry is a road marker, usually painted on the road, that points the way on the route. Each ride uses distinctive markers so that many rides can overlap without any riders getting lost or having to stop all the time to look at their map or cue sheet.

As usually happens on these group rides, you tend to travel with the same pack of folks all day. Our pace seemed to match up with a couple of other groups of riders, and we spent the morning passing and re-passing each other. By the time we got to the first rest area at twenty-five miles, we had seen the same jerseys and helmets all morning long. Other than the occasional “On Your Left!” as we went past each other, we really hadn’t talked much. This changed when we got to the rest area and food stop. Even though we had our own food and liquids, we would still stop to stretch and answer the call of nature.

Tori and the Jeep were waiting for us at the rest stop. She had a route map and had simply driven ahead of us to this point, as we had already planned to stop here. If there had been a mechanical problem we couldn’t fix in a few minutes, I would have gotten out the route map and my cell phone and had her come back to us. We had decided that this was a better plan than having her try to pace us all day, as she could have gotten in the way of other riders, or other cars and that would have been no fun at all. We all gathered around the Jeep and reloaded our bottles and jersey pockets. Meredith and Amanda headed over to scope out the food stop, but came back empty-handed.

“What, no bar cookies this stop?” I asked, and they looked at me a little funny. “Well, usually they have these great raspberry bar cookies at the rest stops on the ‘Slammer’. It’s one of the few things that make it worth riding. I lead the way over, and they all got in line and picked up a bar cookie. After a few sniffs and tentative nibbles, everyone decided that they were as good as I remembered, and they were quickly gobbled down.

The crowd of people soon got to the point where it was clearly time to move on. Everyone had used the port-a-potties, so it was time to head ‘um up and move ‘um out! On the way out, I noticed that two other groups were also forming up to ride, and they were the two groups we had been playing cat-and-mouse with all morning.

The first group was clearly a group of friends that were training together, probably like us, for the STP. There were seven riders here as well, and they consisted of five singles and a tandem. The tandem was obviously a couple as they had matching everything, down to the shoes! That’s always cute, and as is tradition we gave them grief about being ‘twinsies’. However, if it got really windy that tandem was going to be a lifesaver. A tandem makes a hole in the wind about the size of a small car, and drafting one on a windy day was sweet! The rest looked to be good friends, but spotting couples on the road is always hard, as you can’t check for rings when everyone has on cycling gloves. Anyway, they looked like they would be fun to ride with, and the ladies seemed inclined to want to get to know the other women.

The second group made my hackles stand straight up! It was a group of five ‘wild dogs’, all in various stages of matching team kit for some local amateur team that just never seemed to get any better. I suspected it was because the members were knuckle draggers, but that was only my opinion. Anyway, they were clearly sizing up all the women, and there was a lot of nodding and smiling going on. As we hit the road, we had become somewhat integrated into the group of friends, and it took us a few hundred meters to sort ourselves out. We also had the ‘wild dogs’ running up and down our flanks trying to impress the women, who seemed for the most part singularly unimpressed by their efforts. Most guys would have grabbed the clue, but, well, ‘wild dogs’ just don’t seem to be able to find a clue with both hands and a flashlight. So for the next twenty miles we rode as our team, the ‘friends’ and the ‘dogs’.