Not Even My Wife Reads This

When the Flatbread 200k was announced, I thought it sounded like fun. A brevet with no hills? Like Florida, without as many dangerous ancient drivers? Sign me up. I'll choose between just setting a personal best time, or riding it on my junker fixed gear, or just goofing off.

Then it rained last week. Hard. The weather forecasters kept guessing that the rain would stop soon, and they kept being wrong.

So I got up at 4:30 a.m. Saturday morning to head for the ride, expecting only a dozen or so of the most hardcore randonneurs to be there. (It's not nice to call people insane, so we have polite codenames for it, like "R-12.") It rained most of the way to the start.

But then, as the sun came up, the rain stopped. And when I got to the start, I saw about 40 people there, way more than expected for a November brevet with iffy weather. It appears a lot of people like flat rides, and nobody was afraid of the weather. Also, this ride was closer to Baltimore and Philly and New Jersey than most of our rides, so a bunch of people from the northeastern branch of DC Randonneurs showed up. (It was a two-hour drive for me, since I live in the western exurbs of Northern Virginia, but that's the price you pay if you want to ride in the flatlands.)

Another concern was flooding. The downside of doing a flat ride at low elevation right after a week of rain is that half the route might be underwater. But ride organizer Chip re-scouted the route at the last minute and rerouted around the washed-out areas. So now there are two cue sheets for this ride, Low Water and High Water. Thanks Chip for going above and beyond.

I was on my junker fixie with 52×20 gearing. I'd just put a new chain on the night before, and the chain had about a tenth of a mile of testing on it. So I was a bit concerned about whether the chain tension was correct. (It was; no mechanical problems all day.)

The weather was low 50s with a bit of mist in the air and a lot of puddles on the roads, so I chose my Lake winter boots over my summer mountain bike shoes. I went with cotton socks, wool socks, tights, short-sleeved jersey, long-sleeved jersey, light windbreaker, and full-fingered gloves. I had a balaclava, arm warmers and lobster gloves in the rack trunk. This was almost correct. My feet got a bit hot near the end, but I think that if I'd gone with summer shoes they would have been really cold and wet. So maybe I should have gone with just the wool socks without the cotton socks underneath. And I got hot with three layers on top near the beginning and should have started without the jacket. Finally, my hands got cold near the end, but not cold enough to justify stopping to change gloves.

At the start in Centreville MD I was near the front of the pack. Unfortunately the usual hammerfest ensued and I wasn't in the mood to spin 120 RPM, so a couple dozen people passed me, and I was on the back of the front group, going 20 mph. I fought for a while to hang on, then realized I didn't need to spend all that energy, and slowed down to 18. (My newbie dumbassitude may be slowly receding.) In theory, 20 with a draft is probably easier than 18 without a draft. In practice, drafting really closely on a wet road means you get a bunch of road spray in your face. Also, on a fixie, the faster you go the faster you have to spin, and being outside your cadence comfort zone isn't fun.

There was an info control at a wooden bridge around the 8-mile point, where I stopped to write down the bridge's load limit and also pack away my jacket. Then I realized that there were still a bunch more riders behind me, as they blew past failing to stop for the control. I yelled out "control" and some of them turned around and came back to the bridge. I hope nobody got disqualified 8 miles in for not listening to the pre-ride speech or reading their cue sheet.

Just after the first control someone told me my bag was tipping over. I guess the extra weight of a damp jacket on top was too much for the Velcro straps on my $15 Nashbar rack trunk. (I have a fancy Carradice on my usual brevet bike, but it just wouldn't match the junker fixie.) I recentered it and continued. It was lopsided all day but didn't fall off. At some point I realized that, despite hardly drinking anything due to the cold and wet, I wouldn't be able to make it to the bathroom at the first control. The woods and cornfields are less common in the Eastern Shore than further inland, but I eventually found a suitable (except for the thorns) stretch of woods and watered a tree. Then reminded myself to drink because you can dehydrate even in the winter.

I ended up in a small group with Chip (the other one) and George and a tandem and a couple of other single bikes. (Having so many new-to-me riders on one brevet really stretched my name-recollection ability; sorry.) We stopped at a non-control store in Greensboro at the 28-mile point. Normally I'd just press on, but the constant motion required by the fixie was already getting to me a bit, and it felt like a good idea to rest off the bike for a few minutes. I ate a Clif Bar.

The route went through Greensboro MD, then turned into Delaware. The second control was at the Dolce Bakery in Milford. The staff were extremely friendly. I hadn't eaten much and figured my blah performance might reflect a bit of bonk, so I got a breakfast cookie, a chocolate chip cookie, and a ham and cheese croissant. I was slightly confused when the total came to exactly $4.95, then remembered that there's no sales tax in Delaware. That really simplifies small retail cash purchases, since most will come up just short of an even number of dollars, rather than a bit over. All the food was delicious. While eating my carb-feast outside, an older gentleman walked up and started telling me that he couldn't ride a bike. That every time he'd tried, he'd crashed and bled, until he'd stopped trying. Ouch.

Continuing through Delaware alone, I got my first bonus miles of the day. The (revised-at-the-last-minute-in-the-dark) cue sheet said "BR Cabbage Pond Rd". Unfortunately the turn onto Cabbage Pond was unmarked, but the cue sheet was missing the usual "UM." Also, in my opinion it was a full right turn, not a bear right. That said, I kind of thought that was the turn, so I only went a bit farther to confirm, and saw Paul coming back the other way. So it wasn't that much extra riding. There were a lot more unmarked turns than usual on this ride; maybe Delaware doesn't spend as much on signs as other places, since the road grid in such a flat area is more like the simple grids you see out West, less like the random mess we get in most of the mid-Atlantic. (Heck, maybe in the future when GPS is everywhere, localities will stop bothering with road signs. Just like most phone booths have gone away.)

The next control was at the Iguana Grill in Milton. The place was empty except for about a dozen cyclists; it's probably more of a night spot. I think there were only two people working there so the food delivery was a bit slow, but the service was friendly and the burger and fries I had were okay, and I needed the break, so no problem. Got to chat with a few more cyclists from the far northeastern branch of DC Randonneurs.

The big group leaving Iguana Grill was dawdling, so I decided not to wait any longer, figuring they'd catch me soon enough. They did. And most of them eventually dropped me, but then I caught up again at the next control at 85 miles in Bridgeville. Where I grabbed a big Gatorade, didn't wait in the long line for the bathroom, and left early again, trying to make up for my slow riding speed with fast control speed. This time Chip followed me and caught me right away, and we rode together for a while, with me navigating. (For the first brevet ever, I made no navigation errors on this ride, other than the minor bobble I already described, which I'm not counting because the cue sheet was confusing and I was just double-checking both options, not actually lost.) Then we heard the big group coming up behind us, led by Chuck and Crista on the fast tandem. We were absorbed into the group, but the 18 mph pace was too fast for me on my fixie while digesting a meal, so after a couple of miles I dropped off the back and resumed riding solo. So yet another ride where I failed to finish with the C&C group, which I consider to be "par" for brevet speed. (They're consistently fast, but not crazy win-the-brevet fast.) Though I think that if I'd been on my usual brevet bike, I would have stuck to the group. (Normally I fall off the back on either a big climb or a big descent, but there were none of either.)

The route turned back toward Maryland. There was another confusing cue in Denton where we were supposed to skip the marked turn onto Gay St., then later take an unmarked turn onto Gay St. (I wonder if someone stole the second sign, and it's hanging in a fraternity house somewhere?) The unmarked turn looked like a big highway because it featured a big high bridge over a small river. (Possibly the biggest climb on this ride, maybe 30′ vertical. I stood up to climb it.) But there was a "No Outlet" sign if you went straight there, so I figured that was the correct turn. And it was. A couple of miles later I saw a rider going the wrong way, who stopped when he saw me coming. It was Mike, who'd had the same questions I had about the previous turn and was doubling back to check. I was pretty confident that I was on the right track and that our next turn was 0.7 miles ahead, and I guess I convinced him that I knew what I was doing, so we rode together for the rest of the way. (And I was right once again. I am going to get so seriously lost of the next brevet to make up for this one ride's worth of good navigation.) Mike's done a bunch of brevets in the past but not much lately, since he'd been training for an Ironman. So I got to grill him about swimming and wetsuits and getting kicked in the head underwater and whatnot for the last 20 miles of the ride, to distract both of us from how much our legs were hurting. (Me because of the unfamiliarity of spinning at a constant rate for so many miles, him from not having done many long bike rides lately while he worked on his swimming.)

We made it to the end before dark, and there was pizza and beer. So I think despite the horrible weather preceding the ride and the last-minute rerouting, this was a very successful brevet. Turnout was impressive for a November ride, and it drew people from far away. Kudos to Chip for organizing it so well.

So why did I do this one on a fixed gear? Well, I'm no super-hardcore fixie rider who can climb mountains on one, so this was just about my only chance to do a brevet on one. I'd never ridden my junker fixie more than 40 miles before (and that was just an easy out-and-back on the W&OD Trail), so I wanted to see if I could do it, and if it was as easy as on a multispeed bike with a freewheel. Looks like the answers are yes and no. The ability to coast once in a while, or vary your cadence without varying your speed, are helpful for maintaining comfort and controlling fatigue on a long ride. Even if there are no hills where you really need an easier gear. Of course there are superstar riders who can do 1200 km rides on a fixed gear, but I don't think your average PBP finisher could just hop on a fixie and repeat the performance, without a lot of fixie-specific distance training first.

Beyond the self-inflicted handicap of riding a weird bike, everything went perfectly for me on this ride. I had the right clothes, ate and drank enough that I didn't seriously dehydrate or bonk, didn't eat or drink anything that disagreed with me to the point of illness (despite recklessly continuing to eat whatever looked good rather than sticking to a few known-safe foods), didn't get lost, didn't get chased by any mean dogs (there was one dog but he just wanted to play, and actually stopped when I yelled "Stay."), didn't get buzzed by any bad drivers, didn't have any mechanical problems, and finished before dark. My legs are more sore today than they usually are after 200km, but nowhere near as bad as they were after the 400k in May. I have a bit of pain in the outside of my left knee, but not enough to keep me from riding to work tomorrow. Sorry this ride report is so boring; I'm sure I'll do something entertainingly dumb next time.

I switched Slugathon from libglade to gtk.Builder back in August, using gtk-builder-convert on the XML files, then a few small boillerplate API changes in the Python code.

Just noticed today that a few dialogs weren't working correctly anymore. (This is the problem with waiting until something is "done" to actually release it — you have to find all the bugs yourself.)

The differences introduced were missing action-widget tags for some buttons, and changes in the ordering of the children within the dialog ActionArea.

Once I figured out what had happened, it was trivial to fix things up. But be sure to test all your dialogs after running gtk-builder-convert. Slugathon has unit tests, but they don't cover the user interface, so I didn't notice the bugs until I played a long test game to verify other changes.

For the second time this week, this morning there was a group of prisoners clearing brush on the W&OD Trail in Sterling.  They were wearing what looked like pajamas with green-and-white horizontal stripes, like in old movies.  (Okay, they're usually black-and-white in old movies, but then so is everything else.)  The work crew appeared to be well-behaved and well-supervised, at least while I was there.

I wonder if this is an attempt to teach prisoners a useful skill, or an attempt to save money on park maintenance?

I tried signing up for the Baltimore Bike Club's Civil War Century last year, but it was full.  I thought of trying again this year, but then DC Randonneurs announced this 200k brevet, with the same theme (ride around Antietam and Gettysburg battlefields and the nice rural Maryland and southern PA roads between them) but 30 more miles of riding, a much smaller crowd, and a lower price.  (At the usual cost of no SAG wagon, no T-shirt, convenience stores instead of staffed rest stops, and more paperwork.)

On my last couple of brevets, I went too fast too early and had food and drink issues.  So my goal for this one was to pace myself early, eat and drink the right amount of the right stuff at the right time, and finish in a reasonable time feeling okay.

I went through my brevet checklist the night before and remembered to pack most of the stuff on it.  (Somehow I forgot my spare tire but didn't need it.)  Highs were predicted to be in the 70s, so there was no need for a CamelBak.  (Lots of riders had one anyway, but I prefer bottles.)  I also drove my car for an errand the night before, since I hadn't driven it in two weeks and wanted to make sure it would start.

I woke up at 5 a.m., ate a very small bowl of cereal for breakfast (eating too much before the ride in an attempt to ward off bonk may have contributed to stomach trouble on previous brevets), and left the house by 6.  The drive up Route 15 to Frederick at 6 a.m. was uneventful, with little traffic.  I didn't get lost, arrived 15 minutes early for the start of the ride, and was preregistered so I just needed to sign the waiver and the emergency contact sheet and grab a map and a backup cue sheet.  I didn't end up needing the map, but I appreciated the overview it gave of the route, and it may have been useful if I got seriously lost like on the 400k.

About 35 riders left together at 7 a.m.  There was an information control right off Urbana Pike, only three tenths of a mile from the start.  I guess that was the "make sure you didn't forget your pen because you'll need it later" control.  There was a monument there saying that this is where the Lee wrote the order to split his forces so that he could both invade Maryland and capture Harpers Ferry simultaneously.  Some Confederate officer (it's not conclusively proven who, though many historians and Civil War buffs have a prime suspect) lost the order (which was not encrypted), some Union troops found it and were smart enough to read it and figure out that it might be important and pass it up the chain of command, and then even McClellan was able to figure out that he should attack half of Lee's army while the other half was away.  Which led to the Battle of Antietam / Sharpsburg.

So after we all wrote down the answer we remounted and proceeded west as the usual large early-brevet group.  A small group of fast riders split off the front and I managed to stick with the plan and avoid chasing them.  By the time we reached Mar-Lu ridge, the steepest climb of the ride (yay for having the steepest climb near the beginning) I was with about 20 riders.  Of course the climb fractured the group.  I'm not a good climber by randonneur standards, and I didn't have my climbing legs that day, and I was supposed to be taking it easy early.  So I went over it nice and slow (7 mph) near the back of the group.  I was pleased to note that my bike stayed in my lowest gear rather than popping out of it like it had last time; my cable adjustment had worked.  Shifting back up to the big ring at the summit took a couple of tries, but I didn't throw the chain off to the outside, then or later in the ride, so the front derailleur high limit adjustment worked too.

On the big fast descent down Mar-Lu the last couple of riders in the group passed me (yep, I'm still a wimpy descender), so I got to ride alone for a while.  I eventually realized that I hadn't eaten anything yet so I ate a Clif Bar.  Approaching Burkittsville I remembered that the descent down Townsend Road is shady and bumpy, so I put my sunglasses away during the climb so I'd be able to see the bumps.  I caught a couple of the riders who had passed me on the descent.  Once again we rode down Burnside Bridge Road and once again I failed to actually see the bridge, but I wasn't looking very hard.

The first control was in Sharpsburg, and there were a bunch of riders still there when I arrived, so I hadn't been too far off the back of the second big group.  I controlled as quickly as possible so that I could leave with people who'd arrived ahead of me.  I bought a 32-oz. Gatorade, drank some of it, ate a Gu packet (Chocolate Outrage, which isn't as yummy as the Vanilla Bean, which is why I had some of it left) and refilled my water bottle with the rest of the Gatorade.  Then I left following Chuck and Crista and Mark, with a whole bunch of others a bit ahead or a bit behind.

We entered Antietam Battlefield Park and immediately hit another info control.  This one was more challenging because there were a whole bunch of statues and plaques and signs in the immediate vicinity so we had to find the right one.  Luckily we had a bunch of riders so it only took a couple of minutes to divide and conquer.  Mark found the right sign and we all wrote down the answer and took off down the pretty battlefield roads.  I found myself at the front of our little group and decided to do my fair share of navigating for the day, while it was flat and I still had energy.  Before we even left the battlefield, there was a secret control, Bill and Keith with a DC Randonneurs sign off to the side of the road.  Because I'd been leading I made it through this bottleneck first, and I kept going rather than waiting for the rest.  So I got to ride my usual too-fast early pace for a while, even though my goal was to avoid that.

I was soon out of the battlefield and onto MD 34 for a long stretch.  Somewhere along there I got caught by Chuck and Crista and Mark and Bennett, so I clearly hadn't been going too ridiculously fast on my little solo escapade.  We all rode together for a while, then Mark fell off the back.  He hadn't said anything about a problem so I figured he was just wanted a slightly slower pace and we'd see him again later.  Eventually we reached Raven Rock Drive, for a 5.8 mile gradual climb on a nice, wide, smooth shoulder.  Thank you Maryland for putting these wonderful shoulders on some of your highways.

We weren't going all that fast, but long hills tend to separate groups.  Bennett went off the front and then I went off the back and then I re-passed Chuck and Crista when they stopped for a nature break, and then they passed me back when I took my turn to water the local trees.  And then all the randonneurs were out of sight but I caught a local rider and talked to him for a bit.  It's against brevet rules to draft off someone who's not in the ride, but the shoulder was wide enough to ride two abreast, which I figured was okay.  Anyway, the guy said he'd had a heart attack two years before and now rode 30 miles per day to keep his heart healthy.  And we were having this conversation on a 5.8-mile climb, and he was keeping up with my pace despite being at least a couple of decades older and having the aforementioned heart history (though he did have the advantages of being skinnier than me and on a nicer lighter bike with less baggage), so I've got another guy to add to the people I want to be like when I grow up list.

Somewhere near the Pennsylvania border, I started slowing down due to creeping fatigue, and Mark caught me from behind.  I sped up a bit to match his pace, figuring it would be good to have the navigational aid through Gettysburg Battlefield, which features road signs that tend to be pretty rather than usefully placed.  (For example, they don't necessarily put them at intersections.) As we entered the park we got caught up in battlefield tourist traffic, lots of people driving really slowly and trying to see the sights without getting out of their cars.  Scary.  It's weird for me to be on a bike, being held up by cars.  (I guess it's common in city traffic but I mostly ride in the suburbs.)  It's unfortunately not at all unusual to be on a bike, being endangered by cars who are paying attention to something other than the fact that they are driving two-ton machines that can easily kill people.  But here they were doing their stupid dance in slow motion.

While dodging the Sunday drivers on Saturday, we were brought to a stop by a fake World War 2 MPs leading a convoy of WW2-style vehicles.  No tanks, unfortunately, just old motorcycles and old Jeeps, all painted olive drab, with drivers and passengers in WW2 US Army fatigues.  One of the jeeps had a machine gun, probably fake or inoperable.  We're used to seeing reenactors in Gettysburg, but these guys had the wrong war by 80 years.  After we escaped from the parade and finished telling all the obvious jokes, we missed the next turn.  Luckily Mark figured it out pretty quickly so we only got about a quarter of a bonus mile, and then rode out of the park and into the city for the second real control at a 7-11.

I'd been fading so I decided I needed some real food.  Since it was a 7-11 my choices were somewhat limited, but I got a decent-sized Jalapeno turkey wrap (I eat hot food all the time so I didn't think mere Jalapenos would be a problem), some Doritos (because they were free with the wrap, and I needed calories and salt couldn't hurt), a bottle of chocolate milk, and a big jug of water.  It took a while to wolf all that down and rest the legs a bit, and then we were off to re-enter the battlefield and be endangered by more tourists.  (We heard later that Tyler got hit by one of these menaces.  Sounds like it was a low-speed incident and he's okay, but he couldn't finish the ride.)  There was of course another information control on the battlefield. The question was amusing: what's the fine for defacing this statue? George caught up with Mark and me around that control, and the three of us continued together out of the park and back toward Maryland.

We must not have been going that fast, because we got caught from behind first by Roger, and then by a couple of other guys. Maybe they were riding fast and controlling slow. Anyway, adding more riders picked up the pace of the group, and eventually I started falling off the back and fighting to catch back up, and then decided to stop fighting and let the group go. I was tired enough that I was coasting on all the downhills and easing up the climbs, and I was spending most of my time riding on the tops rather than the hoods or the drops for comfort, but my head was clear so I figured it was just fatigue, not dehydration or bonk. So I ate a bit more and drank a bit more just to be sure, and made an extra stop for more Gatorade at 110 miles just to be extra sure I wouldn't run dry before the end, and finished 20 minutes behind Mark and 25 behind George. That's a lot of time to lose in just the last 30 miles, but when you're out of gas you're out of gas. And 9h38m was actually my second-fastest finish for a 200k, so I don't think I did that badly.

All in all, it was a good ride. There were a lot of information controls, which we all joked about, but they needed to be there to avoid shortcuts, and with the exception of the one in an overly sign-infested part of Antietam, they were quick on-offs.

My only real complaint was the amount of traffic in Gettysburg Battlefield, and moreover how incredibly clueless and distracted most of the drivers were. Seriously, it was like a gigantic mall or church or elementary school parking lot that went on for miles. I really think they should close the roads within the park to private vehicle traffic, since most of the drivers seem focused on sightseeing not driving, and a two-ton vehicle with an inattentive driver is deadly. Let them walk or ride bikes or Segways or ride in tour buses driven by someone who's already seen the sights. Anyway, I'm not enthusiastic about riding there again on a nice summer weekend. (I hear it's much less crowded on weekdays or away from tourist season.)

Other random stuff:

I saw 5 dead snakes on this ride. Coincidence, or do a lot of snakes die at the end of the summer? (On a semi-related note, I ran over a live snake on the W&OD trail today on the way to work. Saw it right before I hit it, but had no time to swerve. Third time that's happened to me. I hope it's okay.)

In addition to the ubiquitous split-rail fences, I saw one unmortared stone fence in Gettysburg, like the ones you see in upscale Virginia horse country. I had always assumed that such fences were too labor-intensive to economically build without slave labor, but Pennsylvania was a free state, so maybe not. Or maybe it wasn't economically sound but rather a form of conspicuous consumption, the 18th-century equivalent of a Ferrari or a private jet?

I had a really hard time finishing the 400k in May. But I was fine for the first 150 miles except for some minor digestive issues, probably caused by eating too much Gu at once. So I resolved not to do that and assumed that the next 200k would be easy. Ha!

The start was fun. It was a nice cool morning, and there was a big, pretty fast group at the front, and I stayed mostly at the back of it where I belong. There was one really sharp blind left turn, which led to a rider falling and hurting his shoulder and needing to quit the ride. Get well soon Jim. I'm glad that nobody else piled onto him. Several people stopped with him to make sure he was okay, and the rest of the group kept going.

On one medium-sized roller, for no good reason that I can recall, I decided that everyone was climbing too slowly and charged off the front. My solo break lasted for a few minutes before a smaller group caught me again, and it was a dumb waste of energy. I need to stop doing that.

By the time we reached the first control, my stomach was acting up a bit, even though I hadn't eaten anything funny yet. (Pasta with chicken for dinner the night before, two bowls of cereal for breakfast.) Maybe just riding too hard? I didn't want to bonk, so I ate a Clif bar and a banana, both of which are usually safe foods for me. (Though the banana was a bit on the ripe side.) I left with the second group, Chuck and Crista and Mark. I was still feeling too full of energy and still pushing too hard at the front of the group.

We went up over Mar-Lu Ridge. My bike has 50/34 compact double and a 13-29 cassette. But it kept autoshifting out of the 29 cog into the 26. So I was climbing in 34×26 instead of 34×29. That first tough climb finally cured my desire to go too fast, and I dropped to the back of the group, which had been joined by Chip and Eric.

At the top of Mar-Lu Ridge, when I shifted back up to the big ring, the chain overshot and fell off on the outside. This time I managed to get it back on while still on the bike, by soft-peddling while fidding with the front shifter.

I'm a wimpy descender, and Chuck and Crista descend like Evel Knievel, so I got dropped going down the other side. I caught up again on the flats (wasting a bunch more energy to do so) and rode with the same group (minus Chip, who had flown off the front) up the big hill after Burkittsville, but then got permanently dropped on the big descent down Townsend Road (which was bumpy, and shady enough that it was hard to see the bumps with my half-fogged sunglasses).

I almost missed a left turn at a traffic light in Sharpsburg, and had to make a U-turn and wait for the light again. Tyler caught up with me, and we rode together from there to the second control at the Shepherdstown Sweet Shop. I love that place — indoor plumbing and yummy food. Unfortunately, my stomach was still unhappy, so I limited myself to a cheese danish, a cranberry juice drink, and another Clif bar. I really should have skipped the danish and picked something blander like bread.

The weather was cool enough (mid-80s) that I thought 2 24-ounce Polar bottles would be enough. I failed to notice the 50-mile gap between the second and third controls when I looked at the cue sheet before the ride. I should have brought my Camelbak or a third bottle, or looked harder for water along that section.

I left the control with Chuck and Crista and Mark again, but C&C had a flat in Shepherdstown so Mark and I kept going, knowing they'd catch us eventually. Then I hit a big bump on MD 34 and lost a water bottle, and by the time I retrieved it and adjusted the taillight that I'd knocked into my spokes in my rush to retrieve the bottle before a car hit it, Mark was out of sight. So I rode fast, and he eventually realized I was missing and rode slowly, and I caught him again. And then Chuck and Crista caught us, before the big climb up Reno Monument Road.

I'd done that climb once before, and I remembered that I'd had to stop and rest a couple of times. So my goal this time was just to make it over without stopping. I made it up the first steep part in my 34×26, and caught back up to the others on the flat bit, but then started suffering badly on the second part and decided to let them drop me rather than to keep wasting energy keeping up. So I stopped and rested for a minute until I no longer felt my heart pounding in my throat, and got a drink, and then started moving again (which took two tries because I didn't manage to get the second foot over the top and clipped in the first time, a sign that my brain was a bit fried) and slowly climbed up and around the next curve — and realized it was the summit. If I'd known the top was so close I would have kept going and rested on the bike going downhill.

Tyler caught me again while I was waiting for a red light in Middletown. We rode together for a while, then I almost missed a right turn. I finally saw the sign before I was completely past it, but but I'd been going fast downhill in high gear and forgot to downshift while looking for the street sign, and the turn was back uphill, and I couldn't manage to pedal uphill far enough to downshift, so I had to get off and lift the rear wheel and hand-spin the pedals to downshift it. It took a while to remember how to do that; my brain was clearly a bit cooked. So while I was rediscovering things that I'd learned about bikes when I was about 6, Tyler dropped me going up the big hill on US 40, and then went out of sight up Shooktown Rd.

I rode solo for several miles, then saw Tyler on the side of the road with a flat. He had a big gash in his tire, and had forgotten his tire levers. So I lent him mine and stayed with him while he fixed it, in case he needed more help. His patch failed a while later, so I stopped again and waited while he swapped a tube. Then a few miles later his new tube blew up with a bang. The hole in the tire needed patching. He tried booting it with a dollar bill, but wasn't confident that it would hold. Eventually Eric came by with a tire boot, which held for the rest of the ride.

The cue sheet showed a 7-11 10 miles before the next control, and I was almost out of water, so we headed there at a pretty good clip. We re-passed several of the people who'd gone by while Tyler was fixing his tire. Tyler pulled the whole way and I just followed; I was pretty dead at this point. When we got to the 7-11 (featuring a picnic table in the shade!) I drank a bottle of chocolate milk and filled my bottles and used the bathroom and let everyone else go, so that I wouldn't be tempted to ride too fast to catch up. Unfortunately, the chocolate milk didn't help settle my stomach, and I was starting to bonk by this point because I couldn't make myself eat enough.

Then it was 10 miles to the next control (another 7-11, this one without a picnic table). I still felt bad so I drank a 32-ounce Gatorade and took another bathroom break, then resumed riding alone. Went over a nasty hill on Buffalo Road, then a moderately steep hill on Watersville Road, then we were done. I took this last section very slowly, coasting on all the downhills, spinning slowly on the flats, and climbing the steep bits at 4 mph.

At the end my stomach still hadn't recovered so I didn't eat any post-ride pizza. Just headed home, showered, ate a banana, and went to bed early.

The moral of this story? Don't go too fast early. Make sure your lowest gear works okay before a hilly ride. Bring enough water. Eat. Same as every time. (Except this time I didn't get lost or suffer any serious mechanical problems, other than not being able to use my easiest cog.)

I don't really know what made me sick, since I didn't eat anything weird. Maybe just riding too hard early on?

I was just scammed at a Wendy's drive-through window. I figured out what the guy was doing while he did it, but let him continue because I was curious and the amount of money was small.

This drive-through has a outside intercom, a money window, and then a food window. One person takes the order via the intercom. A second person takes the money and gives change. A third person hands you the food and your receipt.

So what the guy at the second window does is quote a higher price. (In my case, the order was $5.94 but he said $10.94.) The intercom isn't very great, and most of the people who work there have strong foreign accents, so it's quite possible that many customers don't hear the price correctly over the intercom, and even if they do and they correct him, he can just pretend they heard him wrong. If they don't object, he pockets $5. Assuming this guy is paid about $8 per hour, he only has to pull this scam twice per hour to more than double his income. If he does it often enough, he's probably making more than the store manager.

The critical flaws in Wendy's process that make this scam easy are:
1. The price isn't displayed on a screen for the customer, either near the order intercom or near the money window
2. You get the receipt at the food window, not the money window. So if you check your receipt against your change, you've already moved away from the guy running the scam, and now it's your word against his.

Note that most McDonalds do both of these things correctly. Perhaps this partially explains why McDonalds does a lot better than Wendy's financially, despite having much worse food.

Anyway, I called the store, asked for the manager, and explained what was going on. I'll go back to that Wendy's soon and see if the guy who ripped me off is still working there. If he is, I'm never eating at that Wendy's again.

(Note that if, even if he does get fired, he still wins big. It's not like he can't find another $8 per hour fast food job in about five minutes, and there's no record of how much he's stolen so they'll never get it back. He only loses if someone actually prosecutes him. But Wendy's loses big, from customers who realize they were ripped off and then never eat there again.)

My long-ride goal for this year was a 300 km brevet. But due to scheduling conflicts, I missed all three local 300k brevets this spring, so I had to either admit defeat or step up to a 400k. I'm pretty stubborn, so I signed up for a ride almost twice as long as I'd ever done in one day, not really knowing if I could finish it.

The fear of not finishing actually motivated me to prepare for the ride. I bike commute 10 miles each way, almost every day, but experience has proven that being good at 10-mile rides does not translate to being good at long rides. So over the last few weeks I did two half-centuries around the hilly western end of Loudoun County, some mountain biking, and Crista's May Your Pain Be Exquisite century that featured a hill steep enough that two skilled cyclists tipped over backwards. I rotated my handlebars back a bit so that the hoods were a bit closer and easier to use when I got tired. I bought a second Polar water bottle since slightly colder water is good. I bought some Clif Bars and some Gu in case I needed calories between controls. I adjusted my front derailleur's high limit screw to make sure that it wouldn't throw the chain off going up to the big ring. And I packed 3 tubes and a patch kit.

In order to use all available daylight, the ride started at 4 a.m. It takes me about 45 minutes to drive to Frederick with no traffic, and one advantage of a 4 a.m. start is that there's no traffic, so I decided to pack everything the night before, wake up at 2:15, eat a big breakfast and then leave around 2:45, leaving me 30 minutes for tech inspection and registration. But my GPS got confused about the difference between East Patrick St and West Patrick St (or maybe I got it wrong, but I triple-checked it), which cost me about 20 minutes, so as usual I arrived just a couple of minutes before the start and had to scramble to leave with the main group. That was my first mistake of the day. (See Patrick's photo of the whole group ready to leave? I'm the guy in the maroon jersey still getting tech inspected.) Luckily I was pre-registered and the tech inspection (Rudy) and registration (Lynn) were lightning-quick, so I caught the back end of the pack as it pulled out. I didn't have time to put on my helmet light, so I couldn't see the cue sheet, but 30 bikes going the same way can't be wrong.

The pre-dawn ride from Frederick down to Brunswick and then over the bridge into Virginia was fantastic. There's not much traffic on the road that early, and the drivers were pretty patient about passing the big group. Then the route went through Lovettsville and then down Mountain Road toward Hillsboro. I had just ridden most of these roads a couple of weeks ago, so it was fun to actually know where I was for once. (Of course it wouldn't have mattered if I were lost since there were still over 20 bikes in the main group.) The sun came up in time for us to spot a few kamikaze deer jumping back and forth across the road trying to take us out, but we were all awake enough to avoid them without crashing into each other. We took Route 9 west through Hillsboro and then Stony Point / Woodgrove / Airmont (all really the same road, but in Virginia all roads change names every few miles to confuse damnyankee invaders) down through Round Hill to the first control at the Airmont store. The store wasn't open but there was an information control — write down the name of the nice old house or the year it was built or the fraction of its peak value that it's worth now. I hadn't eaten anything since breakfast at home (it was dark, we were going fast, I didn't have my helmet light, and I forgot), so I ate 3 Gu at once to try to catch up. That was my second mistake.

At the control the big group split up, as some people stopped for a few minutes to eat or use the Outdoor Restroom Facility and others took off immediately. But we still had a nice line of riders heading up Snickersville Turnpike. There are fairly evil hills on that road, but it was still early so everyone was at full strength and the climb wasn't that bad. And it led us to Route 7, which is a state road but would pass for an Interstate in many parts of the country. Four lanes, wide median, paved half-shoulders. Snickersville had taken us almost to the top of the Blue Ridge, so we just had a bit more gradual climbing on 7, and then got to bomb down one of the longest and straightest downhills in the area. I'm usually a wussy descender, but even I surpassed 40 mph on this one, and Chuck and Crista's tandem blew by me like I was standing still. Even at that early hour there was traffic on 7, but not too much, and most of them were courteous enough to move over into the left lane to pass us, rather than blowing by at 70 mph 3 feet away. (There were a couple of exceptions.)

We continued west on 7 for a few miles, and down several hundred feet, before turning north into West Virginia a few miles east of Berryville. Eastern West Virginia is a nice place to ride bikes — pretty countryside, not too many people, not too many cars — except for the uneven road surfaces. One road will be glass-smooth, and the next will make you wish for a mountain bike. I guess even Senator Byrd's record Senate seniority can't fund improving 'em all at once. I rode with Russ and Lisa for a bit, then jumped up to Bill and Roger (I always start too fast, which was my third mistake), and then those groups came together and Ed and Mary's tandem joined us. So we had a big enough group that I didn't have to navigate but a small enough group that I didn't have to worry about crashing into anyone. Perfect.

We got to Shepherdstown around breakfast time. The Shepherdstown Sweet Shop is about the worst place in the world for a diabetic or someone trying to watch their weight, which makes it about the best place in the world for an early morning bike stop. There were so many kinds of yummy sweet stuff that I'd never imagine eating for breakfast except on a bike trip that it took me a couple of minutes to decide on a cheese danish and a piece of raspberry cheesecake. I had bonked on my previous two long rides and had decided that it wouldn't happen again — I'd eat until I threw up rather than bonking. Unfortunately my stomach was already a bit off by that point, because it turns out that the suggestion to eat one Gu per 45 minutes is not just a minimum, but also a maximum. The good thing about pure carbs in a gel form is that it's easy to digest and goes to work as fuel quickly. The bad thing about being easy to digest is that it goes right through you, a bit too quickly, if you know what I mean. Also, I was wearing bib shorts, my fourth mistake. In my opinion bibs are a bit more comfortable than bike shorts with elastic, because there's no elastic digging into your waist. But they require disrobing completely to use the bathroom. So on a brevet, where you want to be efficient in the controls, they're not a great idea. That goes double if some of the controls feature the kind of bathrooms where you really don't want to set anything down. And triple if you're having stomach issues that require more than the usual number of bathroom breaks.

Enough about that. The next stage of the ride from Shepherdstown to Hancock was pretty hard. There aren't a lot of serious hills along the south side of the Potomac, but there are a lot of rollers and they add up. Once again I ended up riding with Roger and Russ and Lisa, and we moved at a good clip without getting lost. But the combination of early-ride optimism and the big breakfast got to me — at one point I was leading the paceline, and then I looked back and realized I'd dropped everyone. So I slowed down until they caught up, and then it happened again. I just can't ride a sustained pace on the front. Always too fast or too slow. Maybe I need to wear a mirror so I notice when I'm accidentally pulling away. Eventually I was unsure about a turn on the cue sheet, so I waited a bit for the group to catch up to make sure, and then I stuck myself at the back of the group to keep out of trouble.

We crossed the bridge back into Maryland around lunchtime, and went to our third control at the C&O Canal Bike Shop in Hancock. That place has everything a control needs — outdoor restroom facilities, cold drinks, spare parts, benches in the shade, recumbant bikes in case your saddle area really hurts and you need to change religions in mid-brevet. Lynn had warned us that it was easy to miss the turn off the Western Maryland Rail Trail up a trail through a parking lot and then the wrong way on an I-70 entrance ramp, so I wanted to make sure I was with a decent navigator when I left the control. Roger had already taken off while I was visiting the porta-potty (the Gu-overdose-induced problem stayed with me all day), but Bill hadn't so I left with him. Anyone who uses both a GPS and a cue sheet in parallel is a good bet to not get you lost. Bill would normally be way ahead of me by this time in a brevet, but he was deliberately going slowly to stay fresh for his 600k checkout ride next week. If any fast riders need someone to slow them down, I'm always happy to help. (I'm also happy to help pull slower riders, but I'm not nearly as good at that, since it requires riding a consistent pace and staying on course.)

There was a non-control at a campground near Mercersburg, PA that the cue sheet said had good milkshakes (and cue sheets never lie), so we stopped. Another part of the no-bonk pledge. The milkshakes were indeed good.

After the milkshake stop came the second big climb of the day. It was long but not that steep, and I was still pretty fresh halfway through the ride, and Bill was still taking it easy, so it wasn't that bad. Eventually our big uphill got rewarded with the corresponding big downhill, and we continued northeast through the cow-farm valley toward Newburg. Later we caught up with Ed and Mary on the tandem (they'd deviously skipped the milkshakes to sneak ahead of us), so I had two bikes to follow (I was feeling okay, but no longer full of early-ride excess energy). Then I dropped a chain (ever since I put a compact double on my bike, it drops the chain off to the outside about every hundredth shift up to the big ring, and none of the adjustments I've made have quite cured this), and had to chase hard to catch up. And then I got paranoid about that happening again and chose to ride in the small ring when I really should have been in the big ring. (I know that spinning at 100 rpm builds character, but I'm not Lance Armstrong, and I can only do that for so long until my legs get tired of it.) And then I didn't stop for water at the "last water for 22 miles" because I still had 1.5 bottles left. That was mistake number five of the day, and probably the worst one. It had warmed up to about 80 degrees F, and we were riding in full sun, and I had a black helmet made back in the 1990s when helmet manufacturers still cared more about protection than ventilation. 1.5 bottles would have been enough earlier in the day, or if nothing went wrong, but it didn't give me much margin for error.

Without warning, my rear tire went flat with a loud "POP!" Definitely a burst tube not just a little hole. I was a bit off the back when it happened and the bikes ahead didn't notice, so I was alone. I pushed my bike into the shade of a nearby silo (shade: good; evidence of cow farming all over the ground near the silo: less good). Turned out I had about a six-inch split in my tube. I had inflated it to about 120 psi that morning (better to prevent pinch flats), which is close to the limit for my tires (I usually use 110 psi in the back, 100 psi in the front), and I didn't think about what would happen during the day as the temperature increased. (We now interrupt this ride report for a high school chemistry refresher. Ideal gas law: pv=nRT. Assuming everything stayed constant during the day except pressure and temperature, T at the start was 55F which is 286K, air temperature in the afternoon was 81F but it had to be at least 90F on the road surface which is 305K, and 120 psi * 305K / 286K = 128 psi. So if 120 psi was near the limit, it's not surprising I burst it. Yep, mistake number six.) I repaired the flat but it took a lot longer than usual, because I was getting tired and maybe a bit dehydrated. I continued down the road solo.

I drank all my water (I think that's the right thing to do if you need it; water in your bottle doesn't help like water in your body) and ate some Gu and slogged on to the next control near Newville. I definitely got a bit dehydrated during this stage; my speed dropped and my mood got surly. (It's a bit hard to tell the difference between dehydration and bonk, since they both have a lot of the same symptoms, but I'd eaten so many calories I was pretty sure it wasn't bonk.)

Next time I'm bringing my Camelbak in addition to two bottles. I'd thought of bringing it, but I don't like having weight on my back for long rides, and the weather forecast had said only 80F so I hadn't thought I'd really need it. (Mistake number seven.) I wish Camelbak would sell a big water bag that fits inside the main triangle of the bike, like this one that Sandiway Fong custom-made.

I'd thought I'd need to go all the way to the next control to get water (I wasn't quite desperate enough to start knocking on doors and begging for water, though perhaps I should have been), but then I saw a Pepsi machine off to the side of the road in Newburg. Luckily I had some $1 bills, and it wasn't empty. It took a few tries (why are soda machines so much less reliable than every other modern machine except fast-food intercoms, Christmas lights, and computers that run Windows?), but eventually I got a 20 oz. Pepsi and a 20 oz. Aquafina for $2.40. Normally I'd consider that a complete rip-off, but I was thirsty enough then that it was a total bargain.

A few minutes after re-hydrating my mood and pedaling speed improved. And since I was no longer trying to stay with a group I was less paranoid about dropping my chain and happier to use the big ring. (I don't think I dropped it again all day.) And I saw some Mennonites in old-timey clothes and funny hats on bikes, which I thought was cool. So I pedaled with renewed vigor toward the next control, and promptly turned the wrong way onto Big Spring Road. (Mistake number eight.)

Just in case you don't regularly follow cycling cue sheets, let me summarize the different kinds of turns and their degrees of difficulty. Examples of hard ones are turns on sharp downhills, unlabeled roads, street signs turned the wrong way, hidden little roads that are easily confused with nearby bigger roads, and non-orthogonal intersections with lots of roads at weird angles. Most people miss those sometimes. If the author of the cue sheet thinks that a turn is easy to miss it may be labeled "ETM", so we tend to pay more attention near those ones and miss others instead. But the really easy ones are labeled "T/SS" which means "T intersection at a stop sign." You cannot miss those, because if you keep going you run out of road and hit rocks or trees or something. Yet somehow the cue sheet said R and I turned L. It was 1.3 miles until the next turn, so I pedaled 1.3 miles, into the town of Newville instead of away from it. Because I was in town there were a whole bunch of streets nearby. None was called Springfield Rd., the expected next turn, but there was a Springfield Ave. But it didn't have the "quick steep uphill" that the cue sheet mentioned. Like many men I consider asking for directions an admission of personal failure, so I lapped Newville a few times (mistake number nine) before I finally gave up and called my wife Tchula. I hadn't brought my GPS on the bike, and the route map didn't have the level of detail I needed, but she had Google Maps. (And she had asked me to call anyway to verify that I wasn't dead yet.) Unfortunately her long distance map-fu was not quite up to the task, so I was just as lost after talking to her as before. So I broke down and asked a local couple walking down the sidewalk for directions, and was lucky enough to find someone both nice enough to help and clueful enough about the local geography to point me the right way. And once I got back on route it was only a short, steep climb to the World's Best Control.

This route featured several really good controls. The Shepherdstown Sweet Shop is right up there due to the quality and variety of the food and drinks. And the C&O bike store features not only provisions but actual bike parts. But the log cabin control run by Ray and Denise and their daughter was off the charts. It had about 10 kinds of excellent food, indoor plumbing (and an entertaining steep twisty stair climb up to it, probably great for the guys who insist on wearing road bike shoes instead of much more walkable mountain bike shoes), and a nice shady yard with a pool. When I told Ray that I'd had a flat he indicated that he also had spare tubes, but I still had two left so I didn't think I'd need one. I spent way too long at this control, ate and drank a ton, and finally headed out toward the day's third and worst major climb.

I followed Jim and George, who were leaving at the same time, but on the first steep downhill I hit a bump and "POP", flat number two of the day. This time in the front tire, so at least it couldn't be something I caused when fixing the previous flat. Again, I found a shady spot, this time against a nice tree in a farm house's front yard, with no unpleasant byproducts of cow farming in sight. By the time I had the tire out, the farmer from across the street had ambled over to talk to me. Really nice older gentleman. I now know a whole lot more about cows and this part of Pennsylvania than I did before. For example, when they built I-81 in 1962 they split his farm in half, but that's okay because Herefords don't really got along with Angus. I finished fixing the flat, and took off the pump, and it took the end of the Presta valve with it and all the air whooshed out. (I was probably too rough with the frame pump. Maybe because I was tired, maybe because I was distracted by the entertaining conversation. Anyway, that's mistake number ten.) So I had to fix the flat twice. Good thing I brought three tubes. Now I had to baby my tires for the rest of the ride, or at least until I caught up with another rider who might have an extra tube. (I did have a patch kit, but patching a flat and waiting for the glue to dry is about the last thing I felt like doing at that point. And not all flats are patchable; one of the two dead tubes I was now carrying had a six-inch gash in it and the other had a failed valve.)

If you look at a map of south central Pennsylvania, you see places where people live like Shippensburg and Harrisburg and Gettysburg, separated by places where not many people live because there are big tall rocks in the way. Unfortunately the direct route from Newville to Gettysburg goes through Pine Grove Furnace State Park, which is a nice place to ride if you have a motorcycle. Not so much on a bicycle with darkness approaching and 180 miles in your legs. PA 233 climbs from 500′ up to 800′, then descends to 650′, then up to 1300′, then back down to 900′, then up to 1600′, then finally plunges down for real. It's not just the amount of climbing that's annoying, but the way it taunts you into thinking you're done, before sticking another big uphill in your face. And they call this climb Big Flat, for another small kick in the ego. By the time I reached the final big descent it was getting dark, so limited light and no more tubes meant I had to ride the brakes all the way down, making sure I didn't hit any potholes. And it got cold, at least with the downhill wind.

While I was putting on my arm warmers and long-fingered gloves and tights, Russ and Lisa went by. I hadn't seen them since lunchtime, and between the flats and the missed turn I'd figured that I was the last rider. So I tried to chase them pretty hard toward Gettysburg. But I didn't have much energy left, so I couldn't catch up. Except that there was a fireworks show at the battlefield, which they stopped to watch, so I caught up there. Never got to watch fireworks on a bike ride before. Fantastic. But I had a near miss with a car after the fireworks show — some lady in a hurry to beat all the other spectators out of the parking area almost backed up into me. I should have stopped and let her back out rather than trusting her to check her mirrors and see me. (Mistake number eleven.) Too many hours in the saddle were definitely affecting my judgment. Luckily I dodged her, but it was close.

The three of us headed into the town of Gettysburg, to the final control at a 7-11. I'd only been to the town a couple of times before as a kid, and thought of it as small and sleepy. Well, downtown Gettysburg these days is one happening place. There were dozens of people wandering around, including a horde of tourists being led on a walking tour by a woman in old-timey clothes with a lantern. Plus plenty of teenagers in stupidly decorated cars with flatulent-sounding exhausts blasting stupid music. Like something out of a bad sequel to American Graffitti. I wonder why their downtown is so much more lively than most small cities' downtowns? Maybe they don't have a big soul-destroying mall yet because all the places they could put it are part of the battlefield park? It was crowded enough that I decided to guard the bikes while Russ and Lisa got coffee. My stomach had reached the point where I decided not to eat anything more, and even water didn't seem that great an idea. We spent a while at the control while Russ switched the batteries in his headlight, and then we left to do the last 40 miles.

40 miles isn't that far, but I'd never ridden a double century before, so it hurt. I was okay until Thurmont, then I started falling off the back and then sprinting to catch back up. About 10 miles from the end I decided to stop trying to catch back up, and just ride in as slowly as possible. With that short a distance I could walk in and still make the 7 a.m. time limit, but I rode instead for pride's sake. Surprisingly, a mile from the end I heard bikes coming up from behind. I figured it was George and Nick and Jan, who had come into the Gettysburg control behind us right before we left, but it was Russ and Lisa again. They'd taken a wrong turn near the end.

After checking in at the end-of-ride control, I pondered getting a room and staying in Frederick, but I was wide awake and preferred to drive home and sleep in my own bed. But driving doesn't keep the adrenaline flowing to keep you awake the same way that riding a bike does, so the fatigue hit me hard halfway home. I was able to keep myself awake by turning up the stereo and tunelessly screaming along, but it wasn't a fun drive. (Even though nothing bad came of it, this counts as mistake number twelve.)

Anyway, I finished, and I didn't hurt myself, so it was a good ride. But the second half was hard and I really was pretty close to not finishing a couple of times. I am so not doing the 600k in two weeks, but I plan to ride the full 200/300/400/600 series next year, and I'll try to make fewer or at least more entertaining mistakes next time.

On a sad note, Keith was hit on this ride, in Frederick about 5 miles from the finish. He doesn't know who or what hit him, and I'll avoid speculating without evidence. Sounds like he'll be okay, because while he was unlucky to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, he was lucky to be knocked into the yard of a nice family who heard the crash and helped him out and called the EMTs. Get well soon Keith.

Thanks as always to the organizers and the volunteers and everyone who rode with me. Also to the people who gave me directions in Newville and the farmer who entertained me with stories while I entertained him by showing the slowest possible way to fix a flat tire (twice). And to the thousands of decent drivers who didn't needlessly buzz us, checked their mirrors before backing up, and didn't have seven or eight beers before driving home. And the deer who pranced across the road far enough ahead of us that we had time to miss them. And especially to the family who helped Keith.

In the beginning (of fancy Linux desktops), I was a KDE user, because it was first.

Then I was a Gnome user, because it's what came on Red Hat and I didn't care that much.

Then Gnome 2.0 decided to remove lots of features in the name of ease-of-use, and one of the features they removed was proper Unix-style point-to-focus, which I cared about a lot more than I cared about Gnome, so I was a KDE user again.

Until last night. My KDE 4.2 plasma app kept crashing. Without plasma, I had no toolbars and no way to restore a minimized window. An hour into trying to debug the problem, it hit me that I didn't need to do this. I could just switch back to Gnome.

Sure enough, gnome 2.24 is stable. It has point-to-focus. It doesn't have a terminal as nice as konsole, or a CD burner as nice as k3b, or a music player as nice as amarok used to be before they wrecked it, but it's not crashing.

You can keep most users with inertia. It takes hard work to chase them away. Stability first. Not removing basic useful features second. New stuff last.

I've been using Python 2.6 (and 2.6.1) as my primary Python in Gentoo for months, but it was hard masked until a couple of days ago, which meant nobody except developers and crazy people was supposed to use it. Now it's finally unmasked and in unstable (~x86, ~amd64, etc.), so it's recommended for people who are only slightly brave. Just in time for 2.6.2 to come out so everyone can upgrade again in a few days.

Lots of distributions write a lot of really important tools in Python (such as Gentoo's portage package manager), so they tend to be really conservative about upgrading it. I remember finally giving up on Red Hat when RH 7.3 still shipped the ancient 1.5.2 as the default Python. (Of course I'm still stuck using Red Hat at work. And they still ship a seriously outdated Python version, though I have to admit 2.4 isn't nearly as bad as 1.5.2.) Now I just have to wait for Ubuntu and Red Hat and Debian and Mac OS to upgrade, so I can use 2.6 features in Slugathon without feeling like I'm asking my hypothetical users to jump through too many hoops.

Warning: You might be offended by this ride report if you love mean dogs, Oprah, bike helmets, totalitarian regimes, or Yuppie trucks and have no sense of humor.

Yesterday was Valentine's Day. Also the first DC Randonneurs 200k brevet of the year. I didn't pre-register because I was supposed to go couch shopping, but then I didn't get to ride at all last weekend because of other random errands eating up all the precious winter daylight, and decided that two weekends in a row of no fun and no exercise would turn me into one of those sniveling Oprah Nation husbands who just stands around waiting for his wife to tell him what to do and randomly says "yes dear." So I went on the ride. And my wife Tchula has already forgiven me and bought a couch within the agreed budget, so it was a win-win.

The ride started from Ashland, VA, a small college town north of Richmond that bills itself as "The Center of the Universe." That kind of ridiculous self-promotion is obnoxious when someplace like New York or London does it, because it's actually half-true. Here it's just silly: Ashland is barely the center of Hanover County. It was about a two-hour drive down I-95 in the dark with no traffic, which was fine.

I hadn't written down where to park, and most of the parking spots near the start were labeled "3 hour parking" or "parking for customers of X only", so I parked on the street a few blocks away to guarantee that my car would still be there unticketed when I returned. And then took a slightly roundabout half-mile trip from my car to the start, so that I could cross railroad tracks safely. Yay for pre-ride bonus miles. Of course half a mile is nothing at the start, but I would begrudge it later.

The temperature was just below freezing, so I wore thin and thick long-sleeved bike jerseys, thin and thick bike tights, polypropolene long underwear, cotton and wool socks, and my Lake winter boots. All of that stuff stayed on all day, even as temperatures rose into the 50s, because I wasn't that hot and removing an underneath layer takes time. So the only things I changed were headgear and gloves.

For winter biking headgear I have a ridiculously warm heavy wool hat knitted by my sister Amy, a heavy balaclava, a light hat, and a light balaclava. Unfortunately the warm hat and warm balaclava don't fit under my helmet, so I can't wear them on helmet-required brevets. (I would not at all be surprised if those big heavy hats actually provided as much real crash protection as the typical non-Snell-certified CPSC-self-certified 400-vent 9-gram bicycle helmet, but that's flamewar material among cyclists so I'll stop.) And I mistakenly brought my smaller helmet, which meant I couldn't even stack the light hat and light balaclava, so I just wore the balaclava. Brrrr.

I had my heavy mittens that are comfortable (with bicycle wind chill) from about 15F to 30F, and my lobster-claws that are good from about 40F to 55F. Much of the ride was between 30 and 40, so my hands were either too cold or too hot. So I swapped gloves a lot. Before next winter I need to find some in-between gloves, or else some really light ones that I can layer.

Anyway, it got light around 6:40 and we rolled out at 7, so there was no strict need for lights, but most of us erred on the side of caution and had them on anyway. Yay for safety. I ended up near the back of a big herd and happily stayed there until it split. Then I couldn't resist the urge to go faster and jumped up to the next group, and then to the next. I was thinking about jumping up to the leaders (the usual delusions of grandeur that always make me start too fast) when my hands got really cold. I had mistakenly started with the lobster claws instead of the heavy mittens. I stopped to change gloves and almost everyone passed me and I rode solo for most of the day. (This always happens to me. If you want to stay with the group, you can't stop between controls.)

My first official brevet-underway bonus miles came when we crossed highway 301 and the cue sheet said to go straight. But it wasn't quite straight, it was a little jog to the left. I tried going to the right first, went half a mile looking for the road, half a mile back, then went the correct way. In hindsight, the cue sheet says "Two Frogs on a Bike on R", so clearly I had to cut left, but I have a much harder time navigating on a bike than at my desk. I finally passed two riders, who were going much slower than I was and didn't seem to want to speed up to draft my wheel, so I kept soloing.

There had been no open bathroom at the start, and we'd been told that the convenience store that was the first control might not be open when we got there, so I started looking for an IORF. (Improvised Outdoor Restroom Facility.) The first two likely-looking stretches of woods had enough thorn bushes (a.k.a. Organic No Trespassing Signs) that I gave up, but the third one was fine. This excursion probably cost me another ten minutes, though.

Then I swapped gloves again and plowed ahead at 16 mph to the first control. It had just opened when I got there, so I opted to treat it as a real control (go in, buy something, ask the attendant to sign my brevet card) rather than an info control (write down whatever's on the store's funny sign and go). This cost me another couple of minutes, since I was apparently the first randonneur the clerk had seen so I had to explain the whole brevet card concept, but I did get to drink some yummy new flavor of mixed fruit drink that I hadn't had before. (I should have written it down, because I've already forgotten exactly which fruits and/or artificial fruity flavors it contained. So let's assume it was strawberry kiwi mango watermelon pomegranite MSG disulfate orange and move on.) There were some nice people outside the control who wanted to know about the ride, so I gave them the one-minute no-French-words version. One guy wanted to tell me the optimal roads to get me to Tappahannock faster, and seemed disappointed that I wasn't allowed to waver from the assigned route and take advantage of his local knowledge.

When I flipped my cue sheet, I noticed that the next section featured a "DOG ALERT!!". Scary. But not for a while. The route reversed itself from the control, so I got to wave to one cyclist who was behind me and revel in my not-quite-last status. (I'm a competitive person by nature, but not a very good athlete, so I have to move the goalposts really close to motivate myself to keep trying.) Then I continued along the pretty mostly empty country roads, until I approached the turn from The Trail to Poorhouse Road, thinking about how that was an interesting juxtaposition of a ridiculously pompous golf-course-community-style street name and a almost-too-honest old-timey small-town street name, when I got my unscheduled DOG ALERT for the day.

I love living in Virginia, but I don't like people who let mean dogs run loose, and we have thousands of them in the rural parts of the state. I can't say for sure if this particular dog is actually a biter or just a chaser, because he didn't quite catch me, but he was big and fast and loud and showed a lot of tooth. Cyclists talk about interval training, which means going really hard for a bit, then slow long enough to recover, rather than just medium speed all the time. I hadn't really planned on doing any intervals during this brevet, but thanks to this dog I got to do a couple. He came from my right side and blocked my right turn, so I went straight as fast as I could until he stopped chasing, which was about half a mile. And then I was off course. I had to go back through that doggie's territory again to get back on course. So I proceded at moderate speed but in a high gear, ready to sprint, until I saw him. He was sitting under a tree in his yard a bit to my right, and I needed to go left, so I gunned it so that he'd have to chase me instead of maybe tripping me. And he bolted after me, even faster than before. I was going about 26 and he caught right up, slavering and barking, and I sped up to as fast as I could go, probably 28 or 29 but I was too busy to look, and he stayed with me up to the edge of his territory. But he never actually bit me, so maybe he was just a scary chaser not an actual biter. Or maybe he was waiting until I fell off the bike and presented a softer target before he started biting. I didn't call the cops because it didn't actually bite me so I didn't think they'd actually do anything, and I probably would have lost an hour dealing with them, but if I'd been armed I would have shot that dog.

Anyway, I have even more respect for the pro stage race sprinters who ride a couple of hundred kilometers in a stage race then sprint to 60 kph or whatever crazy speed at the finish. Because what little sprint I have was definitely off just 50 miles into a brevet. And I was definitely motivated. That dog may have a future in coaching. (I shouldn't say things like that. It might give the Chinese Olympic team ideas. So just in case this is somehow readable past the Great Firewall, let me point out that the East Germans already tried this before the 1980 Moscow Olympics and it made their four-year-old future sprinters slower not faster, due to stress. So please stick to steroids and fake IDs and don't sic mean dogs on your child athletes. Thanks.)

Needless to say, when I got to the marked "DOG ALERT!!" spot on the cue sheet a few miles later, I was nervous and jumping at shadows. But the dog wasn't there.

I saw several other loose dogs along the route. A pair were just running around in the road non-threateningly but I slowed down gave them a wide berth to pass, and then some kind of CAFE-loophole vehicle (I honestly can't remember which passenger-moving-vehicles-classified-as-trucks-to-exploit-loopholes-in-the-safety-and-fuel-economy-laws-that-Congress-is-too-stupid-or-corrupt-to-fix are marketed as SUVs and which ones are marketed as crossovers so I just call them all shitboxes) came up behind and completely stopped and honked at them until they got out of the road, then blazed by me a few minutes later. I found that amusing. I can't put the exact reason into words very well, but start with the analogy "dog : bike :: bike : shitbox", but then add in the fact that the shitbox has to also deal directly with the dogs, so you get to put "squared" in there somewhere. (Superscript numbers are funny. I don't know why.)

Another pair of big dogs were standing in their yard like statues (so still that I wasn't sure if they were real dogs until I got closer), and when I reached them they started pacing me, but in their yard rather than in the road, and without barking. No problem; always glad to help well-trained and/or invisibly fenced and/or nice dogs get their exercise. Later there was a collie that also paced me from its yard, and this one barked the whole time like it really wanted to scare me, but it was too small with too high-pitched a bark to be even a bit scary and ended up just being cute. I sped up a bit just to help its self-esteem. Finally, there was one more dog near the Mattaponi river bridge that actually did come into the road to chase me, but it was also pretty small and not that fast so I just sped up a bit with a smile. One you've been threatened by Mike Tyson, Joe Pesci talking smack just isn't the same.

That concludes the extended Animal Planet section of this ride report. I continued to the turnaround point at Tappahannock (a very amusing name, for a town on the Rappahannock River. It's like they wanted to call it Rappahannocktown but decided that was too long and just changed the 'R' to a 'T' instead) with no further drama. Except that I missed two more turns and added about 1/4 of a bonus mile each time. (I'm so used to missing turns that every time I go past an intersection I double check the cue sheet, so I often overshoot by just a bit.) When I got to the turnaround control there were several cyclists eating lunch. I checked to make sure none of them had been bit by the mean dog, but apparently nobody else had even seen it. So maybe it only chases solo cyclists, or cyclists with red helmets, or it was inside watching TV or mauling children until just before I got there. So if I'd been a bit faster I could have avoided all that fun. I asked for a sandwich to go, in hopes of making up some time and maybe catching a group, and the extra-nice super-efficient staff of Java Jack's got me a surprisingly excellent chicken salad sandwich in about 30 seconds. That place doesn't look like much on the outside, but if I'm ever hungry again in the vicinity of Tappahannock I'm definitely going back.

Unforunately I don't think I ate enough lunch, and I'd only brought a bunch of 90-calorie granola bars instead of Clif Bars (fewer calories is good for overweight people snacking when they really shouldn't, less good for someone riding all day and actually burning thousands of calories), because my average speed dropped to about 12 mph and I lacked the will to go much faster. The dreaded bonk, when you've exhaused the glycogen in your muscles and have to burn body fat for energy instead. So I ate all my remaining emergency food, and drank more water than I wanted, and kept plodding along waiting for my digestive system to extract those carbs and let me go faster again.

It's good that the eastern part of Virginia is pretty flat, because if this ride had featured any serious hills I may have quit. Riding with the bonk is no fun. I pass 12 mph cyclists all the time. Most of them are just cruising along enjoying the scenery and not really caring how fast they go, which is great. But it's sad when you pass a guy on a multi-thousand-dollar carbon fiber wonder bike wearing the full Lance Armstrong team uniform (whenever his team switches names they buy new clothes to match, so they've got lots of blue USPS and Discovery in the closet and are now wearing Astana white) looking like he's trying yet going that slowly. I'm a halfway-nice guy so I don't actually scream "poseur" as I pass, but I think it. And now I was going that slow. I'm allowed to be mean to myself so I'll say it: Poseur. (Notes to self: eat a bigger breakfast. Stop longer for lunch. Bring real Clif bars. Maybe even fill the bottles with Gatorade instead of water.)

The penultimate control was a convenience store, with 3 little kids outside asking questions. They have to go to school on President's Day to make up an extra snow day. I'd feel sorry for them if I got President's Day off, but I don't. And they probably had a lot more fun playing in the snow than they would on a regular old not-important-enough-to-not-move-to-Monday-for-convenience holiday, anyway. And they asked lots of perceptive bike questions, like whether it's hard to balance while pulling out your water bottle (depends on how good your balance is and how much you practice, but almost everyone who rides a lot can do it easily), and why I was eating ice cream in February (I'm going for maximum calories and this store doesn't have any Clif Bars), and why 30-some cyclists are in front of me and I'm by myself (I stopped to change gloves and then I got lost and then a dog tried to kill me and then I bonked and now I'm talking to you kids instead of riding).

Hanging around talking to nice kids was more fun than riding in a bonked state, but slightly slower, so I eventually said goodbye and slowly rode away. After what felt like several hours of plodding along at walking speed, I got to the unpaved part of the route. We took route 54 out of Ashland at 7 a.m., but that's the main drag into town and gets busy later in the day. Plus a loop is better than an out-and-back because it lets you see more scenery. So the organizers gave us 5 unpaved miles. I was a bit worried about riding an unpaved road on 23mm tires, and actually considered bringing my touring bike, but Hickory Hill Road was fine. Half of it was just hard-packed dirt with hardly any gravel, which is about as good as a paved road as long as it's dry. The other half was gravel, which isn't fun on a road bike, but it was shallow enough that there was no real risk of falling. The only bonus fun was when a logging truck came charging down the center of the road in a gigantic cloud of dust, out of the late-afternoon sun toward the southwest. I didn't know if he saw me, so I prepared to bail off-road to the right. But he saw me and slowed down and got on his side, so I didn't have to. Let me compliment the drivers of this part of Virginia: I didn't have a single problem with any of them during this ride. Not one rude honk, screamed dumbass comment, or fast buzz inside the 2-foot legal limit (or even the 3-foot limit from more bike-friendly states). If they'd keep their damn attack dogs inside their yards, I might even think of it as a nice area to retire to someday.

We had an info control to prove we took the dirt road. We were supposed to identify the animal on a farm sign 1 mile past the railroad track. 0.9 miles past the track was a farm sign, so I kept doing. Then about 1.1 miles past the track I realized there were no more farm signs and that was the one, so I dug out my brevet card. But by then I'd forgotten whether it was a cow or a bull, so I rode back. Teats, so definitely a cow. Oops, no pen (it's on the checklist that I made but forgot to check) so I have to remember "cow" all the way to the end. Cow cow cow. See, I can do bonus miles without even taking a wrong turn. It's a gift. Cow cow.

A really nice house appeared on the right, and (coincidentally I'm sure) the road suddenly became paved, and it was clear sailing from there. At the "Ashland Corporate Limit" sign the road quality improved again. Then a mile down US 1 (fast but uncrowded and four lanes so fine) and a few turns through the Randolph Macon college campus (pretty but small) and I was done. Average speed: 14.6 mph. Much slower than I'd been on much hillier brevets. Some of that was the bonk, and some was riding almost the whole thing solo, but probably most was winter unfitness. (I've been commuting through the winter except on snowy or icy days, but there's a big difference between 10-mile rides and 130-mile rides.) So I need to do some more long hard rides before the next brevet.

The ride ended at Ashland Coffee & Tea, which seemed like a really nice college town coffee shop slash restaurant slash poetry reading zone. The kind of ambience that Potbelly's tries hard to imitate but can't quite pull off. (Even the bathroom had hipster decorations featuring the exciting adventures of a wandering coffee mug. Though, frankly, this was trying way too hard because it had me at "indoors.") Unfortunately, the big pile of emergency granola bars that I'd eaten to defeat the bonk had all hit me by this time, so I had absolutely no appetite for actual food. But it looked good and I'll be sure to eat there next time I'm in Ashland.

The drive up I-95 at 5 p.m. is much worse than at 4 a.m. Three lanes, all of them going way faster than the speed limit, with way too little following distance, and with no lane discipline so the yahoos who want to go 90 instead of merely 80 are holeshooting every which way, doing their best to cause a 30-car pileup that would be a minor hit on YouTube if a traffic camera caught it. Luckily none of them succeeded, so I got home okay.

Overall, it was an excellent ride. We got fabulous weather for February. The course was almost flat and easy to navigate. The volunteers did a great job. The dog didn't actually bite me. So most of the grumpyness in this post is directed at myself, for being too disorganized and too out of shape to enjoy a wonderful bike ride as much as I should. Someday I'll figure out how to start with the right clothes and eat and drink the right amounts.