Saddle Soars 2

SADDLE SOARS

Chapter 2

The Others


While my siblings would argue it, for the most of my youth I was a loner. I did not really go for the heard mentality. When the boys in fifth grade were bragging about what they would do with Rachel Welch (Hollywood sex kitten of the ‘60s and ‘70s) I took pleasure in pointing out that they were just little kids and she had no interest in them. This type of talk will not win friends but it will influence people to keep away from you. I was always the oddball artist who saw other possibilities than what was commonly held to as truth. I was the kid in third grade that defiantly told a guy who called me weird “Maybe I’m normal and all of you are weird!” The point of all this is that I have never been one who is drawn to large crowds, or small ones for that matter. I like people just fine, but I find that most of my history has been decidedly alone.

Bicycling changed all that. It started with that first ride with Mickey, the elder from our church. I had to stay with him, as he was the way for me to make it back home. He was a much stronger rider than I was and could have left me behind at any time, but he didn’t. He stayed with me. He did not need to stay with me, but I needed him to stay since I had no clue how to get home. I needed his help because I was hurting quite a lot and could barely peddle up the hills going home. There is something passed between people who are depending on each other. Maybe it is trust or camaraderie, I don’t really know. What I do know is that I like to ride with others. Although, while I will ride alone if that is my only option, I really don’t like it.

The others that I have ridden with over the years have changed faces many times, and the things I gain from ridding with others changes with each group. What is constant is how every rider of more than a couple of year’s experience all prefer to ride with others. The only time I hear someone say “I prefer to ride alone” is from a novice. I think that they are afraid of making a mistake in front of others. I do hear new guys say they don’t want to hold me back. They don’t get it. If I go to the trouble to ride with someone it is not so I can show them how strong I am. Nor am I trying to be the big-shot know-it-all. I just wanted to ride with that person, to enjoy the road and the scenery and to have an adventure together. To encourage and to be encouraged as we push our pedals. To be a help to each other if there is some kind of problem even if it is just moral support while changing a flat (a one man job).
Jasper was one of the “others” that had a profound affect on me as a cyclist. We had been friends for a couple of years before he got a bike. I had been riding for about five years when he asked about bicycling. I would tell him about some of the adventures I was having and I suppose he wanted in on the fun. My brother had a Cannondale that he was no longer using and made it available to Jasper for a very reasonable price. Cannondale makes a high tech aluminum bike that, while stiff, it is a very lively bike. In fact they feel as if they have a motor on them assisting you as you peddle. A very good first bike! He got it in mid October of 1991 on a Sunday afternoon. He was just like any kid; he wanted to play with his shiny new toy, so we went on a short ride together.

We began to head north. My plan was to do about twenty miles, which I felt would just be challenging enough for him. I knew he was a “smoker” so I kept an easy pace. When we came to the turn around point Jasper said he wanted to go further. So we went two miles more into Deer Creek. It was not a warm day when we started and it had dropped about ten degrees by the time we turned around. To top it off a slight wind (10 mph) started blowing out of the south. We had not been holding a very fast pace with a head wind so I let Jasper know what pace I would hold and if it gets to be too hard let me know. I locked onto 15 mph as we headed back. After several minutes I turned my head to tell him something, but he was not where I thought he would be. He was way back, about a half-mile or so. I slowed down to allow him to catch up to me. I asked him what kind of pace could he hold. We held 13.5 for a while but soon I looked back to see him dropping back again. We peddled along at 8 or 10 mph (he would use the word “trudged”). We stopped at a convenience store where he gulped down a Snickers. We had three miles to go and I offered to go get my car and drive him home. He declined. That is the kind of man he is. He said he would go the distance and he meant to do it. He made it back on his own steam with me bragging on him for finishing what I would have quit. The next day he tried to smoke a cigarette. He said he nearly threw up and gave up smoking on the spot!

We had many adventures and saw a lot of Oklahoma together. At first we were not going fast, but almost every week the distance was increasing. I told him about a ride in Texas called the”Hotter N Hell Hundred” or the HHH. I had ridden the hundred miles just the year before and I felt like he could work up to it. So he set a goal to make the hundred in August (the month of the HHH). August came quickly as it tends to do for cyclist, and Jasper was ready. He offered to drive us to Wichita Falls in his truck, where the ride starts. Wichita Falls is about 150 miles from Oklahoma City, so we left at noon on Friday to get signed in early and go to the bike expo. We never arrived. Just fifty miles short of Wichita Falls Jasper’s motor died. He had the truck towed to the small town of Elgin, Oklahoma. It was about two thirty in the afternoon and we had only one good option. Ride our bikes home. We unloaded our bikes and gear, locked the truck and headed off. We both felt disappointed as we were looking forward to riding with ten thousand cyclists at the HHH. We did get our hundred miles in that day, and a far greater adventure than were waiting for us in Texas. There were the quaint, small towns we rode through that seemed to come from nowhere. And the people in those towns looked at us as if they had never seen bicyclists before. The part of that day that I remember most vividly was the seemingly endless miles on highway 81. After the city of Chickasha there was nothing for miles and miles. It was hot and no wind. We had re-filled our water in Chickasha and felt confident that we had enough to get us to the next town. On highway 81 there is nothing to look at, just the long black pavement and dry fields and a few dead trees. Since there were only the two of us we tried to conserve energy by maintaining a 16 mph pace. That is kind of slow, but you don’t want to run out of energy or dehydrate so far from home or any kind of support. So we just clicked off the miles. By that time we had become adept at working together. I would ride in front and he would draft for a while, then we would switch and I would be in the draft. Finally, out of nowhere, a small town popped up. We had just run out of water so the timing was perfect.



It was about 6 pm and only one place of business was open. It was a gas station. We went in to buy some cokes and fill our water bottles. The man who was running the place seemed put off by our presence. “What do you want?” I remember him asking. He never took his eyes off of Jasper (Jasper is a tall black man) and we both felt that the man was uncomfortable with black people. We paid for our cokes and bottled water (we could not use the water fountain) found a shady spot and drank the sodas. By the time we got to Oklahoma City limits I was out of gas (energy) and had it not been for Jasper pulling me the last ten miles I would have quit. All I could do was focus on his back wheel and peddle. He had the energy at that time and so he loaned me some by allowing me to draft until we got to his house.

The next year we did make it to HHH and we both finished. He finished thirty minutes ahead of me and I finished very well. We had our bragging rights, but the ride we bragged about was the year before when we rode home, just the two of us, for one hundred miles. Why did that mean so much to us? We only averaged about 18 mph that day. The next year I averaged 21.5 mph and he averaged almost 22 mph at HHH. That day in August of 1992 we had a real adventure. We knew what we needed to accomplish to get home, and we knew we could finish a hundred mile one day bike ride. However, we did not know what we would run into. In an organized event like HHH there are rest stops and medical personnel and “sag wagons” incase you can’t finish. That ride home was a test of character, friendship and everything we had learned about cycling.

“I’m going to race this next season.” Jasper told me. “O crap” I thought. I had never been competitive at anything, at least not successfully. Jasper on the other hand had been a football player in the Air Force and ran track in college. It was natural for him to compete, but not me. I had to be dragged into it. If I wanted to ride with Jasper I would have to train to race. Had it not been for my friend I would not have found out what my capabilities were and I would have missed out on the fun that comes from pitting myself against others and losing, a lot, and winning a little.
I love to ride with others. I learn more about myself through the experience and something is shared. Sometimes that something is a word or a sight. Sometimes it is surviving a difficult ride that I could not have finished alone. But always, something is shared.

My brother, Joe, had been one of the “others” that impacted me. As my older brother I guess I had always looked up to him, but riding together was different. We rode all the time. We rode on holidays, in the summer and winter. If it was dry weather and above forty degrees, we were on our bikes riding. Somehow all that time together on our bikes, seeing sights and riding with groups, we grew close. He started racing about three years before I did. Oh, I showed up at the “practice crit” but, realistically I was nothing more than an obstacle for the faster guys to go around. I mostly attended the criterion practices to get a little experience and to hang out with my big brother. If it were not for Joe I would not have gained the strength to even consider competing. If you were one of those who shun competing for one reason or another I would recommend giving it a try. It really is quite a lot of fun, even if you rarely place in the top five.

I mostly came in last in the races I attended, but it was a fun time. When Joe was there he would say I did well or have some helpful advice for me. It was from Joe I learned that what I ate had a direct affect on my performance. He would introduce me to paid events like the Hotter N Hell Hundred, the Red Bud Classic and the Streak. We had a great time at these events and got to see more of the countryside than I would have alone. He no longer rides road bikes and has traded the road for the thrill of single track. In fact the two-wheel road riding he does is on his motorcycle. Mountain bike riding is not my cup of tea, nor is motorcycling, so we don’t have that time “in the saddle” together that I enjoyed ten years ago. That is the one down side to riding with others that one may experience. People often change something in their life and sometimes that affects bicycling. I only rode the one time with my college friend in Texas and while that was just a single ten-mile event, it had a profound affect on me. I have often wished I could ride with him again. I don’t know if that is to show him how far I’ve come as a cyclist or to share the things one can only share while riding. Probably both. I would love to ride with Jasper again. We saw so many things together. There were the sunsets and sunrises that we witnessed from the roads of Oklahoma. The small towns that, had it not been for bicycling, we would have never even known existed. Also, the people we met along the way. There were other bicyclists, on a long tiresome ride that help with a story or a joke or by needing you to be the strong one for a while. There were also the people that were always shocked to find out how far we had ridden and that we were only half way done. Once, we saw a road sign outside a prison that read, “WARNING HITCHHIKERS MAY BE ESCAPED CONVICTS”. This will make the strongest of us dressed in Lycra nervous. We did not see any escapee’s nor did we pick up any hitchhikers that day. However, we did build some memories together and I can say that I am not done building memories just yet with “others” that I ride with today.

I met Jerry Cuda at Denny’s in 1996. I had lowered my weekly miles to about 60 or so. By this time as my wife and I were focusing our energies building an Amway business, we were attending what we called in “the business” a “Night Owl”. Someone knew that I was a cyclist and introduced me to Jerry and his wife Karen. He was a budding bicyclist and as is always the case when two bicyclist meet, they talk about riding and the bikes they ride. I noticed a pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket so I figured he was not a serious rider. I was wrong. He was (and still is) a serious cyclist, who happened to have a bad habit. We exchanged information and agreed to ride sometime on a Saturday. That Saturday came and we had a great time. He announced that day that he was “quitting smoking” and he made good on his commitment. It wasn’t long before he was stronger than me and we shared a lot of good times together. We would ride off in some direction and talk about bikes and bike parts. We would talk about how fortunate we were to be married to women who understood us enough to know how important bicycling was to us. My wife as well as his have always supported this “magnificent obsession” of ours and we try not to take advantage of that too much. Jerry and I had many cycling adventures before he moved to Germany (Air force). When we first started riding together he was on a medium quality Schwinn. A good starter bike, but he got the itch for a new bike and started shopping around for something better. He settled on a certain “carbon fiber” bike for an agreeable price and called me before he bought it to see what an experienced cyclist thought. Jerry was smarter than me. He told me the price for the complete bike witch at that time was around $1200.00. We talked for a bit and I asked him if he had ridden the bike. He had not. I had tested one a couple of years prior and felt like his current bike was as good as the one he wanted. My encouragement to the new cyclist has been the same for a long time now. Ride a lot of bikes, they don’t all feel the same and you need to figure out what you want a bike to feel like. Often, not always, it is better to buy a higher quality frame and transfer your current bike components over to the new frame. A high quality frame and a medium quality complete bike are often about the same price. A medium quality bike will not have the balance of a better bike. If the frame is “thermally bonded” or “glued” it will have a dead feel when putting high demands on it, like sprinting up a hill. This is not to say that you can’t go as fast on a glued frame as on a welded frame. That would be a lie. I have been flat out-run by people on a bonded bike. But one needs to be aware of the feel of a bike before buying it. After riding the carbon bike and some other types he opted for a Mercx 753 frame and transfer his current components over and then replace them over the coarse of time. He still has the Mercx and spends most of his time on it. One of the reasons I prefer to ride with others is in case of unexpected problems. I have had multiple flats on a ride where I had to borrow an inner tube from one of the guys. Once, Jerry and I had gone on a ride planning to go sixty or seventy miles. I had failed to properly hydrate during the ride and became dehydrated. We stopped and got some sports drink but it was really too late. I tried to call my wife but she was not home, so Jerry called his wife to come and pick us up. She came to us about thirty minutes later with some ice-cold sodas. I was a little embarrassed but she acted as if it were no big deal and was glad to help. I hope to travel to Germany some time to ride with Jerry, to allow him to share new roads with me.

I hope you see a pattern here. You ride with others for several reasons, and, conversely they ride with you for several reasons. What all this boils down to is community. When you ride with others you participate in a community. Sometimes you take more than you put into the group. Like when you are barely hanging onto the back of a pack and you never take a turn in the lead because you aren’t strong enough that day. Once in a while, you are the one who hangs back with the guy who fell away from the group. Sometimes you chat about “current events”, or joke about them. Sometimes you brag about your kid’s grades and sometimes nothing is said for miles and miles. You know you are part of something special when “re-grouping,” means waiting for you without complaint or snide remarks. The riders are grateful for the ride that the group provided and look forward to the next time together. For some, a ride is something to survive. It is like that for most at one point or another, but mostly a ride is an event in witch we thrive together. It is with the others that I am at my best and hopefully it is the same for the others I ride with.

Joe Goodwin and I attend the same church and our families meet with others on Sunday night to share ideas on biblical matters. Joe is one of those guys that one meets and feels as if you have known each other for years. He’s the guy you want to meet, friendly and warm. He was also overweight. He had made the comment to me that he wanted to do some thing to loose some weight. I told him to get a bicycle and come ride with me. He gave the typical response that most people give. “I can’t afford a bicycle.” Maybe people respond like this because they think it is true. Mostly, I believe, they say they can’t afford one because that sounds reasonable. It allows a person to save face because the truth is they don’t want to do anything that resembles work. In Joe’s case he actually thought that he could not afford a bike. I told him that just wasn’t true and that if he really wanted to get a bike I could help him. The secret is to know what you want, what you want to pay for it and when can you commit to that. Joe felt he could pay three hundred seventy five dollars for a bicycle. I told him to let me know when he was ready to commit to that number and we would go and find the exact right bike for him at $375.00. The day came when Joe was ready to buy his bike, about one month later. So off we went. Joe had gone into a bike shop and priced some bikes the week before and knew that bikes cost about a thousand dollars more than he could afford. So he was very apprehensive about my statement that “we will find the exact right bike for you at $375.00!” I know this sounds kind of odd to make such a bold claim but I have found it to be true. We went to my favorite bike shop first. They had a lot of bikes. They even had some that were close to the price that Joe had set. I told Joe this was not the bike for him and that I felt we could do better. Besides, they were fifteen dollars more than his commitment. We ended up at the other shop I trust and asked the owner what he had that were very inexpensive. He showed us a bike that was $700.00 and as good a deal as that was for the bike, it was way over Joe’s commitment. I asked him if he had any trade in bikes. “I have this one,” he went to the back to get it. A beautiful dark blue Bianchi San Reno. “How much?” I asked. “Three hundred seventy five dollars” was the reply. The bike was just the right size for Joe. I looked at Joe who had fixed his gaze on the bike. I told him “I think we found your bike”. He took it for a test ride around the parking lot and was surprised that it felt so much better than his “Department-Store bike”.

Joe and I have seen a lot of roads together and he has lost weight and had a lot of fun in the process. His wife, Stacey wanted in on the fun, so he got her a “comfort bike”. She road it for about six months and then stepped into a nice road bike. She got to where she wanted to go faster than the comfort bike was designed for.

The first ride Joe and I went on together was total of seventeen miles. We stopped four times for Joe to catch his breath. And he had fun. Helping the new guy have fun is the second most important thing one can do. The first is to make sure you don’t take him (or her) out farther than is good for that person. It is more important that the new person returns feeling just a little tiered and excited about the ride than for them to be made aware of just how much stronger you are than they. During the last little rest I told Joe about the Hotter-N-Hell Hundred and that I thought he could get into shape to do the ‘hundred. And he did, that same year.

The last bit I would share concerning the “others” I ride with is the most incredible part of all. Bicycle clubs. I’m not exactly sure how a group of cyclist go from some guys riding together to becoming a formal “club” and I am not altogether sure why. I do know that it is extraordinary to be a part of one. I have been in three clubs over the years and am currently part of a group that may organize soon. The types of clubs seem to be largely based on the types of riders that form it. From tourist to racers to mountain bikers there is almost always a club that will meet your current needs. Once in a while a group forms based on it’s non-cycling connections. People that work together or members of a church or any number of organizations. Some one finds out you ride a bike and the other riders kind of gravitate to you.
The first club I was in was a touring club, The Oklahoma Bicycle Society (OBS) that promoted cycling in a very general way. They were and still are the largest cycling club in Oklahoma with a membership in the hundreds. This is possible because of the broad appeal of non-competitive cycling and the very friendly nature that most of the members posses. I spent many miles with this club and learned a lot along the way not only about riding a bike, but, also about how to maintain a bike, proper road manners within a group and how to safely ride a bike on roads dominated by cars. An important foundation no matter what type of cyclist you may become. The touring clubs are the best place to get your “feet wet” as the safety and well being of all riders participating in a ride are of the highest concern. I have seen people get out fifteen or twenty miles and for what ever reason could not get back. A member gladly races back to get his or her car and lift that person home. I have been given tubes when I forgot to bring my own and flatted. I have been loaned tools to make minor repairs (even a chain tool once).

My brother, Joe, told me about a group he was riding with and invited me to come along. They had a unique approach to group riding. In a group of twenty or more riders there will usually be people of various strengths and abilities. Most clubs have different rides representing those people. It usually breaks down into three groups. Beginners (slow, short distance), intermediate (longer distance at a faster pace) and the fast group who go farther and faster than the others. This approach is efficient but it keeps people from riding together. What this group did differently was to have all cyclist ride together to a small bread and pastry shop about 7 miles from the Wal-Mart parking lot we launched from. This was kept at an easy pace and allowed all the riders to enjoy each others company. Once we made it back to the parking lot good byes were said to those who were done for the day. Then the rest could go on to do a longer ride. Like I said, this was not efficient. It was, however, effective at creating a bond between all the cyclists that crossed the barriers separate groups tend to generate. That group, “Team Wal-Mart” as we called ourselves went on to integrate with the East Side Road Team. I spent about two years riding with the East Side Road Team and had a lot of fun. The only down side was that I lived 25 miles away from where they launched all rides. I was driving 100 miles per week just to ride with them. I had a good relationship with everyone in the club, but I came to a point where I could no longer drive that many miles each week.