I find this style of music (psychedelic music, to put a label on it) so much more expressive than whatever else is out there, especially above the made-for-tv, keening-style of soulful, star-spangled-banner singing that’s so over-promoted on the networks. What’s more, it does not take so much talent to pull off a convincing sound in this genre. In fact, playing well to the point that some sort of technical prowess is in highlighted can be truly detrimental to getting ones point across. What’s the point? To make women moan and sway, for a sweaty crowd to press in and for all eyes to close and bodies to quake. It’s aspirational escapism, a flight into some primal, singular harmonies, beats and earnest poetry.

Lisa and I packed as much stuff as I could remember to pack for the race. She remembered that we had a pile of cheap white tube socks (to hold ice) stored for hot-weather rides and I managed to find them! Also useful was my stock of Endurolytes (electrolyte caps, for the uninitiated) and our large ice chest– we used all of the 14 pounds of ice that we picked up on the morning of the race.

Lisa held down the starting-line base and I drove out to the half-way point of the 50-mile day loop. As I waited for “our” riders to pass through that time station, I had fun filling water bottles from the road of any rider who needed a top-off. I played the role of an involuntary volunteer, go figure! When out fastest riders passed through, I turned around and head back to the starting line to wait for those front-runners to pass through again. We both agreed that it was a lot of fun. I take a particular joy in being “useful”, or in at least feeling as though I am helping. It really is its own reward.

It was also inspiring to see everybody, and I mean everybody, put together a kick for the last hour of the race. Some did not stop once during that period and despite having suffered well all day. Just about everybody came up with a personal best, or they really did the best that they could under the circumstances. I miss this doing this race– maybe to re-orient from randonneuring to do the Wheeler’s standard Calvin’s/Michigan 24-hour next year? That would be sociable of me, wouldn’t it?

A musical revelation this weekend was Kurt Vile and The Violators, from Philly. This style (called Lo-Fi and Americana, fwiw) sounds a little like what I am tending to put together here, all by my lonesome. His work reminds me and a few other listeners of Leonard Cohen. They are playing in Ann Arbor on O5/19, so I might skip the 400K rando ride that day to meet up with a college chum for the afternoon there and to then watch the band, raptly. Anyone up for a road trip? We could bring bikes and guitars!

Today, however,  I received an almost immediate  reply to my response to an intriguing ad.  It suggested some sort of an accelerated rehearsal-to-tour schedule in support of an established artist who is about  my age.  I won’t say who it is but in fact, I have played on the same bill as his band in the past.  Anyway, I wrote my spiel and sent it and as the phone ringer was low, I missed the call a few minutes later.  My subsequent call-back was left as a message on his answering machine.

The way that I understand it, this would probably be a low/no-pay gig but with a tour of the mid-west, say, included.  There is a new album in the works (which this artist recorded himself) and a documentary is now being filmed.  Knowing what I know, this could be a great time, or it could be something soul-crushing or career-destroying.  I’ll know more in the coming week or two, I suppose!

For the uninitiated, a flêche (“arrow” in French), is the sole randonneuring team event on the calendar.  The spirit of it is that a team rides a minimal distance (360kM) in 24 hours, staying together, finishing together, and the participating teams (each a minimum of 3 members) finish at approximately the same time. Since everyone has a different way of riding, the main challenge to a successful ride is to stay harmonious and together.  From my experience, the latter is especially the case when the riding is easy.  To do 360kM in 24 hours is not usually such a big deal for an experienced cyclist, so ones awareness of others and a generosity of spirit factor on a flêche more than simple cycling prowess.

This said, my team started with just 3 members– Tim Argo, Jon Salmon and me.  Tim has been doing this sport for longer than me.  He is one of the strongest riders out there and he is known for doing the toughest rides on an antiquated Schwinn Varsity.  Jon is young and strong and relatively new to this sport, but he also has a history of success in endurance sports such as running in marathons.   Since we were starting with 3 riders, we would have to end as 3 if we wanted credit for doing this.  Tim A. had submitted our route for approval months ago and on paper it looked like an easy thing to do– West to East, from Danville, IL across Indiana to finish in Columbus, OH, over the plains.  We’d certainly have a tailwind and we would then have lots of breaks, time to eat, etc.

The reality was that the winds had shifted and we would not only face 10-30MPH headwinds almost the entire way, but rain and falling temps into the 30′s.  We knew all of this in advance of leaving our respective homes and so the last time that I could have called the whole thing off was when Jon and his wife, Anne, left their home in Akron to pick me up.

Jon drove us to Columbus to pick up Tim A. from the flêche terminus, Bob and Pattie’s house, and then drove to the start in Danville, IL.  Anne would drive back to Columbus the next day to pick us up– this was very generous of her.  We ate some pasta and went to bed early.  I could not immediately fall asleep and then sat up in a panic as I realized that I had probably forgotten my rain jacket.  Eventually I dressed and went through my gear in the dark, then out to Jon’s car to check if the rain jacket that I had thought that I had packed had fallen out of my open bag.  No… Jon had assured me as we set out that he had a spare jacket.  I experienced more sleeplessness until I arose to ask the motel clerk for some milk.  This helped me to eventually fall asleep for a couple of hours before the 0415 alarm.

I wore a wool jersey, arm warmers, shorts, tights and shoe covers.  I packed some Gore-tex rain pants, a light balaclava and some wool gloves to change out of the semi-waterproof gloves that I planned for the start.  Jon loaned me his heavy-duty wind jacket and we were ready to go.  I took in something like 500 calories at the start before the push off.  We had a tailwind for a couple of miles, maybe, before turning right to face the winds that would bedevil us for the rest of the day.

Boom!  There was no more joking and light talk as we were battered head-on by the wind and rain, working hard to keep our speeds above, say, 12MPH.  I had lightened up by one tooth my gearing on my fixed-gear from what I used for PBP, to 46×18, in an attempt to not be forced to mash the pedals so hard for so much of the ride.  We rode in a tight paceline to the next town, now in Indiana, where some minimal break from the wind was briefly afforded by some houses and a few trees.  I might have then expressed my doubt as to whether we would actually be able to pull this off.  Negative thoughts and talk are poisonous over a hard ride like this but there was also a sincere question of do-ability that I think we all shared.  I tempered my comment with a statement like, “… but if we can do this, 24 hours into a headwind, that will really be something to talk about!”.

There really was no question about hesitating, reconsidering or even of continuing or not. Humans, together, can talk themselves into all sorts of crazy behavior.  This is as evident in randonneuring as it is daily on the newspaper page.  The best that we could do was to stick together and work in a paceline as a team, to take care of ourselves individually and collectively and to trust that in doing so, we might finish the thing together.   I am not sure now of what would have made us stop, short of some acute health problem or an insurmountable mechanical failure on the part of one of us.

The smattering of rain later began to fall in a torrent, filling the road, and blinding us in the wind and the spray from the tires of the rider at front.  We were all covered in sand that was kicked up from the road.  A dark sky and lightning advanced upon us from the South as predicted.  I was soaked to the skin and it was only by my ability to burn calories that I was able to continue as my body heat was whipped off of me by the winds.  We stopped briefly on the porch of a dilapidated country house to wait out the very worst of the weather and then pushed off into the winds, nearly as worse now as ever.

The first stage of this ride was about 60 miles long (writing this from memory) and so it was a great relief to finally pull into the first stop, a Denny’s restaurant, to have something to eat.  I was shivering violently, but in a semi-controlled way.  I stripped off my jacket and tried to dry my jersey off with body heat and paper napkins.  Tim A. gave me a garbage bag to use as supplemental wind shield.  I was to wear it for the rest of the ride as a sauna-suit vest under Jon’s jacket.  I could not palate more than about 2 Denny’s pancakes and a piece of bacon, some hot chocolate and coffee.  I was wary that this would not be enough to get me through the next section.

The next longish section took us though more exposed plains riding and high headwinds.  I could not feel my feet or my hands and Jon confessed to the same.  Tim A. is a bit more stoic that us, never really letting on to us the kind of pain that he had going on.  At a point in this section, Jon’s physiology failed him and he lost, let’s say, anaerobic power.  This was to happen to each of us once through this long day and night.  He fell back and we slowed to try to shelter him from the wind to help us get to the next stop, about 100 miles in.  When we got there, I noted that our hands were the same violet color as our brevet cards.  I could not hold a pen to sign my name on a credit card receipt.

Jon was clearly bonking and he took some time to get some extra sweetened fluid in, plus some Mickey-D hamburger fare.  I had more of an appetite this time around, eating a QP, fries, a smoothie and drinking lots of Hi-C.  In deference to Jon, we then started slowly but he soon came roaring back, taking some strong pulls again.   We tried to limit our pulls to a couple of miles at a time.  The winds might have started to diminish a bit as the afternoon wore on to evening, but they were nevertheless always a factor, sustained, by my estimation from the teens to the 20′s with gusts.  By this time we were often able to bring our cycling speeds up to the higher teens, however, finishing by our conception of “on time” was still a question.  We expected more rain, or snow, later that night as the temps were expected to plunge and so more opportunity for failure would later be available to us.

When we came to the IN/OH border, the sun might have been down for an hour or two.  I was still cold, though not as before, but I really tired and needing some extra calories.  I wanted to sit and eat something but Tim A. suggested strongly that we move on with minimal rest to the next control.  I made a face and whined.  Begrudgingly, I took in maybe 200 liquid calories and caffeine and we were off again.  My worst time occurred over this section.

It started with some thoroughly negative thoughts that I was unable to extinguish from my consciousness.  I could not stop listing every reason that I could think of why this is a dumb sport and I could find only the exceptional teamwork that we had going here as a reason to be inspired to continue in this effort.  I could list a dozen things that I would rather be doing, including yardwork and cleaning the basement, than riding a bike like this, dodging traffic through nondescript commercial strips and gulping down fast food in service of a finishing time.  I was too tired to be angry, and recognized in this that I was clearly lacking blood sugar.  My pace slowed, I was starting to weave a little, my knees really hurt and I was struggling to keep up.  I somehow felt better when I assured myself that this was the last rando event that I would ever enter.

As I faltered, Tim and Jon slowed to help me finish this leg.  When we pulled into a Waffle House, I could barely get off of my bike and had to stop and stretch before attempting to walk indoors.  I noticed that the patrons inside were watching my face for a sign that I was going to puke or start crying.  I could barely keep my eyes open and I dared say little to anyone as I was not sure what would come out.  Tim and Jon seemed to have a booth to themselves so I took one myself.   I chugged a large OJ for some immediate calories (what we give crashing diabetics at work) and then I ate some hash browns, eggs, and then I drank a lot of coffee.  I was hurting when we got up to leave but I was also able to carry on a conversation and to pedal the damn bike.  On to the next checkpoint!

I think that the next stop was one of the shorter intervals that we had.  I was still feeling pretty miserable, there would be no resting tonight as we were still in serious doubt of finishing in Columbus on time for the 24-hour cut-off (we later learned that it does not matter that a team finishes at the end-point on time, but how many miles the team completes in 24 hours– by this measure, we would have had no problem).  In discussing, I resorted to an “in the spirit” argument that if we would could finish by, say 0615 or 0620, that the point is that we had fun, and not that we torture ourselves over meeting some expectation of a finishing time, or “chasing numbers”, as we say at the hospital.  Our designated Captain, Tim A. was I think more oriented to a success/failure viewpoint, with success defined as finishing within some rigorous time parameters.

After a short break at a gas station in Springfield, OH where I drank another of the many Starbucks drinks that sustained me through the ride, we headed to our penultimate checkpoint.  One would not be faulted for supposing that all routes in Indiana and western Ohio are flat, but this is not the case  for the ride out of Springfield.  Where the long hill came from, a river or a glacier, is lost on me.  It started steeply from the edge of town and then climbed more than 15 miles, exposed and into the chilled and gusting winds.  At the bottom, Jon hit a pothole in the dark and almost took me out with him.  I am surprised that he did not crack his frame or a wheel.  Much later, toward the top, Tim A. had his moment of weakness and so we stopped a couple of times to rest and to take in some more calories.  As close to finishing as we were, 20-something miles out from the finish (and just about within the parameters of a legal, by-the-rule-finish), we were still in a bit of doubt of making it back to Columbus by 6AM.

We were really lucky that it had not yet rained or snowed again over the ride but that the winds were diminishing was a real help to our efforts.  Per the rules, we had something like 2 hours to ride the last 17+ miles of the ride– most flêche teams opt to sleep here.  We arrived with almost exactly 2 hours to spare and left with  90 minutes to go, at around 0430.  Somehow I was feeling strong and happy, to have smooth, flat roads and to be almost free of the wind and so I found that I could turn the cranks over as fast as I wanted and without straining much at all.  What was a pain became something of a joy.  Jon later told me that I sustained an 18-20MPH pace for most of the next hour.  It was fun!  I had to try to stretch out over the last few miles, to slow a bit,  as I knew I would be hurting later if I didn’t.  We arrived at Bob’s house, the ride terminus, with 20 minutes to spare.

We laid out on the lawn chairs that were available to us there and recounted to ourselves in a daze the high points of the ride.  I was too tired to smile much but I was of course really happy to be finished.  I have not had a very successful season this year as my enthusiasm for this sport has clearly waned a bit.  It’s been a question of finding a suitable goal to work for and then finding the will to put the time in to be fit enough to ride.  As this ride was a painful as it was, I think it was less a test of cycling skill as it was of our collective mental toughness.  I am pretty sure that I would not have set out by myself to do this, but it was in the great company of my comrades that we were able to stay on and finish this together.

Playing tonight at the Grog Shop!  They are a legendary psychedelic band from Japan.  It is most fortuitous that I am called off of a planned night shift.

(People can be so desperate, so I feel compelled to make a gesture of “copywriting” all of the above.  It’s sad, really!)

I don’t feel like it, but it is a little weird to be too old to jam, if only for jamming’s sake.  One consideration is that I might show-up someone else, so there might be some insecurity on the other end of this potential transaction.  But without them calling me back, I could be, like, “The Best Guitar Player In The World” and they wouldn’t know it.   Then again, if I was in my 20′s and some geezer hit me up to play, I would have been a little reticent about calling him back.

With that in mind, I responded to an ad  by a drummer who probably lives around the corner from me.  He furnished a link to a video of him playing, essentially a frenzied drum solo on brushes.  So I wrote, offering to jam and did not hear a reply.  Then a few days later, I saw that he reposted the ad.  Maybe he did not receive my email? Bah…

It occurred to me this morning that I could extract the audio from the video file and then put my own sounds onto his solo.  I was short on time and laid 2 one-take tracks, SF brain-jam style (more on this some other day maybe), but it needed some vocals.  So I downloaded a video found with the search term “sex tips” and found the whole stupid audio file to be unusable.  But it was in listening to it that I heard the term “young and adventurous”, which made me laugh.  I had just enough time to cut and paste that part of the file a few random times into the “song” before hitting the render button as lunch cooked.  I uploaded the file  as I showered for work.  Should I send this to him?  Mein wife thinks it’s a “little creepy”, fwiw