Bike riding. Great off-season training for skiing, right? So a whole lotta bike riding has to be a whole lotta good training, right? How about 153 miles, 10,000 vertical feet, Riding Around Mt Rainier in One Day? Crazy, or really really good training? David Evans has the full story below!
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RAMROD. Just the name sounds a bit intimidating. Two summers ago I had the good fortune to climb Mt. Rainier for a second time, this time with legendary Kongsberger Scott Tucker and my two sons. Today, July 25, 2019, I was circumnavigating the selfsame behemoth of a volcano, trading crampons and rope for bike and enough Gatorade and de-fizzed coke to match the route’s 153 miles and 10,000 ft of climbing. I’ve been a Seattlite for a quarter century and known loads of folks who’d tested their mettle in this grueling one-day event, but somehow the road cyclist and triathlete in me had never ventured onto the ramparts of that mountain-with-no-peer -- whose mass is a mind-boggling eight times greater than the next biggest volcano in the Cascades -- and participated in an event with finishing times more familiar to full Ironman competitors.
Fortunately for this first-timer, within an hour or so the carbon-fiber-mounted, shaved-leg veterans of RAMROD were declaring the day’s temperature range (60s and 70s) and air quality (no smoke, all view) to be the finest they’d ever seen. Which was fine with me, since RAMROD is really a sandwich of a bike challenge, with the bread slices at the beginning and end comprised of 40-in, 40-out miles of rolling but quite accessible riding surrounding the meat and cheese: two 4,000 ft. climbs, one of which took the riders up to Inspiration Point just beneath Paradise (since brain-dead cyclists who’ve just climbed for an hour straight don’t mix particularly well with unsuspecting tourists up for a short stroll among beckoning glaciers, as the National Park Service’s prohibition of the event there would seem to indicate ). The other climb, fast on the heels of a blood-curdling descent on rock-fall pock-marked roads at speeds sometimes surpassing 50 mph, took us up to Cayuse Pass. “Climbing to Paradise” is an oxymoron if there ever was one for a cyclist, but the climb to Cayuse, also topping out at nearly 5,000 ft but doing so in four fewer miles, left me about as tired as I’ve ever been on a bike. Thank goodness we got to turn left at the pass rather than right, and extending our misery up to even higher Chinook Pass!
RAMROD used to be a race, but the scuttlebutt has it that one too many jet-fueled, Type-A riders ran one too many stop signs and didn’t heed one too many state troopers and, well, the formal race was quickly consigned to the dustbin of history.
Be that as it may, whenever you get 500+ cyclists together, each of whom had the good fortune of getting into the over-subscribed event on a lottery, and no matter what event directors state publicly, at least some of those clipping in at the start line will want to spend a modicum of time at the rest stops and, every pedal stroke in between, ride as if in solidarity with, and comparable ability to, their top-of-the-bike-pyramid Tour de France brethren, who just happened to be beginning their own uber-challenging three-day assault of the Alps that very same July day, and in unprecedented, record-breaking European heat no less!
And so there I was at 58, doing my best to hang on to the wheels of guys mostly old enough to be my sons, putting my best sweaty game face on, while sporting a 1986 steel-frame bike that was either a “wow, that’s a really cool bike!” or an unspoken embarrassment, depending. My group had informally formed during RAMROD-sponsored Saturday training rides the months preceding, during which we’d had ample time to take stock of each other as we pedaled through Snoqualmie and Fall City and Issaquah and their likes, and so there we were on game day, making every effort to prove that we had prepared properly while knowing in our hearts that we’d be extending our longest shared ride by a nifty 50%, all the while hoping to contend with the day’s best.
Along the way there were the usual moments that attend a guy who hadn’t raced a bike in eight years, and hadn’t raced over 112 miles on a bike since 1987. The morning’s 5 am start time was misty and cold, even with a layer of polypro and a cycling jacket, but, as we all know, exercise has a way of stoking metabolism and raising body temperature. So before too many miles I was disrobing and rolling up first one then the other and caching them away in my two layers of now-exposed cycling jerseys sporting a grand total of six pockets. No matter, by about mile 35 my jacket unceremoniously had worked its way out of the pocket, falling to the road, whereupon a following rider, who fortunately had the good fortune of not wrapping it up in his front fork and wheel and doing an “endo,” alerted me to the jettison and, being too cheap to part with even an old, battle-worn jacket with a hole in its sleeve, I circled back, picked up the gravitationally-inclined garment and then had a five-minute, pulse- and endorphin-raising TT back to my group – which probably hadn’t even missed me during their focused pace-line rotations!
Perhaps, given the circumstances, I was weight conscious, since losing the jacket was preceded by losing, after a few too many ruts and bumps and jostles, the lid to one of my two bike bottles. Finding my bottle lidless miles later, when I reached down to suck from a bottle but found myself instead drinking from a putative plastic cup, was an especially curious event given that I’ve probably ridden and raced 100,000 miles with bike bottles of various sorts and had never lost a lid. By extension over the next 100+ miles, I also discovered that if the bottle is less than ¾ full, a lid doesn’t particularly matter, and it’s even easier to take a quick sip. Who knew?
Yet the most hair-raising event occurred in the day’s final miles, as RAMROD’s chief of course, in a weak moment of choosing which route to use, had us descend quickly back toward the event’s start and finish in Enumclaw via a serpentine road that from all appearances had been last maintained when some of my riding compatriots had been in diapers, each twist and turn alternating from blazing sunlight to dark shadow, which as a cruel joke seemed to be land-mined with a huge pothole or divot or some such thing our schizophrenic pupils couldn’t pick out in time. As luck would have it, I was following the wheel of the leader of our then pack of nine when he unsuspectingly hit one of these holes, lost control of his bike, jerked off to the side of the road, somehow managed to not go off into the abyss adjacent, did manage to avoid the sundry rocks and irregular edge of the pavement for about 100m at 25 mph on what appeared to be a mere ribbon of gravel, and eventually coaxed his steed back onto the road, eliciting a whoop and roar from each of us. I’ve seen or been in a lot of amazing near misses and direct hits in bike crashes over the years, but we all agreed at the finish that this would have been one for You-Tube Near-Miss Highlights. Suffice it to say the poor guy didn’t have the stomach to lead after that and limped into the finish, lucky to be alive, knees still knocking!
By the way, RAMROD is now my new favorite endurance event because five feet from the finish line they have an all-you-can-eat ice cream truck parked – which, naturally, is where I spent the first fifteen minutes post-ride, going from a barely conscious and coherent state to a decidedly more convivial and capable one. Amazing the power of glucose! And then followed perhaps the most satisfying hot shower of my life, taken in a classic junior high school boys locker room, with an equally classic communal shower stall, fortunately fitted with a forgotten shampoo and soap, the shower heads about a foot lower than you might like but still spraying wonderfully warm streams on our battered and aching and grateful bodies.
Endurance was arguably the theme of the day, and so it remained as I planted my bag and bike at the exit to the large parking lot, hoping to snag a quicker ride home than my early morning carpool from a gentleman who expected to finish three to four hours after me could provide. Only I couldn’t seem to find even a single person from Seattle leaving from the lot with an empty spot on their bike rack and a space in his/her car. With each hopeful “Excuse me, are you headed toward Seattle?” I instead discovered what a huge geographic area filters into RAMROD. Folks were from Camus and Hood River and Eugene and Portland and Spokane, and of course from Kirkland and Auburn and Redmond and Monroe, but not a one was from Seattle, though at least they’d heard of the place! And then, after a humbling hour and a half, I found someone who smiled and actually talked to me when I queried about destination Seattle, and soon enough I was persuading Greg from Squamish, who had been caught up in mind-numbing traffic on 405 the previous day heading down, to spurn the undeserving, sclerotic eastside and try his luck along possibly faster I-5, now a speedier carpool with two, and drop me off at I-5 and 45th, where my bike and I could hop on the Metro bus home.
And so a day that started at 2:37 am with coffee and oatmeal and the letting outside of our very confused dog Mocha, ended just after 9:30 at night, after one of the more delectable barbecue dinners of recent memory, complete with seconds, thirds and fourths for my RAMROD-assaulted body. It had been a truly amazing day, I reminded myself as I fell quickly asleep, dreaming of how not to lose jackets and lids but win another lottery entry into the Mother of all Mountain Merry Go Rounds!
