Because of my bizarre discomfort with loose ends, I must share with what I wrote after the 600k brevet that I rode in my 2003 quest for PBP.Here it is:

Final Qualifier- This is not a funny story.  If you’ve been reading these updates for the chuckle-factor, feel free to stop now.  It’s a long story, a wet story, and an exhausting story, but it’s really not very funny at all.  The weekend of June 7th and 8th I rode the final PBP qualifier-600k.  I finished (barely), and I qualified, but I really can’t remember a single amusing moment.

The basic facts:  we started at 6 am on Saturday-a day of record-setting rain all across the state.  We rode in said rain.  All day.  By 6:05 am I could feel water squelching in my shoes.  When I arrived at the turn-around in Wilmington at 11:30 pm, they were still squelching-four pairs of dry socks later.  Mercifully, we saw no lightning.

The route was lovely leaving Morrisville-a few gentle rolling hills, pleasant roads, minimal early-morning traffic.  But the rain really slowed me down-I had to pay intense attention to the road in that kind of weather.  I felt like I was just crawling.  Then the route wound down into the flood plain, in the flat part of the state.  I’m sure Bladen County is a lovely place, what with that huge state forest and all those lakes and all.  But it surely does feel remote-devoid of inhabitants.  Lonely.  Isolated.

And then there are the roads.  I don’t know much about the science of road surfaces, but I know that the stuff they use in that part of the state is brutal for cyclists.  Rough, bumpy-bone-jarring.  You can actually identify the individual pieces of rock that have been pressed together to create the material.  And eventually, those roads begin to develop cracks.  Apparently the most sophisticated repair technique available is a large quantity of some sort of black caulk, poured into each crack to an excess that allows it to mound up over the road surface, creating a distinct bump in the road.  Put one of these 2-inch wide black bumps every 18-24 inches over 70 or 80 miles of road, and you have devised this cyclist’s worst nightmare.

At the checkpoint in White Lake, after about 110 miles, I changed into dry clothes-don’t ask why.  It was totally mental.  I was soaked again as soon as I got back on the road.  Onward to Wilmington.

At the turn-around, I realized that I was much more exhausted than I had expected to be.  I guess I wasn’t fully recovered from the 400k, two weeks earlier.  Lack of recovery combined with the intense focus required to stay safe in the rain had completely wiped me out.  The turn-around was at a motel, and I had reserved a room so that I’d be able to shower and re-organize all my stuff.  I really had no choice but to nap for a couple of hours.  It wasn’t in the plan, but that’s one of the important lessons I’ve learned doing this brevet series-things don’t always go according to plan.  The key is to be flexible and stay calm even as you’re implementing plan b, or plan c, or even plan d.

I’ve also learned that while I enjoy the stopping, I really must figure out how to spend less time organizing and more time pedaling.  Wilmington turned into a 4 hour stop-way too long.  I had a drop bag there, which I had to retrieve, as well as getting the brevet card signed, finding food (at the Hardee’s across the street-we checked into the room, parked our bikes, and walked to Hardee’s-in retrospect, that was somehow a mistake.  It took too long), showering, eating the food, refilling the drink bottles, cleaning out the handle-bar bag, etc.  I also lubed my chain-I was worried about it in all that rain, called my husband, and tried desperately-but-unsuccessfully to find a weather report on television.

Anyway, the upshot of it was that my friend James and I left Wilmington at 3:30 am, in off-and-on drizzle and humidity that was thick enough to clog up lungs.  From Wilmington to White Lake-75 miles or so-we had no access to any kind of support or resources.  No stores, gas stations, etc.  We stopped a few times in parking lots, but mostly we just pushed on toward White Lake, where we knew we could get breakfast and, once again, change clothes.

It finally stopped raining sometime around late morning.  Then around 1:30, the sun came out.  That was when things got really ugly.  It was suddenly 87 degrees and so humid it was hard to breathe.  I could feel my arms crisping.  I started feeling even sicker than I had been, and began to really come unglued.  This is a fun sport, but it’s not worth brain damage.  I was very concerned about heat stroke; my husband had teased me once that the first symptom of heatstroke was an inability to remember the symptoms of heatstroke.  This is worrisome, particularly when you’re so tired that it’s hard to rationally analyze the situation and figure out what to do.  I was so hot and dehydrated I couldn’t take in calories, and started feeling really weak and dizzy.  We found a gas station, and worked hard at getting our core temperatures down.  After sitting in a-c for a while, sipping cold Gatorade, and pouring cold water on my head, I sort of got myself back together again, and was able to pro-actively fight the heat when we got rolling again.  Basically, the entire afternoon we pedaled for ice.  We’d stop at a gas station, buy a bag of ice, and stuff our clothes with it.  I had a bandana around my neck filled with ice, and put more down my bra and my shorts.  I was just nursing a bottle of Gatorade and a camelback of water at this point, so I kept adding more ice to those, as well.  Then we’d ride until the ice melted, and do the whole routine over again.  It was unrelentingly horrible.

The sun finally went down-we had hoped to finish by sunset, thereby avoiding another evening of slow, careful riding in the dark-but that was a lost cause.  I was just relieved that the temperature dropped a tiny bit.  I did see a few flashes of lightning off in the distance as we came into Wake County, but honestly, at that point I was too exhausted to care.

At some point-I can’t remember when-we started to have some uncomfortable anxiety about actually making it back to the finish by the cut-off.  Remember, these are timed rides.  The 600k limit is 40 hours; I had finished all the others several hours before the cut-off, but by late Sunday afternoon, things were beginning to look questionable.  We got to a store that we knew was 21 miles out at a few minutes past 8; we had until 10.  Sounds possible, right?  But the miles just crept by.  And my memory of those 21 miles and the mileage totals I was seeing on the cue sheet just didn’t seem to match up in my sleep-deprived brain, so I became increasingly agitated.  Finally, with 6 or so miles to go, at about 9:30, we saw a car coming with a bicycle on top.  One of the guys who had already finished leaned out of his window and shouted, “I think you’ve got it!  You’re almost there; I think you’re going to make it!”  Thank you for the encouragement Mike; you got me to the end.  I realized that if he had said he thought we were going to make it, then perhaps we weren’t.  I panicked.  It wasn’t rational, I didn’t process or think or calculate.  I just got this incredible surge of adrenalin-lift-the-car-off-the-baby kind of adrenalin.  I rode the last 6 miles at speeds well over 20 mph.  Even as worn-out tired as I was, I knew enough to appreciate an amazing moment-it felt truly powerful.

I finished with 13 minutes to spare, I think.  Those minutes at the finish are kind of a blur in my brain.  I was just so glad it was over.  I went home and cried.  I cried off and on all day Monday, too.  It was a traumatic experience.  All of the other rides have had obstacles and adversities, but I’ve looked back on them and remembered a generally positive experience.  Not this one.  I truly don’t remember a single fun moment.  After 5 days of thinking about it and coming to terms with it in my head I’ve decided that the best I can do is to go with all the platitudes people have offered me.  It was a means to an end, a learning experience, and since it apparently didn’t kill me, perhaps it will make me stronger.I leave for Paris two months from tomorrow.  Now I just have to keep up my endurance and refine my logistical strategies.  I’ll keep you posted.