A trip down Memory Lane (ALC Chapter 2)

Day 1: San Francisco to Santa Cruz

We woke up at 4:00 in order to be in the Cow Palace by 5:30. I had slept badly and insisted we stop for coffee on the way. It was early, but Shane insisted that Starbucks would be open. We were in one of the cultural centers of the United States, after all, and where there's culture, there's coffee. Of course Starbucks would be open. When we got to Starbucks there was a man sitting at a table out front, there were baristas inside, and I waltzed up to the door which was... LOCKED! "They're not open yet," the man grumbled. "I'ont know why not. Says right there on the sign they open at 5:00."
I looked at the sign. "It says they open at 5:30." I said, trying not to be rude.
"They're supposed to open at 5:00!" he insisted.
"It says right there, that they open at 5:30," I said. Maybe he hadn't seen the sign. People in San Francisco are crazy, especially the type that sit outside a Starbucks at 5:15 in the morning on a Sunday. Maybe he hadn't checked.
"No it doesn't. It says right there, Monday-Friday 5:00 a.m-10:00 p.m."
"Yeah," I said. "But it's Sunday." He looked stupefied. "Congratulations, you have the day off!" I said as I ducked into the car and out of his reach. He didn't seem to be rejoicing that he still had one weekend day left.
"Well, they'll have coffee for sure when we get there," I said. "They wouldn't have people show up somewhere at 5:30 and not give them coffee." Would they?

We picked up Shane's friend Lidia (who was there to take Shane's car home in exchange for getting to keep it for herself all week), and since my bike box was taking up the whole back seat, I sat in a complete stranger's lap the whole way to the Cow Palace. I hoped I didn't smell bad. I was wearing an old jersey, I knew that smelled bad.

When we got into the Cow Palace Shane and I dropped off our stuff at the gear trucks and went inside. They were serving breakfast, but NO COFFEE! I couldn't believe it! I asked one of the volunteers how in the world an event like this could have us show up at 5:30 in the morning, serve breakfast, and not serve coffee?! "I guess they just don't want people having to... GO... in a big hurry," he offered as an explanation. I grumbled as I walked away with my banana bread, but every time we saw someone with a Starbucks cup I would conspire with Shane to mug them (no pun intended).

They kicked everyone out of the bike racks at 6:00 for the opening ceremonies and herded us into the stadium (which still smelled like cow dung). Someone made a speech about those who had been lost to AIDS. I wanted to soak it up, but most of the speech seemed so trite, and he must have used the term "exhausted and elated" two dozen times, so I tuned it out and started watching the people around me, making up stories for some of them. There was an older couple right in front of me who hugged and cried during the moment of silence. I imagined that they had lost a son to AIDS. All around us there were people in "Positive Pedalers" jerseys with phrases on them like "eliminating stigma through positive public example", and "we all have AIDS if one does". These men (because they were almost all men) didn't look sick. I liked to imagine that I was in a way responsible for this because maybe they got their treatment through the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. As they started playing a song that I didn't recognize about loss and people proceeded through the center of the arena with banners with messages from riders to friends who had died of AIDS, it really, really dawned on me how lucky I am. I think that AIDS treatment and prevention is a great cause, but I've never been close to someone HIV+, or someone who died of AIDS. The number one reason why I did this ride was for the challenge. I'd seen the banners and markers lain out on a table at orientation yesterday. "Do you know anyone to write something to?" he asked. I shook my head. "Me neither," he said. So we walked on. Now I looked at all the people around me, many of them were men who were about a generation older than me. Most of them were gay. They were survivors from a time when they probably HAD lost not a few friends, but many of them. Some of the older ones might have known people who died totally alone, when people still didn't understand how it spread and treatment was virtually nonexistant. A lot of them had probably sat through the time when people were screaming that this was God's retribution on homosexuals, back before enough straight people were infected to be noticed, back before it was cool to be gay. I got misty-eyed and tried not to let Shane see that I was crying when he handed me the sunscreen.

When the ceremonies ended I sniffed back my snot and tears so I wouldn't get caught and Shane and I made a bee-line in our clipity-clopity shoes to bike parking. We were lucky. We were among the first let into the racks, and our rack was close to the exit. We only had a couple of hundred people in front of us, and so were able to ride out in about 15 minutes, but the people in the back must have taken hours to get out the door.

Just out the door, waiting for the hundreds of people in front of us to get through the traffic light at the exit.

This is not actually the rout we took, but it'll have to do. My GPS won't show me a map of the rout for some reason.

Slowing... Stopping...Rolling... Slooooooooowing... Stopping... Rol-Slowing!

We didn't hear much other than that for the first hour or so. I've never ridden with a group of cyclists so obsessed with yelling out a narration of their every movement. There were tons of traffic lights and tons of slow people, and we had to at least look like we were trying to stay single file. It took us about an hour to go the first 6 miles.

And there were people of all different abilities (mostly, not very good) all mixed together. It made passing dangerous. Not 2 miles into the ride as Shane and I were passing a group a woman came up on a pothole and swerved to miss it, crashing right into Shane and taking him out. She stayed upright and rode off. Shane was able to clip out but his bike went down and it took him a couple of minutes to get rolling again. "Is everything okay?" I asked when we were able to pull back into the road.
"Yeah. I don't think I've ever clipped out so fast in my life!" he said. I felt validated. I keep my clips as loose as possible for just such an occasion.
After another mile we crested a hill, and there in front of us was a woman lying in the road, holding her arm and crying. She must have just fallen. The men around her were holding their arms crossed above their heads, signaling to aid vehicles that it was a medical emergency. "Let's get out of here!" I said to Shane, and we started hauling ass to get to the front of the pack.

We hit a hill and the crowd slowed to an impossible crawl. It was a wonder they didn't tip over. "On your left!" Shane and I called out every once in awhile as we passed a steady stream of people. We couldn't be expected to call out for every single one of them, could we?!
"Call it out, please!" someone would say every once in awhile, so we started calling out more.
"You're not supposed to pass on the freeway/on a hill/on the road/on a day that ends in Y!" some of the more disagreeable riders called after us. I wanted to tell them to learn to ride their frigging bikes before they told me how to ride mine, but they were ancient history anyway.

Shane remembers that drinking water is important.

Gargle, gargle, gargle.

After the first aid station where we hit the porta-potties, the food, and then the exit, we started climbing Skyline Drive. It was a long climb, lasting several hours, and Shane and I weren't fooling around. I can go slow on the flats, I can brake behind someone on a descent, but it is so hard to go someone else's pace on an uphill. Go too slow and you lose momentum and it gets harder than climbing more quickly. So we started passing people like crazy again. I was breathing hard, but I still managed to call out "On your left!" several times to every group. Shane kept dropping back. I would wait for him when it flattened out and he would show up again heaving and wheezing. "I smoked for so long, I forgot I have asthma!" he gasped. That excuse didn't make much sense to me, but whatever, I could hear he was having trouble breathing. I didn't mind slowing down a few times every hour to let him catch up.

Finally we crested the hill and started going down. Before we picked up much speed I passed a couple of guys riding two abrest and chatting. "On your left!" I called. I wasn't a yell, but it was loud enough. When we talked about it later, Shane said that he could hear me, and he was riding behind me.
When I passed them the guy on the outside yelled, "Call out, or I'm going to hit you and it's not going to be pretty!"
"I did! You should listen to what's going on around you rather than flirting with your little boyfriend," I yelled back. Okay, the boyfriend part was in my head, but I was seething. I wanted to give him a piece of my mind, but settled for making him look like a tool. I'm a good descender by American standards, and I sped away so fast that he would see that I was a serious cyclist and I meant business. I hope this made him feel like a tool.

The scenery was beautiful. At the bottom I took this:
... and this:
... and this:
The lunch stop was on Highway 1 (what is called the Pacific Coast Highway in southern California). Just because it is the coast, though, doesn't mean that it was flat. The climbs aren't long, but some of them can be pretty steep.

Sometimes Hwy 1 is flat.
But sometimes you see this to your left, and to your right is a 300' cliff down to the ocean. Sorry about the quality of the pictures. The majority of the road shots were taken at 20mph.

Lunch was right before one of these steep hills... at the bottom... meaning it would be the first thing we rode when we got back on our bikes.

See it there in the background? Maybe it doesn't look like much, but let me tell you, on cold legs after eating a huge sandwich, it's A LOT!

We got to lunch early enough that there were still picnic tables avialable, but by the time we left people were everywhere, all over the ground, picnic tables, and the beach. It sure was chilly when you stopped moving, so once we'd finished our meals, Shane and I hopped right back on the road. That hill SUCKED, and I tasted my sandwich more than once muscling up it, and the next one too. For the next half hour or so, my stomach just ached. I slowed down a bunch of times to let Shane catch up, but he never showed. I figured I'd wait for him at the next aid station, which was about 20 miles from camp. I was waiting for what seemed like forever on the road outside the aid station. I saw dozens of riders ride by, and whether they went into the aid station or kept on pedaling, the volunteer at the entrance clicked a little counter for each of them. I guess this is how they make sure no one goes missing.

Shane finally rolled up, and he was not a happy camper. "Where have you been?!" I asked.
"That hill... upset my stomach," he said. "I gotta go to the porta potty." He made a sour face. At least the porta potties were pretty fresh. We were near the front of the pack now. As we were getting ready to leave, Shane's friend Shannon pulled in. She was having stomach issues too. Stupid hill.

I thought Shane would be able to keep up once he'd 'unloaded', but when we started rolling again he dropped off right away, so I was riding alone. I went to UC Santa Cruz, so this rout had been part of my regular training rides. I knew the road very well, and was surprised at how much better I felt riding it now than I did 3 years ago. I passed the big pothole that had once torn a huge gash in my tire, and I'd had to call Lorraine to drive 30 miles to pick me up. I didn't even know Lorraine at the time, she just happened to be the one at work that day when I called desperate for help, and she just happened to have a bike rack on her car. I wished I'd known where the heck she was in this crowd to point it out to her. Later, coming into Santa Cruz, I passed the spot where I hit a nail during the Big Kahuna and got a flat... which subsequently lead to me switching bikes with a spectator... which made me feel horrible the whole race, because I was borrowing Lorraine's beautiful carbon fiber bike. Where WAS Lorraine anyway? And where was Shane?

I stopped again at the entrance to Rest Stop 4 (they always have the best rest stop) where there was a whole group of pretty boys with badminton rackets, red spanky shorts, and tank tops and headbands in a brilliant Tennis White. I waited, and waited, and waited. Finally Shane turned up. "I'm going to ride up to campus just to see our drinkin' spot," I told Shane. "Do you want to come?" The UCSC campus is at the top of a pretty serious 2-mile, 700-foot hill.
"My knees are hurting me. I might just go ahead to camp," he said.
"Okay," I said. "See you there."

A few miles down the road I turned off to go up to campus. Just as I was afraid would happen, some idiot followed me. "This isn't the right way!" I said. He was still there. "I'm not going right to camp, you should go back that way!" I called over my shoulder. He didn't go away. I slowed down and turned to yell it in his ear if need be. "YOU'RE GOING THE WRONG... SHANE! What are you doing here?"
"Well, camp doesn't open for another half an hour or so anyway, so I figured I'd come along," he said. When we started climbing I pulled ahead. We both knew what trying to climb at someone else's pace is like. I hit the first red light and turned around. Where was he? Next light: still not there. I figured he must have gotten tired and gone ahead to camp. I rode the rest of the way up and stopped to take some pictures.
Our senior year Shane and I spent way too much time up here in our cars drinking and talking. It looks out over all of Santa Cruz and the Monterey Bay, and at night the whole town is lit up and you can see the stars. We used to come up alone, too. One day I bought a 6-pack and brought some reading for a class up here planning to have some nice, quiet Claire time. When I pulled in there was only one other car there. It was Shane's car, which is pretty hard to miss– it's lime green. When I went to knock on his window he had a 6-pack on his passenger's seat and he was reading a European history reader. I wished he were up here with me. It would be so cool to be back here, both of us together, on our bikes rather than in our cars (he took up riding after I left), now that we'd both quit drinking and smoking and didn't have nearly as much angst to talk through. I finished taking my pictures and was getting ready to mount my bike again when who comes rolling up the hill with some UCSC student on a mountain bike, but Shane! "Dude! My seat's fucked up!" he said as soon as I was within earshot. "I didn't tighten the bolts enough and it's been sliding all day long! No wonder my knees are so fucked up!" Sheesh, he should have known better! When we put my bike back together, we didn't tighten the handlebar bolts enough, and I wound up riding with the handlebars practically upside-down the last few miles back to his house.

So I got my picture of us back together in our drinkin' spot. I love how you can see the reflection of my arms holding the camera out in his sunglasses.
It turns out that Shane's knees were royally fucked up, though. They would be bothering him for the rest of the week. We showered and hung around camp for a little while waiting for other people to come in. Shane got his knees checked out and I wrote for a little while. We eventually tracked Lorraine down, but everyone we knew on the ride, including her, still lived in Santa Cruz and went home to sleep. Shane and I walked into town where all the crazies and hippies hang out and talked about old times. I also tracked down my old friend, Chris, who was the only person I managed to see in Santa Cruz that was NOT affiliated with the ride.

I was glad there wasn't much night life in the camp. As soon as everyone had eaten dinner and the sun went down, pretty much everyone just went to sleep. Shane and I put in ear plugs and turned our headlamps off around 9 o'clock. Right before we went to bed I held up a piece of paper. "I HOPE THEY HAVE JUICE AT BREAKFAST TOMORROW!" it said.

Total distance: About 84 miles (as I mentioned, my GPS wasn't working quite right)
Roughly 4:40 in the saddle
Average speed (for recorded time) 18 mph (including all that b-s in San Francisco)

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Prologue: Dykes and Bikes