MS City to Shore 2011

Every time I do this ride it's different. The first time is hard because unless you're one of those strange people who ride 80 miles a day on a regular basis, you're likely to have trouble pacing yourself. The second time I had myself incredibly well trained and it was very fast and almost easy. And so on.

This year, I did a just fair job of training. On the good side, I knew what I was in for. On the bad side, I'm now 5 years older than the first time and feeling it a bit. So I decided I'd leave a bit later to get more sleep and take it easy. So instead of getting up at 5:30 AM I set my alarm for 6. I woke up at 6 and then immediately fell back asleep and reawakened at 6:45 and flipped out. The only saving grace was that I had looked over the race materials the night before and knew for certain that I had until 8 AM to be on the road and the starting line is around 30 minutes from my house.

Although I'm older, I've retained the ability to dress myself and make coffee, and really, what else do you need? I was out of the house at 7:05, got parked by 7:35 and on the road at 7:40, less than an hour after I'd woken up.

The weather forecast had been ranging from lousy to dreadful, but it turned out to be near-prefect, in the 70's, slight sunshine, no wind and no rain. I did about 2 hours of this ride in the rain one year and it is no fun at all.

The first few miles of the ride rolls through the southeastern part of Cherry Hill (I think; New Jersey suburbs are mysterious to me except I can find Wegman's). Even in the early stages you can see the various sorts of people who do this ride. There are a number of people roughly like me- middle-aged folks riding solo. Mostly men but a decent cohort of women too. We're generally serious riders and keep up a decent pace. There are the socialites- people doing the ride with a friend or two, riding 2 or 3 abreast, talking non-stop, and generally holding up the people behind them. There are the big young men, whose discussions revolve mostly around how fast they're intending to do, who zoom past periodically. And there are the teams. These are mostly corporate and vary widely in quality. The bigger companies/organizations have dozens of people, some of them very fast and some very slow.

The ride was almost shockingly problem free for me. I never felt overly fatigued. In a 5-6 hour ride like this, you can divide it roughly into 4 parts- the beginning, where you're feeling fresh, then part 2, where you're warmed up and rolling along pretty well. Usually the trouble, if there is any, happens in part 3, from miles 40-60. At this point, you are definitely no longer fresh, and unless you've been training like crazy, you've now ridden further than you have at any point in the recent past. My 4 longest training rides ranged from 30-36 miles, for example. Your legs are dead and your butt is not too happy either. Once you're past the 60 mile mark you can start to feel the finish approaching and you get an adrenaline rush. Just in time for the bridges.

The ride is almost entirely flat and miles 10-65 are pretty rural. Then it gets more populated as you approach the shore, and fiendishly, at mile 74 you can see, looming in the distance, the two bridges from the mainland to Ocean City. The race personnel, so supportive for the first 73 miles, delight in razzing you as you approach this point. The bridges are tall and very much exposed to the elements. The first year I did the ride, there was a stiff onshore breeze that made it necessary to pedal pretty hard to get down the bridge, much less up it.

The bridges encapsulated my problem with this year's ride. As the event has gotten larger, the participants' understanding of group cycling etiquette has decreased. You can no longer count on your fellow cyclists to call out obstacles or signal that they're slowing or stopping. A lot of people were routinely violating basic rules of the road, mostly by insisting on riding side by side, even on busy roads with traffic coming from the back. It's both rude and dangerous. This caused me to ride impetuously at times, bursting out of a pack and swinging almost left of center to pass. This isn't fun to  do anywhere, but on a bridge it's insane.

I have an idiosyncratic way of climbing, where I go as fast as I can in high gear until the hill starts to bite, when I downshift and continue pedaling furiously until I near the top at which point I all but stop and coast over the crest. I don't know anyone else who rides like this and I'd imagine it'd be infuriating to someone trying to ride with me, which is part of why I prefer to ride alone. Here, though, I kept getting caught behind clumps of people not riding single file and not staying to the right, and since I hate slowing down going uphill, not only was I dealing with the climb but I was trying to not get rear-ended by a car as I swing around.

But these are quibbles. I enjoyed the ride, once I knew I was getting there in time to do it, and I raised $1000 for a good cause. At the end, they have food and music and a t-shirt and buses back to the start point.