Context is everything
The end of the paved section of the Portland Traction trail
A couple of months ago, when I started using my ancient Trek to get away from the demons of high blood pressure, riding out to Gresham and back seemed like a nice long jaunt out to the country. 25 km out, 25 km back, or about 2h25 was sufficient for the day, and if I was feeling ambitious I’d push it out to a little above 30km and back.
Well, I wasn’t actually reading any bicycling weblogs then. Why should I? After all, most people seemed to be interested in racing racing racing, and this middle aged man’s reaction to all of the rituals wrapped around racing is to simply slow down a bit and wave as the bespandexed pacelines vanish into the distance. So it’s not as if I really had much in common with the rest of the bicycling world aside from the safety bicycles that most of us ride; I could see eventually doing some of the group rides in town, just because it seemed like it would be fun to do nice long 160km rambles around town, but there wasn’t any great hurry to do something like this.
But sometime this summer, someone on the Pentax mailing list pointed at a webpage talking about some insanely long distance bike thingie which involved riding, by yourself and with no sort of support (or even things like roads,) along the Continental Divide all the way from Canada to Mexico. Not that I’d ever do this, of course, and it was surely just a matter of boredom that I read all of the rider diaries I could find about this, and about various other related rides (I am strictly a surfaced road rider; the extent of my offroad activity in the past 20 years has been riding the gravelled section of the Portland Traction Trail from Rugg Road to Boring, plus gravelled and mudded parts of the Portland Traction Trail this side of Linneman Station during the installation of that new sewer line which ripped up the trail for most of this summer.)
But one of these websites mentioned something about something called “randonneuring”, which doesn’t involve (much) offroad riding, but has the oh-so-appealing “ride ridiculously long distances without any huge support organization” aspect of it. These people tend to toss off 100km rides with the same sort of regard that I treat riding down to the big big store, except that they’ll go out in the sort of weather that chills me even watching the rain pour down outside. Now, racing might be all fine and good, but heading off in the pouring rain for a 200km loop in the country, now that’s the sort of thing that makes my heart go pitter-pat, and which has helped me become unhealthily (I’m not employed, so I need to sell off computer equipment to outfit the Trek for long rambles) obsessed with bicycles.
But it makes the old 50km (intermittently) daily ride seem really short, and now I find myself trying to allocate 5hr slots to fit 100km rides into. Context is everything, I guess.