Another ancient campfire cycling tale

I wrote this piece in the mid-'80s. As you will perceive, I was married then; Shelly and I lived in Albany, California, adjacent to Berkeley.

For the writers among you: I had evidently not settled into my short-paragraph, active-voice habits at that point. In moving this piece from an old floppy to my blog site, and excising the old WordStar (word processing program) symbols from it, I made two paragraphs from one two or three times. At 1300 words, it's also longer than pieces I've had the freedom to submit in the last decade or more.

It occurs to me that this piece may be older than you are, dear reader. It's so old that my big chain ring was a 52! Oh, well... I hope you like it despite all that.

Bunny Hop

My wife and I put my bike in the car last September and drove down to the Central Coast area of California. We visited with her folks and spent a night or two in bed and breakfast inns in places like Ojai and Santa Barbara, neat places, especially for people who like to ride around on bicycles.

In Ojai I learned about a regular training ride in nearby Ventura Sunday mornings. I got up early and drove off, my bike on the roof rack. I found the place that'd been described to me as the start; there was no one there. A passing cyclist told me he knew of a ride starting across town, at a bike shop, and told me generally how to get there. After getting lost twice, at the last moment I pulled into the mall lot where the ride began.

There were more people unloading bikes there than I'd ever seen for a training ride. I thought, wow, these Ventura folks really turn out on a Sunday. I said hi to the guys in the car next to mine; they checked out my bike, making sure it met a minimum standard, before saying hi back.

I noticed that people oddly seemed to be pulling out of the lot in small groups. When I asked about that, the guys said it would all sort out down the road. I nodded as if I understood.

I jumped into a likely-looking group of about 15 people, two or three women and guys from about 20 to 40 years old. Right away I liked the pace and the almost flat terrain. You could use the big chain ring nearly all the time; not the case in Berkeley, bruddah, where I live. You could sit in the saddle and pedal in, say, the 52-17. I liked it.

About 15 miles out of Ventura, I asked the guy next to me in the paceline how far these rides usually went. I'd had in mind around 30 or 40 miles. After a moment of confusion, he told me that I had connected with an event called the Bunny Hop Century. Our group, he said, was headed for downtown Santa Barbara and back - about, as I remember, 72 miles.

I thought, hey, I can ride 72 miles, especially in the big ring at 20-plus mph. Also, I thought, I don't believe I can find my way back to the start by myself. So it was Santa Barbara or bust with the hard-riding Mystery Cycling Club, of Deleted, California. Makes you tired just thinking about it, doesn't it? Does me.

As we motored up the coast highway one of the women in our group got dropped and drifted back quite a bit, riding alone. Because I am such a super human being and a road cycling powerhouse, I dropped back and chatted with her for a while, then offered to tow her up to the group. I can't keep up, Susan said. Let's give it a try, I asserted positively.

She sat on my wheel and I brought her back to her double-pacelined club-mates. After a few miles we came to what is called a hill in that area, but might be called a rise or roller elsewhere. Again she lost a few feet and the help of the draft. I watched over my shoulder as she slowed and began to struggle. Inevitably, without the draft the gap in front of her grew rapidly.

Once again, I dropped back, telling her she COULD hang in, that she was, in fact, only a LITTLE weaker, that we'd bridge again and she COULD hang on. She'd see, I said, that all she needed was to pick a smooth wheel to sit on and she could stick.

No, YOU'LL see, she told me, I HAD a smooth wheel. I towed her up again anyway, watched her merge into the back of the group, and rode up to the front.

One guy up there, whose name is NOT Steve, really it's not, seemed to me to be the unofficial ride leader. He spent lots of time at the front and had a watchful, serious way. He looked like a bike rider. I said to him, Steve, (NOT his real name), Susan can almost hang on. If we could hesitate just a second at the tops of the rises, she could ride the whole way with the group.

She's a big girl, Steve said (let's call him Steve); she can take care of herself. I admitted (weak, weak) that that was one way to look at it. I went to the back and thought about our little exchange. Certainly it was their club and their ride and none of my business. Certainly they had evolved their way of dealing with slower people over years of group rides.

Still I didn't like what I felt was the coldness of it. I'd known groups like that before; they felt that if new people wanted badly enough to ride with them they'd do what they had to so they could. If the new riders didn't (or couldn't) get fit enough, it was good riddance anyway.

I told Susan, who had just gotten sawed off again, that I'd asked the gentleman in front, the one up there with the red helmet, if the group could just wait the least little bit. I told her what his answer had been.

She said that's just what she would've expected. She said she'd ridden with that same club for years. Some years she'd gotten really fit and couldn't be dropped. Other years, like this one, she couldn't quite hang on. They'd see her when she reached wherever they were headed. She knew of other, slower, friendlier clubs in her area, she said, but she liked this one, even when she couldn't keep up.

She said that when she first rode with them the effort - trying to hang on just one landmark further - made her fast. At that time, the club had not been friendly to women riders; she'd had to prove she could be fast enough and safe enough to qualify. Eventually they accepted her.

It was clear to me that, even that September day, when no one would wait for her, Susan felt proud of that acceptance.

Susan prizes Steve's (not his real name) friendship and defended him valiantly when I told her about his "big girl" remark. She said that all along he's been the enforcer of the "no favors" code the club practices. After a long period of being unimpressed by him, she wouldn't change a thing about the guy.

What a tough woman, I thought. I don't believe that way of initiating new riders would work with me, were I to start all over again. Nothing encourages me more than a little success. Showing up weekend after weekend, only to lack the horsepower or pack-savvy to survive the crunches in the group, would get me down.

I'd like to think I'd sense how neat it'd be to be one of the boys, so to speak, and keep on trying, but I bet I'd weaken. I know I'd give up long before Susan apparently did.

You won't find any easy answers in these last couple of paragraphs. This isn't one of those columns I do (too often) in which I tell all you out there how things should be, as if I knew. This column tells a story that made me think and may do the same for you.

Clearly, the way Steve and the Mystery Cycling Club dealt with new riders worked great for Susan, as she’ll tell the world. Strong folks like Susan will persevere, enduring mini-failure after mini-failure until ultimately they triumph.

Also clearly, some folks are more easily dismayed than Susan, me for instance. Still, folks like me might learn to survive just as well as she did. They might be just as proud of their progress as Susan is, just as protective of their leaders, if given an occasional few seconds of patient encouragement.

Ride leaders should find plenty of opportunities to provide such encouragement, right at the tops of the hills.