I blew past my previous max distance by a resounding 24 miles. The total elevation ended up coming up just under 5500′ which is about 500 merciful feet less than the route was described. Still it’s the most I’ve climbed on one of these long rides. I completed the route one hour and a half before the cutoff. Looking back on the ride itself, my previous post sounds childish (maybe it did anyways) with how strongly I managed to finish. Yet even the night before I was still in the throes of anxiety…

I rolled up to the Simi Valley Hotel I was staying at with Daniel around 5pm. I was immediately beset by concern because they had multiple “No bicycles permitted in building” signs plastered all over the entrances and windows. I wondered how this could have been such a recurring problem that it warranted such aggressive signage. I imagined Simi Valley being swarmed by flocks of cyclists at hotels but I never saw a single other one besides Daniel and the rest of the randonneurs I was heading out with. One thing bicycling has reinforced in me is that sometimes it’s better to ask for forgiveness than for permission, I believe they call this exercising your privilege. If you’re in a shady neighborhood you grab your bike and walk right into the store; If you’re at red light with a weight sensor and no cars for miles then you just roll on; if you feel unsafe on the shoulder of a road you just take up the whole lane instead. I gathered my nerves and walked right in with my bicycle already mentally preparing my defense: “Your website never said no bikes allowed”. The lobby was completely empty, I leaned my bike out of sight of the reception, checked in, and went to my room after the worker walked to the back room.

I went out to have dinner with my former boss who lives in the area, Red’s bbq…can’t say they impressed much but I figured it was good fuel for the next day. Afterwards I felt sleepy around 10 pm, which was great since I had to wake up at 6, it was the perfect amount of sleep. I got into bed, closed my eyes….and lied awake for the next two hours. Whither had my sleepiness gone? It was consumed by the thought I would wake up and face the challenge that had plagued me for the last week, the fugue was playing in my head again.

Daniel finally came to the room around midnight, also brazenly walking his bike in without being told anything, and then as he recounted the trials and tribulations of riding 248 miles that day we took up another hour and a half of sleeping time. I think in total I had about 4 hours to sleep but my mind hardly felt it because when my 6 a.m. alarm hit I bolted upright and began the process of assembling my gear. Jairo, the person, died the night previous, now I had slipped into the role of cyclist and my feelings of dread were banished to my subconscious at least momentarily.

We got to the start line without much issue and at last around 7 am we were ready to start, except the route had not loaded on my GPS something which I never checked for because it had always been automatic. Now I looked like an amateur in front of everyone trying to synchronize my gps, restarting it, scrolling through my embarrassingly long list of saved routes knowing the clock was ticking down. After 15 minutes of trying and failing I told Daniel to lead us for now. The route had been updated a couple of days previous and he had the old route. We were accepting the fact that we may be misguided a bit, and I was accepting that I would at some point need to end my ride, try to download the course again, and start a new ride meaning I would need to stitch together my activities. As we set out already having burned 15-20 minutes on dumb technical problems I fell ill at ease. Starting off on the wrong foot feels like a bad omen, it sets the tone of the rest of the ride and this time was no different. Daniel was starving since he was 400 kilometers in without having had a real meal. We tried to find a nice coffee stop but had to settle for Carl’s Jr since we didn’t know the area and didn’t want to veer off course. Long story short, we took another 40ish minutes. It was an hour and change after start time and we were barely 8 miles in. In the parlance of our friends: the gas had to be pumped.

Daniel did the mental math about what our pace needed to be to not miss the cutoff. What would normally have been a ride with meandering, and semi-frequent opportunities to stop had turned into a race to beat the clock. It sounds more intense than it was because we still had ample time, we weren’t exactly going mach 5 since he was handicapped and we started off slow as he warmed up. Thankfully the stop had afforded me time to fix my damn GPS so we were able to follow the correct route going forward. We hit one of the only climbs of the day immediately at mile 10 and I could tell Daniel was in pain because I never lost his sight of him up Santa Susana Pass whereas on a normal day he would have been waiting at the top for me 20 minutes. I could definitely get used to this level of riding.

We passed some rolling terrain through Chatsworth and Granada Hills before making it to San Fernando and our average pace was improving. The first control was here, a church nestled in a quiet neighborhood. Daniel joked that he had become a pedaling automaton: M.O.D.O.B (Mechanized Organism Designed Only For Bicycling). We referenced my thoughts on living in bad faith and whether this counted as that, and I told him yes since it seemed like his instincts told him to stop, yet to become a great athlete requires quite literally pushing aside your humanity and inhabiting this other role. Near mile 300 for him, Daniel had accepted his fate but at least at this point we were joking in high spirits, there was still a person somewhere in there.

Soon after, we made our first real stop to refill water at around mile 30. We kept it brisk yet I had accumulated some things I had to do (use the restroom, apply sunscreen). We took maybe 10 minutes and then continued. There was some minimal climbing here which always brings me to a crawl but I gained the momentum back on the inevitable descents. At this point I thought I could easily be dropped but it didn’t happen we kept chugging along like a yo-yo with pushing and pulling based on the gradient of the road. So it went: through Lakeview Terrace, Tujunga, La Cañada Flintridge, Altadena and Sierra Madre. SM had control point 2 and we again briefly considered stopping for more substantial sustenance but it felt like we hadn’t exactly made up the time we lost before.

We kept chugging gels and moving along through Monrovia, and Duarte with a brief stop at Encanto Park to refuel water, then finally we hopped on the San Gabriel River Path and came to the Santa Fe Dam, which was the turnaround point for the day at mile 63, halfway done. the last time I rode down that path was for my first century ever almost exactly a year ago. I reflected on how much better I felt compared to that day especially considering I was traveling an additional 24 miles and almost 4 times the elevation.

The feeling of accomplishment didn’t last long however because at around mile 70 my mental and physical stamina were starting to show some wear and tear. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, my goal shifted from riding with Daniel to not losing him. I was putting on a brave air but some part of me deep down wanted desperately to take the pace a bit slower or stop and smell the roses a bit harder. Something seemed to change in Daniel too as I could tell he was getting impatient with the stoplights and was growing more irate by the minute. Our feelings were brought to their natural conclusions at mile 78 when we faced the challenge of Ciclavia 626. The route organizer had wound the 200k ride through the public celebration of cycling in lower Pasadena, which brought out all the families and pedestrians on closed streets. It was supposed to be a fun diversion in the middle of our day but to me it ended up being a reminder of all the things I like to stop and do on these long rides, and I suspect to Daniel it was just one giant hindrance on his increasingly desperate rush to finish once and for all. I lost sight of him almost immediately and got caught behind two metro rail train cars. I didn’t stop at any of the live bands or attractions since I figured he might wait for me, and indeed when I found him he was powering through a gas station pastry. I mentioned something along the lines of how on a normal day I would have loved to stop and check out some of the delicious food or bands along the Ciclavia stretch, and that’s when I knew I too was cycling in bad faith.

I knew we would split eventually, Daniel was clearly in a very different head space and his body was no doubt in pain. Whereas I was not used to pushing out so many miles without a generous dose of dilly dallying. He announced his intentions to keep pedaling nonstop until the finish, and I told him that I’d give it one final hurrah and if he ever looked back and didn’t see me there that I would meet him at the finish. It must have been around mile 87 after some short hills that I fell back, got caught at a stoplight and that was the end of the fellowship of the beach. Daniel had achieved his pledge to become a machine. As I watched Daniel ride off into the wild blue yonder I could no longer tell where man ended and bicycle began.

At mile 88 as if in direct response to my renewed freedom I looked to my left and saw a picture perfect roadside French bakery. It seemed to spring forth from my thoughts like a temple of some French cycling god. I made an immediate choice to stop and accepted my destiny of finishing near the cutoff time (I wasn’t really working out the pace math in my head). Two of my favorite things were housed in this church, coffee and croissants and I partook in both.

It felt amazing to be off the bike for a bit, to stretch and most importantly sit somewhere that wasn’t my saddle. I desperately needed this stop and I immediately felt a renewed sense of mental energy. I tore apart the croissant tooth and nail and didn’t even care about the powdered sugar getting all over my kit, those were mile 0 Jairo problems. I made a commitment not to stop again until the last control point in San Fernando at mile 101. After getting back on the bike I still did not feel very great but pushed through without trying to stop, the little hills and gradients in Burbank were starting to become much more taxing than they should be. Then around mile 95 I felt power and purpose return to my legs, my saddle pains subsided and I even felt like my breathing improved. What magic was this? This was the primordial force of caffeine, carbs and sugar. Maybe I had not been eating enough previously but I began to feel great again, mile 20 Jairo was back! I blazed (comparatively at least) straight through San Fernando where I caught up with a 600k participant that didn’t look like he was doing so well, he was laying down with his eyes closed next to his bike seemingly asleep. At this point I fully embraced the idea of eating more and dispensed with the gels and clif bars I had in favor of a delicious looking ice cream sandwich (it was still hot out) and a gatorade. I have never enjoyed eating gas station food so much in my life and my spirits were way up. As I approached the trash can to leave, the rider I thought was asleep suddenly looked at me and like a Greek oracle declared “Time to get back on the road!” We left together but I lost him after a couple of stoplights.

Within 2 miles I quietly celebrated in my head that this was now the longest ride I had ever ridden. Riding from San Fernando back to Santa Susana didn’t just feel manageable it felt great. I was still shocked about how good I felt considering all my previous experiences with rides this long were full of pain and cramps by this point. I was even looking forward to the last and worst climb of the ride back through Santa Susana Pass. I stopped right at the start of the segment for one last break, I busted out my secret weapon: peanut M&Ms and casually munched on them as I prepared for the final 13 miles of the ride. Another 600k rider caught up to me and decided to stop as well. As we were conversing, without batting an eye he turned towards the shoulder of the road and started peeing. I guess that’s the randonneuring way, when you gotta go you gotta go. He let me know that this 200k I was on was definitely on the higher end in miles to elevation gain ratio and I felt encouraged to perform well on the climb. He left as I finished the last of my candies and I set to it.

The sun was setting now and the cooler weather added yet another boost to my spirits. I was for sure on my third or fourth wind by now, Hermes give me strength! I stuck to my commitment of no longer stopping except for when I saw this image on the side of the road during the climb:

I had to stop and snap this. Why were these printers abandoned near no offices on the side of a mountain pass? I felt like I had stumbled onto an art installation. Are the worn down printers in front of the picturesque nature of the pass a sign of mankind’s inevitable doom? It reminds me of a scene in The Green Knight where the lady of the manor ruminates on Nature’s place in our world:

It does not dally, nor does it wait to plot or conspire. Pull it out by the roots one day and then next, there it is, creeping in around the edges. Whilst we’re off looking for red, in comes green.

The Green Knight, 2021

The earth was here long before us and will remain long after us, and the broken down printers were a warning to me that humanity is merely a fad on a geological timeline. So after being existentially put in my place in the middle of this climb I doubled my effort to finish, my own personal suffering no longer seeming so vast and dramatic. I tore through the next 13 miles, at least to my addled body it felt like I was firing on all cylinders clear to the end. It helped of course that after the descent from Santa Susana it was one long gentle downward slope to the finish.

I got to the end at exactly 12 hours of moving time. Not too shabby considering how much I stopped after being cut loose. My personal goal, as often is the case, was to finish so the fact that I finished an hour and a half before cutoff was an absolute win. The ride organizer had Pizza Hut, snacks, and drinks waiting for us. All the riders I had passed and met along the way including Daniel were also hanging out in the room enjoying the food. I inhaled three slices without even bothering to heat them up, warmth is just an impedance to consumption at this point. Now that I was finally done I took actual stock of my body and my leg muscles were vibrating with a pain I had never really felt before, my back and shoulder were tense and sore, my toes hurt, and my lungs felt exhausted. The ride had definitely taken its toll, but mentally I felt stronger than I ever have after a century. I feel much better about doing the upcoming Tour De Big Bear century route in August which with 8000 feet of climbing above 6000′ elevation promises to be a whole new level of pain.