Seattle Roads by Night

This weekend, I did something foolish - on Friday I hit Recycled Cycles and picked up a very old Schwinn road bike (complete with 80's steel frame) and the appropriate accessories to ride safe. My target? The Seattle Night and Day Challenge 16-hour Mixed Bike category, with my road wingman Laurel.

It had been over three years since my mountain bike had been stolen - and at least 18 months since I had gone on some casual road rides with Shay out to Maple View Farms. And the hills in North Carolina's Peidmont are rolling at best, nothing compared to the up-and-down hills of King County. Needless to say, I wasn't really prepared - but it's something I really wanted to do. 16 hours on a bike, from 4PM to 8AM, visiting different points around the Seattle metro area.

We went to Greenlake Park, and at 2:30PM, we were issued maps and told to plot out our intended course - in case we got lost and didn't report back in. Laurel and I divided the city into quadrants and she plotted out the courses we would take to get from point to point. 4PM, we were off.

The next seven hours are a blur of park-to-park biking, with unusual highlights splashed in: nearly getting run over by a hearse; getting beat by a footrunner from point to point because the streets are slower; losing fourty-five minutes of trying to fix the wheel on my bike; a lonely old woman washing her dishes; the stares of homelss as we intruded on the parks they call home; and the hills - the weakest part of my bike skills is my lack of hill handling.

At 10PM, we decided to take a nap and pick up some checkpoints in the morning. We stopped for a few more on the way back to my place - and when we got there at midnight I did laundry and we took a five hour nap. I didn't sleep a wink - I don't know why.

At 5AM, three alarms went off in my apartment, just as I was falling asleep - Laurel and I talked and we agreed that since we were in such a small class (2 mixed teams for the 16-hour category) that we'd sleep for another hour and then hit head back to Greenlake for the 8AM check-in. We arrived at 7:33 and turned our answer sheet in for scoring.

And hour later, the winners were announced, and we had won first place - I really couldn't believe it. Our competition had checked in at 2AM and stopped there - about the same time we stopped. Because we had hit the last few points on the way back to my place, we had won by a single checkpoint.

Riding home, I thought about how much I used to enjoy biking - heart-pumping, saddle-sore, muscle-aching biking. Over the next year, I'm going to get back on the road and get ready for next year.