The Harbor to the Bay Ride

This is how your charity ride starts: you wake up at 4:11 in the morning.  Your alarm is set for 4:30, but your cat has decided that 4:11 is a more suitable time, and honestly, you're excited and don't need much persuasion.  After a flurry of last-minute text messages, your friends arrive a little after 5, and by 5:40 you're signing in in the dark outside Trinity Church at Copley Plaza.  You eat breakfast (oatmeal--it'll digest easily); put on socks, bike shoes, hat, gloves, helmet; affix your rider number (282) to your jersey, your bike, and the backpack containing a change of clothes that will go on the luggage truck.  You half-listen to the opening speeches; you try to be respectful but it's Time to Go.

I thought I could do well on this ride.  I'm in peak shape, had rested for the two days previous, and having learned important lessons over the summer about not dieting the night before a major event, I had consumed a huge plate of Pad Thai before going to bed early.  I was close to my fundraising goal and excited about that.  And when they finally sent us off I felt strong and solid, like I could ride for days.

I rode with Jerry, a guy from my team who proudly wore his Positive Pedalers bike jersey on this AIDS benefit ride.  He and I were reasonably well matched and drifted in and out of other groups.  Charity rides are not really about speed, except that sometimes they sort of are, and I was pleased to be in a large group of guys and going fast.  The idea when you're riding is to stay out of the wind as much as possible by keeping other people in front of you.  In a group like the one I had, it often doesn't make much sense for me to "pull" (or take the lead) because I can't go as fast as a guy in good shape and because I'm short enough that they can't really get a good draft off of me anyway.  So for the first thirty miles I got sucked along, averaging between 18 and 19, before we stopped at Pit Two and I got my picture taken with the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence:

Then my heros started to drop off.  They got tired.  I did not.  Jerry and I took turns on the front until we got to the "lunch stop" (at 10 in the morning) at Mile 60--the Sagamore Bridge--averaging 18.3.   There I rested:

After lunch we walked across the bridge to begin the second half of our ride:

This is where the fun began in earnest, as we began to pick off other riders--slower folks, who were just doing 60 miles and had started at the bridge, and others who had started with us but were now starting to feel the distance.  We passed everyone we saw.  No one passed us.  I felt like a rock star.

Our next stop was the Mile 90 pit.  One of my favorite things about his ride is the pit stops.  On most rides, the organizers take direct responsibility for staffing the pits and providing supplies.  On Harbor to the Bay, though, each pit is sponsored by a different AIDS-related organization, and they're encouraged to personalize.  The Mile 90 Pit is one of my favorite places out of all the rides I do.  It's run by the Seacoast Gay Men, and they have managed to encapsulate every positive gay-male stereotype into a single pit stop.  They all wear grass skirts and hand out leis. Sometimes, though not this year, they play show tunes.  They offer a wide range of baked goods--regular and gluten-free--along with fresh fruit, and the drag queens who come out to support the ride congregate there.

I ate two brownies--a volunteer tried to sell me on a hummus wrap but all I wanted was sugar--and hopped back on the bike.  We did twelve miles on the Cape Cod Rail Trail and then got onto Route 6.

Things got hillier.  And windier.  I had taken the lead and, after pulling for a while, pulled to the left and gestured for Jerry to pass me so I could rest behind him for a while.  Nothing happened.  So I looked back and saw nothing but empty road.  At some point I had dropped Jerry and was on my own, riding into a headwind, fifteen miles from the finish.

Undaunted, I pressed on, passing still more riders, climbing a series of wedding-cake-shaped hills in Truro with an energy born of a surfeit of sugar in my system (I'd also been eating Oreos all day).   And finally, there it was, up ahead:  a crowd of people in orange "pit crew" t-shirts, waving flags and ringing cowbells and cheering.  The finish line.  Victory!  With an average of 17.8 MPH and a ride time of 6 hours and 42 minutes, I was the first woman to cross, and can therefore claim that I WON THE CHARITY RIDE.

This was a fantastic day (we even avoided all the rain) that raised over $450,000 for AIDS foundations (you can still donate; click here) and pushed people to previously unimagined heights.  One woman cried as she crossed the finish line.  One man crossed, tried to get off his bike, and tipped over sideways.  A bunch of volunteers rushed over and I could hear him, sitting on the ground, saying, "I'm just a little tired; that's all.  I'm just a little tired."

Some people rested.  I got up the next day and rode another 82 miles--still on a high.  I'm just a little tired myself.  But it was an awesome experience and I feel great.

Upcoming Charity Rides

Click on the links below to learn more or donate.  All donations are tax-deductible.

Harbor to the Bay:  September 15, 125 miles, fundraising minimum: $1000.  Money for this ride goes to support four local AIDS organizations.  These groups saw their funding slashed last year--paradoxically, because they were too effective.  The federal government decided to shift the funds to states that weren't doing as well.  So they need your help more than ever.

H2B is one of my favorite rides; it's the longest one-day route I do (though next year I will try a triple-K) and has the best volunteers, including an all-female biker group called the Moving Violations who ride around on their Harleys, directing traffic and just generally looking menacing.

The Dempsey Challenge:  October 14, 100 miles, fundraising minimum: $150.  This will be my third year doing Dempsey, which raises millions for the Patrick Dempsey Center for Cancer Care and Healing in Maine.  It takes place over 100 hilly miles starting and ending in Lewiston, involving more climbing than almost any ride I've done (Tahoe was more).  It's a great ride that hundreds of spectators come out to support.

My 2012 Charity Season

Due to a new job and various other occurrences, I've had a somewhat abbreviated charity season.  In June I did the two-day, 183-mile MS ride from Boston to Provincetown.  It rained the first day and I forgot my jacket, so I did the first chunk of the ride wearing a giant trash bag.  I was proud to have done a sub-six-hour century and to have helped Bike MS raise over $2 million.  In July I did Seacoast Safari, to benefit cystic fibrosis research.  This was my fourth time doing this ride and I was actually on the planning board this year.  Vertex has developed a drug that essentially makes the disease chronic instead of fatal for a small portion of the CF population, and it's exciting to be able to support that kind of progress in some small way.  At the end of the July I did the Mass Bike Summer Century--and bonked, hard.  But hey, it happens to the best of us.