Old Dime Box Revisited 600K
Randonneuring is a cycling discipline—is sport the right word?—that’s somewhere between racing and touring. You complete a planned route before a certain cutoff time, but finishing order doesn’t matter. Rando events have a few standardized distances: 200K, 300K, 400K, 600K, and 1000K. There are longer events as well, including the big show for randonneuring, Paris-Brest-Paris at 1200K. Each of these has a standard cutoff time; for a 600K, it’s 40 hours, and that includes whatever sleep and other off-bike activities you need to squeeze in.
Our local chapter posts a series of events every year, and I was interested in completing a 600K, so I signed up. It turns out I was the only person who signed up.
I’ve ridden nearly the same distance over a two-day period in my failed attempt at the TABR in 2023, although the circumstances were different then—I was in better shape, but I was carrying a lot of cargo. There was much more climbing, but Day 1 also had a massive tailwind. So it’s hard to compare the efforts.
I went into this knowing that I was pretty under-trained for this attempt, and would be getting through it on the basis of good pacing and orneriness.
Day 1
Day 1 was a 357-km (222-mile) loop heading northwest > northeast > southeast > southwest. I had probably been on half the roads at some point before. In general, the area west of Austin is hilly and dry; to the east it’s flat and wetter, with a lot of farmland. I generally prefer the former to the latter both in terms of aesthetics and riding quality. Hills are interesting and have knowable end-points. But in the flat farmland to the east, there is nothing to slow down the wind, which just grinds you down. Very few trees for shade.
Around Krause Springs, I noticed that the Hill Country Ride for AIDS was underway, and passed some of the participants. Gwen and I did that ride back in 2005. I noticed this time around a lot of the riders were on ebikes. This is a good place for it, because it is one of the prettiest places in Texas, especially when the wildflowers are in bloom.
I stopped for a sandwich in Marble Falls, about a quarter of the way through. This was the last real food I’d have until I got home. Mostly I was fueling myself with fruit-based energy blocks and the occasional Snickers bar. Appropriate fueling is a problem for me because in a Zone-1/2 ride like this, I can go for a really long way without bonking—I’ve finished 200Ks on no more than a few energy bars. But certainly this ride would put me deep in the red, and bonking would be really ugly.
I had been feeling a little off up to this point—nothing specific I can point to. I was nervous about this ride, and perhaps I was burning off that anxiety. After Marble Falls, I got into the zone better—and zoned out. I turn inward on rides like this, just focusing on what I’m doing, not so much on my surroundings, except for traffic.
Burnet had what seemed like it had once been a grand downtown, but was almost completely vacant now.
Florence was weird—there was a sharp rich/poor divide, only made more apparent by the fact that there’s basically one downtown street where the two sides are forced together. Some guy who was very impressed with his car (and its modified exhaust system) was making passes up and down the main drag rattling the windows.
When I reached Milam County, I was still about 60 miles from home, but I felt like I was on home turf—I know the roads, and I know the area. I had been riding conservatively to that point—and had mostly been riding into headwinds—and at this point, I knew I could turn up the heat a little bit. My knees were bothering me a little bit. Not the kind of trouble you get from bad positioning, just the cumulative effect of a lot of miles. I’d had some brief and minor episodes of hotfoot, but nothing bad (and never in the same place twice). At this point, my ass was really starting to bother me.
I rode the last 30 or so miles in the dark. And for the last 15 or so, my speed dropped off. This was not so much because I was tired (though obviously yes I was). I was losing the mental discipline to keep my speed up; I was on increasingly urban roads with more twists and turns. And I was keeping in mind the advice “don’t ride faster than your guardian angel can fly” (that is, don’t outrun your headlights).
I got home at about 11 PM, showered (I smelled like something a vulture would refuse to eat), ate, plugged in stuff that needed recharging, put some drip-wax on my chain, and crashed.
My ass was hamburger meat and my knees were kind of bothering me.
I slept amazingly well, and woke up before the alarm I had set.
I was a little dilatory getting out the door to begin Day 2, and probably could have saved half an hour there. I had about 8.5 hours of downtime from the time I got home until I left. A lot of people riding a 600K would opt for less sleep than I did.
My ass was still on fire, and my knees were still not great. I knew Day 2 would be a slog.
Day 2
Day 2 was an out-and-back route to the east, so, flat farmlands with no shelter from the wind. And like Day 1, it was all headwind for the first half. I knew that my performance would drop on the second day, but I wasn’t sure how much. It turns out the answer was “a lot.” I use the Ride with GPS app to read my cues and record my ride, and it reads out my stats at 15-minute intervals. Under normal conditions, I’d want to keep my heart rate between 120 and 130. On Day 2, my heart rate for a 15-minute interval didn’t go above 110 until the last hour of the ride. I couldn’t push it harder.
Similarly to the day before, I stopped at around the 60-mile mark for a sandwich, and again, that was the last real food I had until I got home. If fueling is a problem for me, hydrating is probably a bigger problem. I keep reminding myself to drink more, and I keep not drinking as much as I should. I’m sure I started Day 2 dehydrated, and I was really beginning to feel it. I know that when we eat, our digestive tract takes water from our bodies to process the food, and I kept asking myself “am I drinking enough to get any benefit from the food I’m eating?” The answer was probably “No.”
At the start I was taking it easy on my knees, but at around the halfway point, they started to feel a little better. My ass did not start feeling better, but I eventually kind of came to terms with it. I spent as much time as possible on the aerobars because that took some weight off my butt, and rotated my position so a less-sensitive part of my butt was on the saddle. What I realized when I was getting toward the finish of Day 2 was that I had been using my aerobar grips and armrests to slightly cantilever my butt out of the saddle, and the pressure on my forearm was tweaking those muscles and my pinkies and ring fingers, probably due to pressure on the ulnar nerves. Also, with just a few miles to go, I developed intense hotfoot on the balls of both feet, probably again from trying to keep weight off the saddle.
I finished with exactly 90 minutes remaining before the cutoff time.
Day 2 was not fun. I did not much like the area I was riding through, and my pain made it difficult to enjoy the ride regardless.
The bike I was riding is set up for comfort. It’s got a position I can hold all day. It’s got a suspension seatpost and stem (I can barely imagine what condition I’d be in if I’d been riding on a rigid seatpost). My tires could be fatter, but they were at a low enough pressure to absorb some bumps. And I’ve ridden similar distances before without being so badly pulverized. So I’m not sure why I feel so beat up now. I think there are two factors:
- My previous long-distance efforts were on better roads.
- I haven’t been doing a lot of long-distance riding lately to toughen myself up.
Like I said before, I got through this on orneriness. I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it. If I do it again, I’ll go into it with better preparation.