3 Tales of Tar Heels at PBP

If you're fairly new to randonneuring, you may not know that RUSA has twice published a PBP Yearbook with retrospectives from members who’ve participated in that celebrated event.

The 2003 edition, with 28 accounts, was compiled by two of RUSA’s most devoted volunteers: former president Bill Bryant; and Lois Springsteen, who currently processes RUSA’s brevet results.

The book was a rousing success. Here’s how one Canadian reviewer described it:

An interesting feature of this collection is how nicely the stories complement each other. Participants experienced similar sorts of things -- encounters with the "British Triple", the overcrowding at Loudeac, and droopy head syndrome ("Shermer's neck") for example, are recurring themes -- but the descriptions are always from a slightly different angle. The riders are moving at different speeds, passing through locations at different times and so their observations are out of phase with each other. It all adds up to a vivid portrait of the event that could not have been written by one person. You can think of this as a single story told from multiple points of view.

North Carolina was capably represented in the 2003 edition by three riders -- Adrian Hands, Capn John Ende and Will Martin.

Adrian and Capn’s stories are available online. Will sent me his story so I could excerpt portions here. All three accounts are instructive reads on the highs -- and the lows -- you’re likely to encounter in your own PBP adventure.



Capn John Ende

Let’s start with Capn Ende, one of the most enthusiastic under trainers I’ve ever met. Any time you ride with Ende, you can count on a little wry with your ham.

Ende's PBP 03 account proves the old Carol Burnett maxim: Comedy is tragedy plus time. Here’s how he described the 80-hour start:

The streets were closed to traffic and lined with enthusiastic spectators. The start line was wild, complete with some type of Moroccan music and kids doing crazy stunts. One girl, about eight years old, was riding a stationary bike spinning hypnotic wheels. As I watched they spoke (pun here) to me, “You are crazy, you are crazy, you are crazy”. It was awesome. It was festive.

Ende chose the 84-hour start, which departed at five a.m., hours after the 80 and 90-hour groups left.

It was an exhilarating feeling to finally be on this ride. Our peleton was huge. It was dark. It was fast. It was PBP! Exiting the suburbs, the course descended onto relatively flat farmland. This was the flattest part of the route, I would later learn. I was surprised at how quickly we were into the countryside. Weren’t we just in Paris? The first hour was fabulous, but intense. Such large packs in the dark make attentive riding mandatory.

Things went swimmingly for a while…

All in all we covered the first 100 miles in 5:50. Now I know that this is nothing to write home about but I thought that it wasn’t bad considering that I was scheduled to complete 6.5 more consecutive centuries after this. I was half an hour ahead of schedule in Mortagne, and then 20 minutes ahead of schedule at Villaines-la-Juhel. At this pace I thought that I could make La Trinite Porhoet by 10 PM, climb into bed and sleep between five to eight hours. Plans and pace are funny things. They are dynamic things. Things change. That is all you can count on.

And then la merde hit le ventilateur:

Thirty-five km out of Tinténiac on a relatively easy section it hit. Stomach cramps! What was this grumbling in my stomach? Was it the large volume of Sustained Energy that I had consumed? Was it the water that I had accepted from a kid on the side of the road? Was it mesenteric ischemia, a life-threatening condition that I thought may have been reported in ultra athletes? Hey, that’s weird, am I an ultra athlete? Every time I pedaled over 10 km/hr the cramping became so intense that it sent me doubled over to the side of the road where I would stand over my bike until the intense pain had stopped. I would continue a short way and the pattern would repeat. It ultimately took me three hours to cover the last 30 km.

Did the Capn recover? Mais, oui! But his struggles, in and out of the water closet, make an entertaining read. Check it out here on Adrian's site.


Adrian Hands

The adventures of local velorutionary leader Adrian Hands began long before the event. Here’s his account of a train ride to the start:

I rearranged my belongings into hotel stuff and PBP drop bag contents and we set out for St. Quentin. Our subway ride toward the regional rail line at St. Michel was going along smooth as silk when Sridhar noticed I was no longer carrying my drop bag. Uh-oh. Left it at the station. We double back, but no-go, it’s gone. So, it turns out I’m riding PBP sans drop bag—another good reason to pack all the really important stuff in the pannier. Hey, drop bags are for wimps anyway, right?

It would be a full year before he and his bag were reunited. Get him to tell you the story. And that was not the only bag he lost. He left a pannier in Carhaix, intending to retrieve it on the way back from Brest. Guess what…

Horror of horrors!...my pannier is not be found! I check around, to the point of annoying the staffers, at the control, read the message board, leave messages, try to buy a jacket or at least a reflective sash -- no dice. Too much time wasted. Let’s go, Allons, mes Amis!

But wait! He’s not done yet.

Miles up the road I remember the headlamp I just borrowed from Lisa is still hanging in the shower room. Arrghh! That’s two headlamps I lose before ever using either one!

Adrian suffered throughout the ride from sleep deprivation. Here’s how he describes a roadside nap:

It is getting close to the control closing time; I don’t see Sridhar or anybody else that I know, but the crowd is SO large I could’ve easily missed them. Push on. Did I eat too much? I’m feeling sleepy...hot afternoon sun...better pull over and let the plan slip. No way around it, the charming French countryside, the small farms with stone buildings that smell of ripe apples and warm hay-straw, they all whisper to you to relax. “Lie down with us in the pastures”, they say, and it is ten times more intoxicating than any silly sirens singing to Ulysses. I take a caffeine pill, set my new watch alarm for a ten minute snooze, shut the eyes and lay back in the fresh sun-baked straw. Zzzzz.... An hour and a half later I wake up to find I had set the alarm to 10:36 PM instead of AM! Oh well, if I was that out of it, I probably needed the rest. Now that I’m refreshed, I can push a bit harder.

Neither lost luggage nor lost sleep kept Adrian from the ultimate prize. Here’s the link to his full story.



Will Martin

Adrian was not the only one to suffer from sleep deprivation. Winston-Salem rider Will Martin described a similar experience, with a dash of hallucination tossed in for good measure:

About ten miles west of Carhaix, I am suddenly overwhelmed by the desire for sleep. I get off my bike at a traffic circle. I know that if I lie down, I will quickly get cold, so I try to take a short nap sitting with my back against a signpost. I can’t fall asleep and get cold anyway. I press on in the darkness in the direction of Brest, which now seems impossibly distant.

I climb a long grade, and the exertion makes my shivering go away. But as the shivering subsides, the sleepiness returns. I eat some energy food; I yell; I sing out loud, something from the Sound of Music of all things. Nothing works. I pedal on aimlessly for a while. I stop again and get an emergency space blanket out of my rear rack bag. I lie down and wrap myself up in it as best I can. I begin to think that my wife and three children are with me. We are all cold. I know it is a delusion, but I can’t make it go away. Sleep escapes me and I begin to shiver again. I have to get back on the bike and try to keep moving.

Will was in phenomenal shape for PBP 03, and he finished in under 70 hours (69:48). But his physical exertion eventually exacted a dear toll. Here’s how he described an alarming problem he had with his neck about 672 miles into his epic journey:

At some point I realized with alarm that it had become nearly impossible for me to keep my neck bent to see the road ahead. This presented some obvious safety concerns, especially in paceline riding, which requires constant attention to the small gap between your front wheel and the rear wheel immediately in front of you. I reluctantly dropped off the back of the paceline.

I reached up and felt my neck. The muscles running along my cervical spine were like steel rods. On ultra marathon rides, you expect that just about every hinge in your body will get stiff and sore, including your neck, but God almighty, this was something else altogether! It was as though there was an anvil on the back of my head when I tried to bend my neck. It required a tremendous effort that I couldn’t sustain for more than a few seconds at a time. I quickly developed a new riding style to keep my neck as straight as possible. On the climbs, I looked straight down, keeping an eye on the distance between my front wheel and the right edge of the pavement. Every so often, I bent my neck back just enough to quickly peek over the handlebars at the road ahead. On the descents, I sat up straight in the saddle, hands off the handlebars, and coasted to the bottom. In this way I struggled into the checkpoint at Mortagne…

Will also describes the magic personal connections he made at Mortagne au Perche…

Before leaving Mortagne, I had an extraordinary series of encounters with several local people. It started with the man in charge of the dorm and culminated with a baker at a boulangerie. In between, there was a beautiful woman who escorted me to the showers, a volunteer at the checkpoint infirmary who tried to treat me for sunburn when what I wanted was sun block, a little man with a mustache and a mechanical voice box who led me to the tucked-away pharmacy that had been mapped out on a scrap of paper by the infirmary volunteer, and the pharmacist who finally understood and sold me a tube of 60-strength sun block to replace the one I’d put in a blue duffle that never got delivered to the bag drop at La Villaines. I was deeply, deeply touched by their efforts to help me. By the time the baker handed over the ham and cheese baguette sandwich she’d made for me, I had tears in my eyes. There I was, pretty bad off and facing a difficult ride to the finish, but somehow I was feeling an incredible joy. It was as though the people who helped me were lit up by some special light that gave extraordinary life to their simple acts of kindness. I felt like I was catching a privileged glimpse of something, some rarely seen reality that had briefly opened up, because of, not in spite of my pain. But I had to move on and leave it to others to ponder the connection between suffering and gladness.

Ah... the magic and madness that is PBP...