Biking to Boston Albany

I got up on Friday morning at ten minutes past five. I was in shape, my bike had some known problems, but had ridden well on the long training rides. My baggage was pared down as light as I could make it. The weather was supposed to have scattered showers and overnight rain. I could deal with that.

I left at 5:50. By 7:00, the showers had found me. They stuck with me all the way to Syracuse. That's an hour and a half by car; five by bike. Then the wind picked up. But instead of the prevailing westerlies I expected, it was an unpleasant headwind. I stopped at an auto body shop to re-oil my bike as the now-sweltering sun had dried it up (after the rain had washed out all my oil earlier). I limped into Oneida and refueled with a quart of ice cream and my third banana of the day.

Then I made for Utica, which I struck before sunset. Going east from Utica, I was peddling to the chant of "Herkimer, Fort Plain, Canajoharie, Fultonville; Herkimer, Fort Plain, Canajoharie, Fultonville...", which were the main towns I had to cross to reach my destination: a hot meal and shower and a warm bed. I was equipped to bivouac outside, but the drizzle returned, and that option was very unattractive.

At this point I was riding quite well. There were plenty of hills getting to Fort Plain, but more than that was the miles. There were a lot of them. Whereas I had pre-calculated the lenght of the day's ride at 175 miles, in fact it was 205. I think the rain was a big part of my ability to ride all that way. As unpleasant as it is to have dirty water dripping into your eyes and mouth and to spend an entire day in soggy sneakers, it conserves sweat, and doesn't exhaust you the way the hot sun does. My toughest hours were the midday, when it was clear and humid.

Not that the night riding was easy. Dense fog rolled in as the last sunshine disappeared, so my last two hours were in pitch darkness, with only the occasional house or headlight to show me the road more than a few yards ahead of me. I got to the point where I welcomed even being blinded by an oncoming headlights, just for the company.

I reached my hosts in Fultonville at 11:00pm. I had ridden 205 miles in 14 hours and 3 minutes, plus three hours of breaks (which isn't as much as it sounds like). That means that I was riding at about 15 mph, which is my standard of excellence, the entire day.

I had lasagna, a long shower, and fell asleep before my head hit the pillow.

The next day was tough. I couldn't get up and leave early, because I'd gotten to bed at midnight. But I limited myself to eight hours' sleep, and tried to make what I could of the morning. But the first days' rain meant a lot of work in the morning: lubing the bike, reassembling my drying things, etc. I got off before 10:00, but it was already warm.

I rode well for the first two hours, considering how sore I was, getting down into Schenectady. But then through a combination of poorly laid-out bike routes, heat, and bike troubles, I slowed way down, stopping constantly. My bike started making funny noises, and I had to mess with it and finally stopped the racket by hand-tightening the axle. That's not something you're supposed to have to adjust.

There were also phone calls to make and receive. My mother was going to come and drop off my dad towards the end of the day. He would finish the day with me, and then we'd ride home across Massachusetts on Sunday. I hoped to be at the peak of the Berkshires by the time he was supposed to meet me, at about 6:30pm. This whole arrangement sapped my mental energy: if Mom was meeting us and driving home, why not just get in the car??

When a spoke snapped on the arduous climb out of the Hudson valley at Troy, I gave up. I couldn't ride much further without visiting a bike shop, and the tough push uphill was bringing out more uncomfortable-sounding noises from my rear axle and bottom bracket. So I gave up, called the AP's, and meandered down the river to Albany, where they picked me up a few hours later.

The moral of the story is: long bike trips are only fun at a leisurely pace. You see more by driving on I-90 than by biking NYS Bike Route 5. The only worthwhile sights were Cohoes Falls and the old industrial buildings of Cohoes, which had a 19th-century charm. Everything else was single-wide trailers and pickup trucks, with the occasional burned-down barn. I've had fantastic bike trips before: across Vermont to Montreal, across New Hampshire's White Mountains, through the Netherlands. But none of these involved racing against time for seventeen hours in a drizzle. So if I attempt the trip again, it'll be with company, and we'll budget four or five days instead of three.