I got out of bed this morning very, very reluctantly: it’d been my third late night in a row and I was definitely low on sleep—lower than I attempt to function on at school, much less a cross country bike trip. And the first thought to cross my mind was that this would be our third day of heavy mileage in a row: 113 on Thursday, 93 on Friday, and a potential 100 for today. What in the world was I doing to myself??

Even so, I tried to attack my day with a feigned enthusiasm and forced energy, accomplishing with efficiency the (now more difficult) task of packing all our bags into the truck. When that was done and I still had 100 miles to look forward to, I was somehow able to just shrug it off and think, Oh we’ll get there, eventually; we always do. It’s just that bike-riding thing we do every day, a routine of spinning your pedals that many of us could probably do in our sleep by now.

By lunchtime, however, I wasn’t the only one who was wishing I could bike with my eyes closed. Though thankful beyond belief for Illinois’ flat terrain, it also nearly put some of us to sleep. I mean, you can get excited about only so many cornfields, before you need to occupy yourself with something else like conversation, the alphabet game, or thoughts about your future. (Advice for college students: if you have no idea what you want to do with your life, bike 80 miles a day for 7 weeks. It gives you plenty of time to think!) We created plenty of our own entertainment during breaks today too: chucking poor grasshoppers back and forth, reminiscing about “Bikemovement Bloopers,” getting peanut butter boogers on our nose, and passing around an ear of field corn and daring each other to eat it. I’ve never laughed so much on a day when I thought my brain was too tired to even function.

After our last break, it was suggested that we split into two groups: those who wanted to “pound out” the last 15 miles, and those who’d rather “take it leisurely.” As tired and dragged down as I’d felt for the previous 85 miles, I’d rather push myself to my limits and get to our destination sooner, than spend more time on the bike seat. (People keep asking us how we ever did 211 miles in one day, but the real question is, how did we stay on our bikes for 11 ½ hours?)

So me and a couple others pounded it out for 15 miles, into a surprisingly strong headwind, with all of us drafting in turn for 1-2 miles before falling back to catch our breath and then take our turn again. It’s an extremely energy-efficient system, as well as motivating: none of us would have probably biked that fast if we’d had to do it alone. It also felt really good, at the end of a long, sleepy day, to get our blood moving like that. Finally, I was awake! I hadn’t thought it possible for me to move so quickly on so little sleep, and for the first time on this trip, I felt like I was approaching the intensity of a cross country work-out. (Would anyone understand if I said I enjoyed that?) We pulled into camp around 5:00 after a full 100 miles, and even took a couple extra laps so that the slower speedometers ticked up to 100, too. The second group had gotten a flat only a couple miles away and pulled in a little bit later, and some of our newer members celebrated their first century. It was a good day. (Hopefully followed by a good night!!)

Oh, and speaking of cross country, I’ll take this opportunity to make an important announcement:

You’ll notice in my profile that cross country—the sport where crazy people run a lot—is pretty important to me, and since training at EMU starts one week before Bikemovement ends, I was planning to leave the group on August 19^th as we passed through my hometown of Columbiana, OH. However, I realized about one week ago that my priorities have shifted a little bit: that, even though running definitely still beats biking hands-down, and even though it will be hard for me to miss those first days with the team, it would have been even harder to miss these last days with this team. In case you haven’t noticed, Bikemovement is pretty awesome, and I want to see it all the way to the end.

So… here I come, New Jersey!

Posted by Kendra Nissley

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 12th, 2006 at 3:16 pm and is filed under Trip06. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.