Day 1 - What Have I Done?

Is the question I repeated to myself for the last 2 miles of our 45 mile ride today. Before I get to explaining why this is the title of my first post, let me explain why the original title was going to be "Many Setbacks, but We Were Prepared For All." Well, turns out we were prepared for most. Lesson number 1 on our trip (learned the hard way): never choose a title for your blog post too early in the day. Choosing with a mere 2 miles left on a ride is, in fact, too early in the day.

We departed from Brooklyn at approximately 10:30 am.

Everything was going well until about 45 minutes into the ride when a traffic officer signaled for Owen to stop short as he was about to make a turn. He couldn't properly unclip his bike shoes from the pedals when he stopped and ended up falling into a sewer. Seriously, his entire left leg was in the sewer. A bunch of kind people immediately ran over to help him up. He was lucky to walk away with just a slight bruise to the hand.

The next crazy thing that happened is Tom caught a flat. Well, not so crazy given this is a bike trip, but crazy given the fact that Tom got brand new tires and tubes installed on his bicycle literally yesterday. Meaning they failed on day one of their use. Not sure what the warranty policies look like over at the bike shop, but probably worth looking into. On top of that, the bike shop that sold him spare tubes also sold him a type of tube that isn't compatible with his bike's rim, even after telling him it was. So he had no spare tubes. Oh well, stuff happens. But we were prepared for that one. We were able to patch up the faulty tube and make it last long enough to make it the next bike shop ten miles away in Piermont, NY.

There, I randomly met one of my former coworkers from the Fordham Football Office which was a pleasant surprise. He gave us some tips on locations to visit in some of the cities we'll be passing through. Just as everyone else we met throughout the day asked where we were headed and offered any advice they could, he was very amicable and willing to help with anything we needed. A pleasant surprise and welcome change from the average encounter with the usually agitated New Jerseyan on the busy roads down there.

The ride was tough and physically demanding for sure, but we were keeping a good pace and making good progress. All in all, after Owen's mishap and Tom's flat, everything went smoothly… Until mile 42. Scratch that, mile 39. To give some perspective of where I was physically, I initially started cramping around mile 20. Luckily, miles 20 to around 35 weren't bad, which gave my body a chance to recoup a bit. But towards the end, as the incline steepened, I began feeling a type of cramping pain in my legs I can honestly say I've never felt before. I couldn't stop or straighten my leg out without a severe cramp pain occurring so I made sure to just keep pedaling. The problem is that in the last 5 miles of the ride, we were poised to gain almost 954 ft in elevation. The last 2 miles, 550 ft. Lesson number 2: check elevations of each route and ask yourself if it's worth it before robbing yourself of the opportunity to make such decisions. After biking 10-15 miles the previous hour or so, it took us over an hour to finish those last 2 miles. But we did it, mostly walking and pushing our bikes beside us. And as Tom so eloquently put it, "That is a hill... I will never forget." Another great quote from him was, "Who the hell decided to put a camp ground at the top of a 1000 foot hill?"

In short, that was a hill we were not prepared for. On the way up, I must've repeated the title of this blog post to myself about 200 times. We thought we got through the worst of our day once we made it out of the most densely populated area of our entire trip – Manhattan. Well, we were wrong, and I'm sure we'll be wrong many times more along this trip. But I guess that's the beauty of it, right? Well, if you ask any of us, that couldn't be any more false as that hill was the polar opposite of beautiful. But this, this is beautiful:

We set up camp with what little energy we had left at a nice campsite at the top of the hill. Each of us ordered a large pie for ourselves, stuffed our faces, and I’m now falling asleep as I type this.

So goodnight and good riddance to Day 1. I don't have the energy to wonder what Day 2 has in store for us. Time will tell.