Team Mango

Seattle to Portland - One Day - July 9, 2005

I ride with a regular group of folks almost every Saturday morning. We meet at a parking lot in the Eastgate area and ride anywhere from 35 miles in the winter to 80 miles in the summer. One of the usuals in that group, Maureen “Mo” Manley, organized a team to ride STP in one day. Mo is a bike racer sponsored by Copaxone, the drug she takes for Multiple Sclerosis. Most people do the STP in two days with 100 miles each day, but Team Copaxone consisted of 8 masochists who chose to do all 204 miles in one day.

We were to meet at the starting point at the University of Washington at 4:30 am for a 4:45 departure. So I left my office in Fremont (my bike shop is behind my desk at work) at 4:20. O-dark-early!

We were all able to find each other pretty quickly among the early birds from the 8000 riders who do the ride. Although one erstwhile member of the team, Dustin, wasn’t anywhere to be found. Eventually Skip got him on the phone and Dustin said he planned to “meet us for lunch.” The thought of even trying to meet someone else during a 12-hour+ event seemed pretty funny to us.

In order to keep the streets near the start at least somewhat available for cars, the organizers release a batch of riders every 10 minutes. So we had to wait about 8 minutes at the starting line and finally were released at 5:10 am.

This was my first time riding STP. Most others on the team had done it several times before. I had heard many stories over the years about riders doing unexpectedly dumb things and crashing for no apparent reason. Sure enough, less than a mile from the start we saw our first crash - apparently for no reason.

The first rest stop is at about mile 25. Up to that point, we mainly tried to avoid colliding with riders changing lines without warning. Once we got into the Kent valley south of Seattle, we started kicking up the pace. We finally got a good rhythm going down the West Valley Highway.

The only big hill of the ride comes at mile 43, climbing up from Puyallup to Spanaway. We got up the hill pretty much together and rode into the second food stop at about 50 miles at 8:00 am.

We made a brief restroom stop somewhere around mile 70. At this point I was starting to bonk (run out of energy). There was a “mini-stop” somewhere around mile 80. I ate a bunch there and left that stop before the group to see if my strength would come back before they caught up with me. But when they caught me, they were steaming along and passed me on an uphill - there was no way I was going to get on the end of their train. I struggled to catch up, but I just dangled 150 yards behind them for a couple of miles before giving up and tagging onto a slightly slower group for the last couple of miles into Centralia at 100 miles. I got there 4 minutes behind the team. My ride time for the first century was 5:11 - by far my fastest century ever.

Believe it or not, we in fact did meet Dustin “for lunch” at the Centralia stop.

I ate even more in Centralia (PB & J sandwich, bagel, yogurt, cookies, some baked potato and I don’t remember what else) and drank a lot of fluid. By the time we got back on the road I was feeling a lot better and starting to feel confident I could continue to stay with the team.

By the time we got to the food stop at about mile 126, everybody was starting to feel tired. We were a very fast team on the road with a pretty efficient paceline, but we paid for it with longer breaks. At one point after Centralia, Gentry fell off our line but got in behind us. He reported later that while our 6-person paceline was rotating at the front, we had about 50 riders tagged onto our tail for about 20 miles. Throughout the day, we would pass lots of riders multiple times - they’d catch us at the next rest stop but leave before us, so we’d pass them again only for them to catch us at the next rest stop, etc.

For some reason mile 150 is kind of a psychological milestone. I guess you figure if you can make it that far, you can make it another 50 to the end. So the next food stop at mile 144 was close enough. It’s also about 6 miles before the bridge over the Columbia River at Longview over which we’d pass from Washington to Oregon.

At least 4 or 5 of the team members are racers or recent former racers (having children has put a crimp in their ability to train for racing). So they are used to long hard efforts. Being a recreational cyclist, when I get in too much pain I sit up and relax for a few minutes. But in the 28 mile section between the mile 144 food stop and the mile 172 stop we didn’t relax once - just 90 minutes of heads-down driving. With about 12 miles left in that section, I realized what I was in for and just surrendered to the agony and hung on. I couldn’t possibly sit up - I would have been dropped instantly.

It took us a long time to get back on our bikes at the mile 174 food stop. Skip had bonked pretty badly and just wanted to lay prone on the grass. On the bright side, Darby, caught up with us and had recovered. She had bonked way back at mile 80 and had been riding solo since Centralia, but had been catching us at every food stop. At mile 174, she got there not long behind us and felt good enough to depart with the team.

We finally did get back on our bikes and headed out for the final push to Portland. Thankfully, at mile 184 Skip had a tire problem. We got a good break while Gentry fixed it. I ate a Gu and drank some fluids and was feeling pretty good now. The last 20 miles were actually enjoyable. At some point, a group of three strong riders passed us and we got on their tail. For about a half hour, we didn’t have to rotate and just rode their slipstream for 10 miles.

As we entered Portland, we were even strong up the hills, getting out of the saddle and climbing as a team. At almost 7:00 pm exactly we crossed the finish line through a gauntlet of cheering “fans”. 13 hours and 50 minutes of clock time and 10:15 of riding time. 201 miles on our bike computers at an average speed of 19.8 mph!

With about 2 miles left, Steve Wyand suggested picking up the pace to try to get our average up to 20 mph. Skip and I both screamed, “No!” I don’t think we could have changed it that much in 2 miles anyway, but nice try, Steve.

We debated taking showers at the finish line, but decided eventually to just head for our hotel in Vancouver and shower there. Then we headed out to a celebratory dinner at a Mexican restaurant before finally getting to bed at 10:30.

I couldn’t have made it (especially not that fast) without the stronger riders on our team, but I’m still proud to have completed my first double century.

If you’re into data, click on the thumbnail for a graph of heart rate, speed, temperature, mileage, elevation and “mile pace” data from Steve Wyand’s computer.

Posted by jmethot at July 12, 2005 7:38 AM