I have begun so many stories over the last few weeks and some are mostly finished, but I have been very busy and still want to work on those stories.
This past Saturday, I rode my bicycle a hundred miles in a hundred plus degree heat in Wichita Falls, Texas. An event called Hotter’N Hell Hundred. I need to figure out the right number, but I think I have done it eight to ten times now. I will break this story into some chapters and start at the beginning.
Unhappy with my weight and health, in two-thousand, I bought a Trek 4300 mountain bike for three-hundred and fifty dollars. That was a big purchase. I had never spent that kind of money on a bike. Even though I was aware it was a cheap bike in the grand scheme of “nice bikes” and by “nice bikes”, I mean a bike from a bike store and not from the sporting goods section of a department store.
At the time I bought the bike, I weighed two-hundred and sixty pounds. The most I had ever weighed. I was very depressed about it. The problem with my relationship with food is that I eat to celebrate and I eat to commiserate. Even though I am very aware of this and have worked hard to use healthy food for the highs and lows, I do not know if I will ever fully overcome that. Sometimes I have to eat an entire pizza and be down on myself and sometimes, sometimes turns into months or years and sometimes those months or years only felt like a week or two.
I have always been on a never-ending yo-yo with my weight and diet. Maybe I inherited this struggled from my mother. Her and I talked about this struggle quite a bit in my adulthood. Here is my sister and I running with my mom as she nears the finish line of a half marathon.
My mother used running as her healthy addiction and I use biking.
The trap I have fallen into time and time again is I am always operating in an extreme. I am extremely exercising or I am extremely doing the opposite of that.
I lived in Dallas, Texas at the time. I lived near a bike path that started at 635 and Hillcrest. It went seven miles to white rock lake and joined up with a ten mile loop that went around the man-made lake and back, making it twenty-four miles total. It took me a while, but I had worked up to riding this entire trail. I could not believe I was riding a bike twenty-four miles. That was so far!
Since I was riding so much, I did not work hard on changing my eating habits, but I was losing weight as long as I was riding most days of the week. I could justify eating this or that, because I was also going to ride it off. I also did not understand what it meant to eat healthy.
I remember hanging out with my aunt in Colorado around this time, someone who actually does eat healthy. I vividly remember bragging to her that I had been eating healthy. She asked me what a typical meal was. I told her I would microwave instant brown rice, and mix it with a can of cream of mushroom soup. It was hard for her to keep a straight face, but she just said, well that is not very healthy.
My childhood best friend, Charles had moved to Dallas after living in Los Angeles for a while. We started hanging out again. I told him I had been riding. He had a bike and wanted to ride together. He had a Trek road bike. It was one of the Lance Armstrong USPS models. It was fancy and he was a much better rider than I was. He told me we should start doing some bike rallies together. I did not know what those were. He said, a lot of cities and towns have these rallies with routes ranging from ten miles, up to sixty-two miles (100k) and some even have a full hundred miles. You would pay twenty-five dollars or so to do these rallies and they were either raising money for the town or for a charity.
That sounded so intimidating to me. He said he does the sixty-two mile routes, but if I would join him he would do a shorter route with me. He found one that was happening the very next weekend and it was close by in Lewisville, Texas. He said they had a forty-two mile route and that we should do that one. Forty-two miles! No way I can do that. He said, if you can do twenty-four, which you currently are, then you can do forty-two. I thought he was crazy, but he talked me into it.
I showed up with my mountain bike and we rode forty-two miles. He was right! I could ride forty-two miles! It was not even that hard.
He then said, okay, there is another in two weeks. We are going to do the sixty-two mile route. He told me to go get some slick tires to put on my bike and so I did and two weeks later we rode sixty-two miles. This was so unbelievable to me. I had just ridden a bicycle sixty-two miles, three weeks after thinking twenty-four was about as far as I could do. This was completely insane to me.
I was hooked. Over the next few months I dropped down to one-ninety-five as Charles and I went to all the rallies we could find that were less than three hours away. We must have done more than a dozen, sixty-two mile routes between April and July in addition to training most days. He told me it was time for me to do the Hotter’N Hell Hundred mile rally in late August. It was a hundred miles in a hundred degree temperatures. I was up for the challenge as I was just hungry to ride. I did two, eighty mile rides on my own through the Wichita Mountains shortly before the event.
Here are a some pictures from my a disposable camera I took during my first ever eighty-mile ride from Medicine Park, Oklahoma to a few miles past Cooperton, Oklahoma and back.
I did not get a good picture of my odometer, but if you squint just right, you can see it says 80.02 miles. The church photo was near the half way point and I just found it cool looking.
With cages or clip in pedals you could pull more with your legs, Charles tells me. With regular pedals it was more just pushing down. I still had just regular pedals on my bike, not even cages over my feet. He had been trying to get me to buy some clip in pedals for a while, telling me it was a game-changer. I think I held out so long because it seemed less like biking to me to not be using just regular pedals.
I was so enamored with the Hotter‘N Hell Hundred. I would read all the information I could find on it. At sixty miles they have what they call Hells Gate and if you cannot make it to there by a certain time, they would close the gate and you would not be able to do the hundred miles. I pictured an actual stone archway over the road with lit torches, stone gargoyles perched over a big iron gate that they would shut and lock if they deemed you not worthy.
The couple of days before the Hotter’N Hell, I upgraded to clip in pedals. That turned out to be a huge mistake. Now I would be altering the way I pedal a couple of days before the longest ride I had ever done. Even though I did not knowingly think I was altering anything, but when you are clipped in to your pedals you are just naturally going to pull up with one foot while pushing down with the other.
I had also not really committed to biking clothes as this time. I was still just wearing cotton t-shirts and mountain biking shorts, which were just cargo shorts with padding in them. I made my first purchased of a breathable shirt right before the hundred mile ride. I did not buy a biking jersey, but a t-shirt for joggers that was more breathable than cotton. I was not ready to commit to skin tight biking clothes just yet.
My mother lived an hour away from where the ride started and my sister lived about two-hours away. I asked them to come out to the finish line to see me cross. I think I was even cocky and told them what time I would finish, probably saying something like, between two and three pm. I knew how long it was taking me to do eighty miles and I figured it would take an extra hour and a half at most.
Usually at least a couple of thousand people ride the hundred mile route. Charles and I sat at the starting line, about a thousand people back.
They have a cannon that goes off to start the ride and Wichita Falls is an Air Force town, so they have jets fly over head right as they start the race. The timing is incredible. They play the star spangled banner over the speakers and at the end of the song, jets come roaring above you from behind at 7:04 and they zoom over the crowd as it hits 7:05 and the cannon goes off.
It seemed like it took twenty minutes before we were actually riding from when the cannon went off, but we were off. I had told Charles to ride at his own pace and not to worry about me. He hung with me for a little while, but eventually he needed to go at his own pace, so he took off.
Everything was going smoothly. People would come up beside me and tell me they were surprised how fast I could go on a mountain bike. Then they would ask which route I am doing and I would say, the hundred mile route. They would tell me that I was crazy to attempt it on a mountain bike. I would tell them it was no problem at all.
I made it to hells gate well before it closed to find it very disappointing. There was no gate! No fire and gargoyles! Just an inflated arch off to the side of the road, which was a service road of interstate forty-four in Burkburnett, Texas. There was nothing cool about any of it, other than I had made it sixty miles.
I was happy with my speed up to that point. It was not even noon. I was making great time and I started to get worried that I might get over the finish line before I said I would and my mom and sister would miss it. I thought to myself, I should have told them one thirty.
At mile seventy my hamstrings that were not used to getting much work, locked up entirely and I fell over because my legs would not move. This was the first time I had ever cramped up from riding. I did not even know this was a thing that could happen. I was dumbfounded.
I sat there on the ground in pain for a while trying to get my cramps worked out with the added embarrassment of lots of people asking if I was okay as they passed by. I would assure them I was fine. I could not stop. I had to finish. I finally managed to stand and work on stretching out my hamstrings enough to be able to get back on the bike. I got a couple of miles before it happened again and again I fell over and again I had to assure people I was fine and again I managed to stretch out my cramps enough to get back on the bike. I discovered that if I rode pretty slow, I could keep the cramps at bay. It was getting hotter and windier. I was going slower and slower. I had no way to tell my mom and sister that it was now looking more like five thirty in the afternoon until I would get to the finish line. I desperately wanted to go faster, but I just could not.
They sat out there, worried and baking in the sun for several hours looking at every rider approaching to see if it was me. They probably looked at a thousand people crossing the finish line.
At mile ninety-nine you have to ride up a long overpass. It took everything I had to make it up that hill. Walking my bike up that hill would not have counted. And as I rode down the other side I knew I had to be close to the end. I started riding down an empty city street, turning down another and turning down another and then, there it was. I could see the finish line. I could see all the people waiting and cheering. Finally, here I was at the finish line, probably one of the last to cross. My mom, sister and step dad came out to greet me and in my excitement, I forgot I was clipped into my pedals and forgot to unclip when I came to a stop, so I just fell over after crossing the finish line. I was somewhat fine, but it looked very dramatic and everyone was rightly concerned. I assured them I was fine and that I was not dying, but I could tell they were not fully buying that.
I had done it! I had ridden a hundred miles, on a mountain bike no less. Charles was waiting there too and he looked like he had not ridden at all. I think he finished four or five hours earlier than I did.
I honestly cannot remember all the time lines, but it was around this time my mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. A cancer with no real chance of surviving. It was the height of Lance Armstrongs fame and his cancer survivor story. My mom was deeply inspired by him. She was determined to beat cancer. She too got a bike and we began riding together in the Wichita Mountains outside of my hometown of Lawton, Oklahoma.
Photos by Mom.
Very inspiring. I would have loved to have been at the finish line to hand you a padron. Still baffling that it’s 100 miles on a bike, and a mountain bike on the first one no less. I’ve topped out at 26 on my
Country roads. You are a bad ass.
Inspired!