I rode a hundred mile bike ride for the first time in two-thousand and two in Wichita Falls, Texas. I rode it on a cheap mountain bike, it was over a hundred degrees that day, hence the title Hotter ‘N Hell. I then did that ride a few more years in a row. This is the story about the second time.
In the early two-thousands I was real unhappy with my health and weight. I remembered loving bike riding as a kid and thought, maybe I would get back into it.
Back home, in my mothers rusted and dilapidated metal shed, with no doors, sat my BMX bike from my childhood. I loved this bike and did a lot of upgrades to it over the years.
I decided I would pick it up when I got back home and get back into riding it. I got pretty excited about the idea of having my BMX bike again. I was in my early thirties and was not sure I could do any sweet jumps, but I could at least do some sweet wheelies.
The brand of the bike was Mongoose. That was a medium big brand in the early eighties and it was the bike that replaced the infamous Huffy Pro Thunder (I have a song called 1980 Huffy Pro Thunder) You can listen to it here
My parents divorced when I was six years old. My dad made good money, but my mother did not. I lived with my mother and she could not afford to get me a new bike. I had to go a while without a bike when I was eleven and twelve. Then one day I saw an ad in the Thrifty Nickel for a black Mongoose bike, with Gold Honey Comb rims for one hundred and fifty dollars.
I asked my mom for the money and she quickly said, you are going to have to ask your father.
It is hard to convey how scary it was to ask my father for something. He did not want to get you anything, but if he did, you were damn sure going to work it off. I was fine with working it off, but he always made it a thing he held over my head and was just a dick about it.
My dad ran a gas station. When my sister turned driving age, he did not help her buy a car, so she ended up with a hand me down from my grandparents. My dad told her to get gas at his station when she needed gas. She did and then got a bill in the mail for the money she owned for gas, signed Bob.
I summoned the courage and asked my father if he would buy me the bike and I would work it off by working at his gas station. I would pump gas for customers, check the oil and fluids, clean the auto shop, the bathroom (I was already doing these things for free).
He said, one hundred and fifty dollars!? You know how long that would take you to work off? Yes sir, I do.
He drove me to the outskirts of town to meet with the father and kid who owned the bike. I am fairly certain I could drive you to that exact house to this day.
The kid had upgraded to a newer, nicer bike and was letting this one go. I gave it a quick look over and told my dad that I wanted it. He handed the other dad one hundred and fifty dollars in cash. My dad bitched about it the entire way back to my house, but I did not care. I had a new bike. I was so excited.
I was really pushing it, when a month later I asked him for one hundred dollars, so I could replace the heavy honey comb rims with brand new Z rims. Z rims were graphite and much lighter.
I still cannot believe it, but he gave me a hundred dollar bill. I think he was impressed that I had the nerve to ask for the money. I immediately went to Mud, Sweat and Gears and bought Z rims.
Pictured below: Me on my Mongoose with Z rims
Over the years I had that bike, I made many upgrades on my own. I bought some black and gold checkerboard pads, got new Shimano pedals, grips, seat, headset, handle bars. I was in for around five hundred on this bike, which was a lot for a kid in nineteen eighty-three.
After high school, I had moved from my hometown of Lawton, Oklahoma to Dallas, Texas. It was a three hour drive between the two and I went home at least every other weekend, because I had a daughter back in my hometown.
I was excited to pick up my bike next time I went back home. I was ready to get back to exploring Dallas on my BMX bike. The first thing I did when I got home was go out to the shed to get it and see how bad of a shape it was in. It was not out there. I figured my mom put it in my bedroom, which was now a storage and computer room. I checked in there and could not find it amongst the chaos. I then figured maybe she moved it to my grandparents garage. I asked her about it and she said, “Oh, I gave that away”. I was upset. “You gave it away?! You realize how expensive that bike is?” She said, “That makes sense then, that it got stolen immediately”. She told me she gave it to a kid in the neighborhood that did not have a bike and that it was stolen the same day she gave it to him.
That was a completely valid decision on her part, but I said something along the lines of, I wish you had told me. I would have told you to buy him a lock as well.
I was really bummed that my childhood bike was gone forever.
When I got back to Dallas, I decided to go to a bike store and look at new bikes. I did not spend much time deciding what to buy. My budget was three-hundred dollars and I walked in and bought the lowest priced Trek mountain bike they had. It was chrome with red lettering. I thought that was pretty damn fancy. I swore that bike would be the thing that got me in shape.
By my apartment was a bike trail that was twenty-four miles long. I had worked my way to being able to ride the whole twenty-four miles. I think at the time I had weighed about two-fifty when I started riding and I was coming down in weight pretty quickly as I have an addictive personality and went from fast food junkie to eating better and biking seven days a week. It is always my downfall. I suck at balance.
The same year I got the bike, I rode that bike one hundred miles in the Hotter ‘N Hell 100 in late August. I did not finish at the speed I thought I would. I think I finished at less than twelve miles per hour as my average speed.
The ride began at seven o’five in the morning. I expected to be done by two in the afternoon, but was one of the last to cross the finish line at around five in the evening. I was overly cocky and told my family to greet me at the finish line around one-thirty, but I think they got there even earlier. My mother, step dad, sister and daughter waited for a good four to five hours in the heat with no way to tell when I was coming in, so they just had to watch every rider coming down the street. I limped across the finish line and apologized that I did not finish in the time I told them I would. I did not let that put a damper on my celebration. Five months earlier, I was riding twenty-four miles, thinking that was as far as I would ever be able to ride. I was proud I had just done a hundred mile ride on a heavy mountain bike, not fit for long distance.
I wasted no time rebounding from the slow time and signed up to do an eighty mile ride in the Arbuckle Wilderness of Oklahoma in late October. My friend Charles and I had been riding all these long distance, organized fund raiser rides together, but he could not make it to this one. I knew this ride was going to be very hilly and therefore at least as tough as the hundred miles I had just ridden a couple of months earlier.
It was a stark contrast in the way of weather. The hundred miles I had ridden was in August, in over a hundred degree temperatures and when the eighty mile ride rolled around in late October, it was cold and rainy.
I reveled in the extra challenge of the weather conditions. It was about a two and a half hour drive from my house. I got up at three-thirty in the morning, to make sure I would be there in time. When I arrived, it seemed most people had backed out. The rain was coming down and it was in the low fifties. It was a very thin crowd of maybe a seventy-five riders and even some of them decided to quit before it even started.
I was mostly used to training alone in the middle of nowhere, I had a very large bag on the back of my mountain bike. I had just gotten used to having it there and I kept a lot of things in it, tubes, compressed air, patches, tools, snacks, first aid. I had just not really ever thought about taking it off in times when I would not really need most of those things. These organized rides usually have rest stops every ten miles that provide food, drinks, first aid, bike repair. Plus they have what they call SAG wagons which are vans or trucks that will come pick you up if you cannot complete the ride of if you are having issues with your bike and often those vehicles have the things to fix your bike should you want to keep going.
I was just a few miles into this ride and going up the first of many steep hills, when a group of guys on expensive roads bikes began to pass me. As one of the guys passed by, he said, What do you have, a six pack in that bag? They all laughed. He then said something along the lines of, you’re not trying to ride the whole eighty miles on that bike? I said, yep. I brushed it off for a minute. Then I got a little pissed about it and vowed to pass him up and finish before he did. I decided I would ride the eighty miles straight through. No rest stops. This would be my first attempt at doing a long distance ride without stopping to rest and refuel.
I rode like a madmen. The weather was not even a thought. One benefit of a mountain bike is the gearing is geared for hills. I was climbing them with no trouble. I got to the finish line and was sure I had passed that guy while he was sitting at a rest stop. I packed my bike up and went and stood next to the finish line and waited. I wanted to rub it in. I waited and waited. He was not coming. I walked to my car and looked back one last time and there he was, limping across the finish line. There was no one at the finish line. No one waiting on a family member, no one just hanging out. It was one of those rides where the finish line is very anti-climatic. You finished to an empty parking lot with a handful of cars in it. He quickly just made his way to his car. I walked over to him and said, “I tried to save you a beer, but I drank them all waiting for you”. He was exhausted and it took him a few seconds to even know who I was or what I was talking about. I explained that I was the guy on the mountain bike, but the joke landed flat and there was not really anything else to say, so I just walked back to my car and left.
I had told myself if I finished the year strong, that I had earned the right to treat myself to a nice road bike, the following year. I finished the year very strong, riding hundreds of miles a week, even in the bitter cold December. At the first of the following year, I started researching road bikes.
I spent months researching and testing bikes, so much so that I was still riding my mountain bike for much of the following year.
I tried every brand available in the stores in the Dallas area. Carbon fiber was the cool material at the time, so initially I was not interested in any other frame material. Then I rode an aluminum frame Cannondale. When I test rode it, I knew it was the bike I wanted. The frame was stiff and fast, but still light and smooth. It still took me a few more weeks, maybe even months to save up and pull the trigger. I cannot recall the price, but somewhere between twenty-five hundred and thirty-five hundred. I had resigned to telling myself I needed to buy it before August.
It is the coolest looking bike I have ever owned. I loved that bike. I could get off work and ride eighty miles easily before dark. I could get my sprints up to forty miles an hour on a strong day.
Where I did most of my riding those days was around White Rock lake in Dallas. It was ten miles around the lake, so I would just do as many laps as I felt like doing or had time to get in before dark.
August rolled around, I weighed around one eighty-five. The lowest my weight had been in years. I was more than ready to tackle the Hotter ‘N Hell. Charles was too. We had both been training all year and had done many long rides together.
Again, I asked my family to come out and told them this time I was sure I would finish before noon.
When that day rolled around, Charles and I got to the starting line about an hour ahead of the start time, so we could be at the front of the pack. When the cannon went off to start the ride, we wasted no time going full throttle. We stayed together the entire ride, formed fast packs with other riders and did our share of rotating out in the front of packs and we finished around eleven thirty in the morning with an average speed of 22.1 miles per hour. Not only was it easy, we finished with plenty of energy. We packed up, grabbed lunch and headed back to Dallas. I remember hanging out in Dallas that afternoon and thinking, it is crazy that I drove two hours to Wichita Falls today, rode my bike a hundred miles and drove the two hours back and it is only mid-afternoon.
If I remember correctly, I got up the next morning and did a sixty to eighty mile ride.
That is the fastest I have ever done that ride. I doubt I will ever beat it, but my next fastest time of doing it would be sixteen years later in twenty nineteen at age fifty. I got in one minute after noon at 19.9 miles per hour. In twenty twenty-five, I am shooting to beat my second best time.