screech owl populaire
You pentathletes can keep your spears and Frisbees. I want a sport that combines the cameraderie of team outings, the “me time” of a solo race against the clock, the mystery of a scavenger hunt, free snacks, and of course the joyous hum of two wheels on the pavement.
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Wish granted. Meet randonneuring, my new distance addiction.
In my favorite bike shop, there’s an old-timey photo of a Tour de France from long ago (kind of like this one, but less posed). Two riders are perched on the doorstep of a pub, beers in hand and extra tires draped bandolero-style across their shoulders. The feel is so relaxed—those guys had their priorities right.
Randonneuring is a sport that makes me feel the same way that looking at that photo makes me feel. With good reason, too. As a sport, randonneuring is decades older than the Tour de France. The first Tour was basically a kind of “randonneuring envy” on the part of a newspaper editor.
The idea behind randonneuring is simple: you go for a distance ride in the countryside (the French word randonnée means something akin to “ramble”). The distance ranges from the 100-km populaire, through the 200/300/400/600/1000-km brevet, to the granddaddy 1200-km Paris/Brest/Paris pain-a-thon. You have a limited amount of time to reach each checkpoint—these are spaced every 20 miles or so. A checkpoint could be a ride volunteer, it could be a trivia question written on a card you carry with you, it could be a sticker you pick up from a specific location, or it could simply be the John Hancock of a passerby you’re supposed to cajole into signing your card.
It’s like they invented a sport just for me!
So a few weeks ago, I fulfilled my New Year’s Resolution by riding my first ever randonnée: the 100-km nighttime Screech Owl Populaire through Oregon’s beautiful and mercifully flat Willamette Valley.
First, I had to outfit Shiki for the trip. Randonneuring requires fenders, so I installed Lynne-with-an-E’s old ones. We also have to have permanent taillights, so the commuting blinkie attached to my messenger bag would have the night off in favor of a real light. Two more gadgets rounded out the gear upgrade: an odometer and a map clip, so I could (in theory) know where I was going. Incidentally, why do bike snobs call odometers “ride computers?” It ain’t a computer until I can run Ruby on it, folks!
David, the ride organizer, set us up with yummy sugar cookies with quite photorealistic screech owls printed on them. (Hope that was edible ink; urp!) I slipped on my $4 knobby work gloves and noticed that David had a pair just like ‘em, except with the fingers cut off. Great minds….
The first few miles were relatively uneventful. My hastily-installed rear reflector was the first casualty of the evening—it shook to pieces from the road vibration. Item one to add to the next ride’s packing list.
As the sky dimmed, my five fellow riders stepped up their luminescent assault on the darkness. My commuting rig consisting of a bright white headlight and taillight had nothing on these pedal-powered halogen-like rigs. At several points in the evening, I nearly yelled out, “Car back!” before realizing that those weren’t automobile headlights; they were Dave and Rick’s blinding monstrosities. With all our illumination and reflective gear, we looked something like characters from Tron.
It was around this point that I began to wish I’d taken my wife up on the offer of her helmet-mounted light. It would have allowed me to see my odometer and route map while I rode. Instead, I had to go from memory as best I could, asking my fellow riders, “Left here?” I got the gentlest chiding I’ve ever been given: I was politely reminded not to trust my fellow cyclists’ directions (“After all, we might be wrong.”).
Around a third of the way through the ride, I was about to learn that lesson the easy way. Another rider and I were out in front, and I yanked my headlight off the handlebars so I could use it as a flashlight and read my map. I kept myself and the other rider on the course through a difficult right turn, in full view and earshot of the one who told me to rely on myself. Lesson learned, dude, and there was proof!
In Mt. Angel, we dismounted and had our ride cards signed. On our way out of town, a fellow rider blew a tire on a vicious gravelly pothole. A couple of us stopped to help fix it. Once we were back on the road, we discovered an error in the route map, and the only people who knew the correct route were long gone. Thank heaven for cell phones. We found the missing street near a picturesque abbey (man, would I have loved some monastic rest right about then), and caught up with the others at the Gallon House Bridge, a Prohibition-era liquor drop and Oregon’s oldest/northernmost covered wooden bridge.
The back stretch of any ride is always the toughest part for me. On this particular occasion, I began to discover that the thing I thought might be a cold—was a cold. Things that seldom hurt in the saddle, like back and shoulders and temples, began complaining. Buddha said something once about breathing through pain, I think. Who’d a’ thunk it worked on bicycles, too? As I let myself breathe, and let some degree of calm settle into my mind, the monotony of the pain became easier to deal with. It didn’t go away, exactly. It just stopped being a bother. “Hmm, that’s an interesting sensation in my elbows. Must be important, because there certainly seems to be a hell of a lot of it.”
Around kilometer 85, David warned us of a mean, unchained dog. So we sprinted like mad past the offending house. Poochie must’ve been inside that night, and I grumbled a little at the adrenaline wasted. Better than the alternative, I guess.
As we neared the outskirts of St. Paul, our starting and finishing point, fatigue was tapping on my shoulder. It was 1:00 in the morning, I was low on water (though not out), and I was cranky from my snotty nose. I didn’t even bother looking for potholes any more. I just rode over them and cursed the road builders under my breath.
After a few short minutes, I pulled into the parking lot, walked over to put my hand symbolically on David’s vehicle, recorded the time, and finished my water. With the sudden drop in activity level, the perceived temperature instantly went from “comfortable” to “freezing,” so I wrapped myself up in the towels I had brought along in my truck. I topped off my water bottle from a borrowed gallon jug, sipped and rested for a few minutes, and said my goodbyes.
And now I’m officially a semi-randonneur. Can’t wait to do a real brevet.