ZappoMan.com - Fitness Blog

National Bike Month - One of the Craziest Things I Ever Did!

May 1st, 2007

May is National Bike Month here in the United States, and in Seattle (like many metropolitan areas) our local bicycle public interest group has organized a “Commuter Challenge”. The basic idea of the commuter challenge is to encourage people to use bicycle commuting as a viable replacement for automobile travel, through a contest of various metrics. There are prices for most miles commuted by a team, most by an individual, most by a new commuter, most trips, most new commuters, most teams in an organization, etc, etc, the list goes on. I’ve participated in the event the last two years and found it to be an absolutely wonderful event that encourages healthy habits and ecofriendly transit alternatives, not to mention being a great excuse for me to challenge my colleagues to some macho duel and end up doing something really really crazy as part of it.

Last year for example… my 1,172.80 mile month of cycle commuting was capped off with a 126.5 mile night ride in the pouring rain. What in the world would make someone ride a bike a 126.5miles in the rain, in the middle of the night? Uh… have you read my blog?

So here’s how the story goes…

Some Background: Commuter Challenge 2005

To understand this story you really have to go back to May of 2005. I was in the midst of my first serious year of road cycling… on the way to racking up 5,000 miles, training for my first one-day STP (double century) and I found out about this commuter challenge. So, I organized a bunch of folks from our company to join me as a team of new bicycle commuters. We’re a pretty small company with at the time about 70 employees. I actually convinced 7 people to join the team, 6 of whome (including myself) were “first time commuters”. Getting 10% of the organization to join the effort to “commute by bike as much as possible” was the first feather in my cap, but as the month progressed it was clear we had a chance to possibly win an award.

No, there wasn’t much chance of us getting an award for most miles cycled by a team, since most teams were a full 10 members and some of the teams had names like “Microsofters Who Ride At Least 125 miles per Week”. The teams with the most mile typically came in north of 6,500 miles for the month. But seeing how 5 of our riders qualified as “new commuters” we had a pretty good chance of winning the award for most miles commuted by new commuters. And in fact, with Phil and I throwing in several hundred miles each, we easily won this category with 1530.7 miles of “new commuter” miles with the closest competing team only riding 1383.1 new commuter miles (among 10 new commuters I might add).

2006 - No chance for a repeat - What Now?

So when last years commuter challenge came around, we all wanted to compete again, but we knew we would lack the incentive of riding for an award. After all, none of us would qualify as new commuters, and there was no chance that we’d compete for team honors. But seeing how last year, I contributed 721.9 of our 1530.7 miles, I thought there was a chance that I could possibly compete as an individual cyclist for some individual awards. But I didn’t want to leave the team behind so I came up with a uniquely ZappoMan approach to the problem.

I decided to challenge the rest of the team… my miles against all of theirs. If they as a team could ride more miles then me as an individual, I would lose the challenge and be subject to some form of public humiliation. If however, I could individually cycle more miles than all of them combined, then well, they would have admit that they were indeed not worthy of riding in my pace line, and they’d have to put up with me bragging about the incident for years to come. (hmmm… I wonder who’s going to win?!)

Oh Yeah! It’s On!

Of course, they thought I was crazy, but we all agreed that having some skin in the game would make the commuter challenge more interesting and so the bet was on. We all agreed that if I lost, I’d have to present at the next Board of Directors meeting wearing my cycling clothes. Skin tight lycra shorts and all. Oh yeah! It’s on!

The challenge started out quite easily… in the first week, I rode my bike to work in my normal commute, 24 miles in to work in the morning, and 14 miles home, for an approximately 38 mile round trip. The morning commute was the “long way” around the top of the lake, and a nice way to start the day. The trip home was usually the bike path on the I-90 floating bridge, which although a shorter distance, was much less pleasant, and always seemed to be a little slower pace… but I could get home in about 40 minutes door to door, which kept the wife and kids happy. Sometimes I’d put my bike on the bus and go across the other floating bridge, although you can’t count miles on the bus (obviously) and so that commute was only officially 6 miles, and sometimes took as long as an hour since the bike racks would often be full of other bikes.

At the end of the week, I had already collected 183 miles to the other teams 102.6 miles, and I was confident that there was no way they could beat me. So confident in fact that I started trash talking… a lot… I even added a side bet, that if they could beat me in miles in Week 2 alone, I’d dress up in a princess costume for my Monday commute and wear said princess costume all day long in the office. I quickly realized that this additional challenge was not a good idea.

The problem with Week 1 was that only 3 riders were actually commuting. And as I learned in Week 2… when the team actually rode, they had the ability to pile on miles at a rate of… oh… 8 to 1. And in Week 2, they pack nearly caught up to me. I got a real scare when I realized that the bigger problem with the side bet is that although most of the other team wasn’t likely to cycle as consistently as I was (every day) they could rearrange their schedules to cycle a lot in one week. As they say in baseball, a short series is all about luck. I needed a long series to win with talent and consistency. Lucky for me, although they brought in 183 miles for the week, I was able to take the extra-long way home a couple days (34 miles per trip) and finish week 2 with 240miles.

They Smell Blood

Now my competition smelled blood, and I was feeling confident that my 137 mile lead was a good cushion that would last me for the next couple weeks. The rules allowed them to add up to 10 competitors total to their team, and since they were within striking distance a couple of new team members joined the group including our CEO, and as a result, Week 3 was another eye opener… My competition out-rode me by 100 miles and inching within 37 miles of my total. Luckily, in Week 4 they slacked off again and as I added 203 more miles, they only added 150 miles, leaving me with a lead of almost 90 miles going into the final 3 days of the competition.

Chasing Down the Breakaway

Week 5 was special… Coming in to the week, I was ahead by almost 90 miles. Ray and Phil made the rally cry and organized the peleton to chase down the breakaway. With a huge pull from Phil, and serious contribution from Ray, and a couple really big days from our CEO and another last minute recruit… they rode for 359.2 miles in 3 days.

Now, let’s be clear, these guys were gunning for me. In the last week of the competition, the rules were getting bent more and more, in particular, reporting of miles were traditionally done at the end of each half commute. But in order to make it harder on me to know exactly how far behind me they were, many of the competition team members were not logging their miles at all… until the end of the week. They also began planning and plotting against me in closed door meetings. The culmination of which came on the last day of the month in which the CEO sent me out on a business trip to LA.

So picture the scene: Last day of the challenge, I’m probably in the lead, but it’s unclear by how much (I’m estimating about 100 miles), 5am, I’m on a plane to LA for a meeting with customers. On the way home, I call my executive assistant, who informs me that although she doesn’t know any of the details she knows that “they’ve been meeting all day to try to come up with a plan to beat me”… But she hasn’t seen anyone who obviously rode their bike to work today… she thinks they all plan on “commuting home from work” and “taking a really long not very direct path to get there”… hmmmm…

I figure there isn’t much I can do about it other than going home, having dinner with the family, and then commuting in to the office to fill out my expense report and commuting home and calling it a day. Let the chips fall where they might. After getting home around 5pm, having dinner, and helping tuck in the girls, I give Phil and Ray a call… maybe they’ll be decent enough to tell me how far they rode, so I can at least have a fighting chance.

The Call

(ring… ring…)
Brad - “Hey Phil.”
Phil - “Dude, give up!”
Brad - “C’mon, at least tell me how far you rode, give me a chance.”
Phil - “Seriously, give up, we beat you… I rode 50miles, from the office, around the lake to home… I think Ray rode even further.”
Brad - “Ok, thanks!”

(ring… ring…)
Brad - “Hey Ray.”
Ray - “Dude, give up! We beat you!”
Brad - “I know Phil rode 50, how far did you ride?”
Ray - “Dude, didn’t you just get off a plane from LA? Go to sleep man! You lost!”
Brad - “C’mon, just tell me, give me a chance… how far?”
Ray - “Dude, I rode 60 miles home… you need to go to bed, it’s 8:45pm… you can’t ride 100 miles tonight… that’s crazy!”
Brad - “Thanks man… that’s all I needed to know… did anyone else ride? Who else do I need to call…”
Ray - “Dude, that’s crazy… go to bed man! Besides, I saw Craig in the U-district, and he lives in Bellevue… so he probably rode another 40 miles.”
Brad - “Do you know his number?”

(ring… ring… voicemal)
Brad - “Hey Craig, give me a call… let me know how far you rode… give me a chance.”

The Ride

So I give my wife a kiss good night, and I headed off to work. On top of the fact that I had been awake since 4:30 am that morning, and it was pitch black, and I was looking at riding at least 100 miles on my own tonight, it was pouring rain. And I mean sheets of rain drops the size of golf balls. I had my super bright HID lamp, a second backup lamp, and a third back up back up LED lamp with extra batteries; my rain gear; a backpack with food and extra nuun tablets, some extra clothes, and the will to ride all night long.

My plan was to ride the long long way to work (about 40 miles) and hopefully arrive by 11:30pm… do about 15 minutes of work, and then head out before the stroke of midnight June 1st so that I was beginning the second half of my commute in the month of May. Although very wet and dark, the first part of my ride went as planned and I arrived at the office a little after 11pm. I was wet, cold, tired and hungry… and a little unsure of how far my competition had ridden. Since I hadn’t heard from Craig, I was a little concerned that Ray was right, and that there was no way I could ride enough miles tonight in order to maintain my lead. Even if I “chickened out” I still faced at least a 15 mile ride home in the rain across the I-90 bridge. So I decided that the only course of action was one finally piece of trash talk… which no one would know about until morning… except me of course… and I hoped that this last shred of ego would be enough to push me through the remainder of a long night ahead.

I don’t remember the exact email, but it went something like… “You guys are wimps, You tried to beat me but you couldn’t… I have no idea how many miles I’ll ride tonight but it will be at least 100 miles in the rain in the dark, and the most any of you ever rode in a week was 90 miles… etc etc…”

Then I headed out on my bike… 11:50pm… 60 or more miles ahead of me. As I rolled down the streets of Bellevue, I saw the strangest thing. Some kind a problem at a local gas station, had 6 Bellevue Police Cars surrounding the station with lights flashing. Was it a robbery? Some kind of a hazardous waste spill? What? And then I thought, “What the hell am I doing?!? This is the craziest thing I’ve ever done!” For about 5 seconds I doubted my actions… but then I remembered the email. I can’t back out now! I had to ride!

Sixty miles in the dark… in the rain… it was hard… it was cold… it was crazy! I ended up heading south to loop the lake, past my house back around to the top of the lake again, and back toward Bellevue. Around 2:30am I stopped at a drive through and got some breakfast and asked to use their bathroom. After completing the 50 mile lake loop, and being in Redmond (near Bellevue again) at least 25 miles from my home, I turned around to head back toward my house.

About 4 am, I rolled past a small section of the trail where wild chickens and roosters live. I told you I had a super bright light… and seeing how it cost almost as much as my bicycle it had better be as bright as the sun. Well, apparently it is, as it was about an hour before sunrise when I rolled by the wild roosters, and they began crowing in the day. They actually thought I was the sun. Wow… that boosted my spirits enough to dig deep and ride hard till I got home.

As I came rolling past my house I noticed that I had ridden 120 miles so far that night. I remember that one of my competitors (another triathlete friend of mine) had only ridden 126 miles for the whole month. As a special tribute to him, I decided that I had to ride at least half a mile more than him tonight… so as I passed my house for a second time, I continued pasting riding another 3.25 miles down the road, and finally turning around and heading home. I rolled into bed about 5:30 am, after 25 hours of being awake, and 126.5 miles in the pouring rain.

Sweet, albeit Slim, Victory

In the morning, the office was all a buzz… how far had they all ridden? Had Brad maintained his lead? Or will he be presenting in his bike shorts? Well, actually maybe most people were just shaking their heads in disbelief. What the hell was he thinking? This guy is over the top.

Finally when Craig entered his miles for the week… the totals were in… Brad: 1091.9 miles… The Rest: 1090.1 miles. By the slimmest of slim margins a mere 1.8 miles or 0.082% of the total 2182 miles.

Entry Filed under: Living Seattle, Fitness, Triathlon, Ironman, Cycling, exercise, Commuter Challenge, National Bike Month