It is six miles from Dover to Durham, New Hampshire.
This distance is not particularly taxing; it could be a lovely summer’s day bike ride. Downtown Dover can be a bit stressful but once you are clear of the new Hannaford’s grocery store the shoulders on Route 108 are wide and smooth. There is plenty of space between you and the cars. The hills are rolling – not steep enough to be considered real climbs and great to coast down in an aerodynamic tuck. There are even two town-line signs that mark intermediate sprints when you are riding with a group.
However, if you have already covered 98 miles in five and a half hours, this last stretch is a hellish misery. The last 40-or-so miles, my quads warn me that each pedal stroke might be their last. I stopped pulling up on my pedal stoke 40 miles ago after my left hamstring turned into a giant Charlie-horse. My left shoulder feels like someone is unzipping the skin and stabbing it with an electrified knife. My lower back is so tight that I can’t sit up straight to stretch out.
But at least I don’t have to pee again. I urinated in The Garrison Players parking lot back in Rollinsford and the coffee seems to have stopped forcing liquid out of my body.
As I roll through downtown Durham, the Seacoast Coffee Shop Tour is nearly complete. All I have to do is thrash my way up the hill that is in front of Holloway Commons and coast back to my truck in the outdoor-pool parking lot. The Seacoast Coffee Shop Tour was: 6 hours and 3 minutes on a bike; 105 miles; 3 states; 10 towns and 6 coffee shops.
The tour is not a sanctioned event and it benefits no charity organization. It actually serves no purpose at all – other than a training ride. Early season rides are usually long rides that allows your body to acclimate itself to riding, after months of riding the ass-groove on the couch.
The ride was the brainchild of UNH graduate and local cyclist Ryan Kelly. He mused about it in his blog. He wanted to combine two things that have universal appeal, riding bikes and drinking coffee. In the post, he recognizes the good and bad points of this ride. Good, riding bikes and drinking coffee. Bad, 6 hours of stopping and starting riding in the dead of winter.
As a way of adding my personal touch and challenge to this ride, I decide to do it all on my single-speed bike. Last winter I found the joy in riding a bike with only one gear. This year I decide to challenge – in retrospect, I would use the word ‘punish’ – myself by doing The Seacoast Coffee Shop Tour with only one gear.
After a long string of emails, we meet up at the Breaking New Grounds coffee shop in Durham at 7:45 a.m. and a chilly 22 degrees. Ryan already has his first cup of coffee when I arrive; black, Hazelnut.
There are two current UNH Cycling Team members there, not including me, that were going to only do a portion of the ride with us. Allison Gehnrich and Sean Berry accompany us to Exeter then head back to campus. Both Allison and Sean are exhibiting their usual behavior; Allison looks slightly frightened and Sean is not wearing enough clothing.
“I’m wearing leg warmers and two pairs of bib shorts,” Ryan said. The two pairs were necessary to protect his “situation” from getting too cold, he explained as he waved a hand over his crotch. The jacket he was wearing was a UNH Cycling Team jacket from his freshmen year. “The zipper broke the week I got it and I just got it fixed last week.”
Ryan Carne has a long-sleeve base layer, short sleeve jersey, a winter cycling jacket and a women’s white and black windbreaker. (Later on in York, Maine, he will remove a folded-up, plastic grocery bag from the front of his shorts, re-fold it and re-insert it. Again, situational protection.) He is has a slight build, probably weighing 150 pounds, soaking wet.
We roll out of Durham promptly at 8 o’clock and head south on Route 108.
We arrive at the Big Bean in Newmarket at about 8:30 a.m. Ryan gets his second cup of coffee and a muffin. I buy my first cup. We drink our coffee as quickly as possible in order to keep on schedule. Ryan calculated that all of our stops should take no longer than 10 minutes so that we don’t have to finish in the dark.
My friend Jack meets us at the Big Bean. Jack, 64, has ridden and raced bicycles for the about 25 years and currently has less than 6 months to prepare for his second trip to the Senior Nationals.
We saddle up after we pay for our coffees and thank the waitresses for their good-luck-on-your-hair-brained-plan wishes. We all gather together to take a picture in front of the Big Bean. I plan on taking a picture at each coffee shop in order to document the adventure.
We ride south to Me & Ollie’s in Exeter. Through this leg of the ride, I am pushing at hot pace. I am at the front of our pack, feeling like a million dollars. I am doing exactly what I said I wouldn’t do; go hard from the start and run out of gas by the middle of the ride. However, my excitement overrides forethought and I don’t realize this at the time.
I even catch the pack unaware and scoop up a few town-line sprints on the way to Exeter.
At Me & Ollie’s, Carney jokes that this will be the only century, or 100 mile ride, that we will actually gain weight because of all the stops, coffee and pastries. I order a Gooey Granola Roll that lives up to Ryan’s hype.
I snap a few photos of us spread out on couches, our bikes stacked against each other out side.
It is important to eat when you’re doing long rides. If you run out of gas 50 miles from home, you have 3 options; limp home, stopping at every convenient store on the way in order to shove Little Debby cakes down your gullet – Little Debby’s usually give you the biggest bang for your buck, as far as the calories to dollars ratio; you can call someone for a ride home – something that no self-respecting cyclist would ever do; or you can just man-up and grind your way home, fueled by self-hatred for blowing up mid-ride, repeating “I am never going to do this again” like a fifteen year-old that raided his parents liquor cabinet the night before.
I fit into the last category.
Ryan, Carney and I leave Me & Ollie’s, headed fro Amesbury, Mass. in search of our fourth coffee shop. Allison, Sean and Jack ride north, toward Durham and Newmarket, because they don’t have other things to do.
On Route 150, Josh Austin, another local rider that races with Ryan and Carney for Nor’East Cycling Team, catches up with us. I told him about our ride earlier in the week and Ryan had called him from our last stop.
We don’t find a coffee shop in downtown Amesbury and Ryan does not appreciate my suggestion of Dunkin Donuts. His tone is firm, almost like an annoyed parent.
Newburyport, Mass. was next on the list. I ride up to Ryan and put my hand on his shoulder, telling him that his was a great idea.
“I have a thousand bad ideas for everyone good idea,” he says.
“Well, this was a good one,” I say as we soak up the sunshine in the cloud-less sky. I still feel as though I am full of energy and excitement.
We do a lap of Newburyport and all we see is a Starbucks. I don’t even think of suggesting another chain. Ryan asks a man walking his dogs if there is a coffee shop near by that isn’t Starbucks.
The man chuckles and gives us directions Plum Island Coffee Roasters, which is in a yacht storage yard.
Ryan is the first one of us through the door. But he stops half through the doorway.
“This place is sick! It’s so warm in here,” he says. A fire in the corner and side-ways glancing patrons greet us.
I get my second coffee drink, a cappuccino. Everybody else orders crumb cakes or pastries. We fill our water bottles in the bathroom with warm water because they will soon cool to about 35 degrees, the outside air temperature.
“I wish I could order a cup of luke-warm coffee so I could just chug it,” Ryan complains. If it weren’t steaming hot, he could throw them back and be on the bike in less than 5 minutes. Instead, we have to sit and sip them slowly.
Everybody uses the bathroom, except for me. Ryan’s previous coffees started taking effect between Exeter and Amesbury. The magic of coffee has not affected me, yet.
While we put on our helmets and re-mount our bikes, a patron exits the shop and strikes up a conversation. The commentary is generally the same.
You always hear something like “You guys are crazy” or “Good for you”. But the man outside Plum Island Coffee Roasters throws in something new.
He says he enjoys doing his 25-mile rides, which is good enough for him – nothing crazy like 100 miles in the middle of winter.
“When I start riding my bike, my wife always says, ‘You keep riding that bike’,” he says. “Anyone that tells you that riding a bike impedes your sexual performance is a liar. My wife always tells me, ‘Keep riding that bike’.”
We all have a laugh, thank him for his adivce and ride on.
From this point on there is long gap between coffee shops. We tried to find one on Hampton Beach but nearly every store has a “closed for the season” sign hanging in the window.
On B Street, after riding past the closed Ships Inn Coffee Shop, my two cups of coffee want out. Ryan and I pull in to the entrance of a parking garage in order to urinate, out of the buffeting winds coming from the west. The last thing you want at the midpoint of a ride this long is to have a stream of coffee-pee blow back all over your leg.
From Hampton to Portsmouth, we fight the western crosswind and scream up the coast. During this section Josh and Ryan ride in front of Carney and me. Josh has a bad habit, Ryan tells me later, of getting on the front of the group and riding – in this situation, referred to as pulling – hard. This is particularly miserable for me because I am not as strong of a rider as Josh is, but also because I have one gear.
I can’t shift gears because I only have one. If I want to go faster, I have to pedal faster; if I want to go up a steep hill I have to stand up and push really hard. My internal monologue on steep climbs is “Le-eg Press! Le-eg Press!” I say ‘leg’ slowly, and then say ‘press’ as I push down on the pedal. I need a mantra that allows me to stay focused as my fellow riders select one of their 20 gears.
For the 21 miles between Hampton Beach and our next stop, Breaking New Grounds in Portsmouth, my legs are spinning as fast as they can. I am bouncing on my saddle, a sign that you cannot efficiently peddle faster. My heart rate (which I know because I always ride with a heart rate monitor so I have a gauge of how hard I am working, how many calories I’ve burned, time in zones, etc.) was much too high. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to sustain a pace like that all day.
It was near Wallis Sands State Beach that my legs started to feel rubbery.
Near the Portsmouth-Rye town line, Carney and I race for the town line and my legs turn to Jell-O. I have a bad feeling that I won’t be finishing the rest of the ride.
The Portsmouth Breaking New Grounds is a glorious bastion of cookies, coffee, pastries and hot-air hand-dryers.
At this point, I only look like a cyclist but it feels as though there is nothing left inside of me. In order to fill this void, I order a medium coffee, a chocolate turtle cookie and a croissant. However, my perceptions are skewed; my coffee is a cauldron, not a cup; my cookie is the size of a baby’s head; and my croissant is foot-long sub.
I inhale all of it.
I head to the bathroom to use the hand dryer to warm up my shoes. I hit the button twice per shoe, which dries the moisture that is trapped in my shoe by my neoprene shoe covers, or booties.
Ryan says that it is time to leave and Josh decides no to join us for the rest of the ride. In this, I find hope that I might finish this ridiculous ride.
As we approach York Harbor, a part of York that is about 2 miles south of the touristy York Beach, I feel an anxious wave roll over me. I look at my heart rate monitor, which reads 176 beats per minute. This is way too high.
“OK, my heart rate is officially now determined by caffeine and not exertion level,” I announce to Ryan and Carney. They chuckle.
I start blinking more than usual, but still feel empty.
York Beach is just as dead as Hampton Beach but The Daily Grind coffee shop is open. Ryan and I have that “not-so-fresh” feeling anymore. In order to finish this ride, we stay only long enough to use the bathroom and pound some juice.
From this point on, we don’t stop at another coffee shop.
From this point on, the fun isover.
At Ogunquit, we turn west and head up Berwick Road. At mile 80-or-so, we have to start climbing some hills and it is hell.
“We got him on the ropes,” Carney shouts as he briefly accelerates up the hill.
“Heckler’s all over his machine,” Ryan yells, accusing me of thrashing around on my bike in an uncontrolled and labored manner.
They’re right. I am throwing my bike left to right as I struggle up the hill. If they decided to, they could drop me; they could just float away from me with their stupid gears. I am against the ropes but I have no choice but to finish.
We crest a slight hill and Ryan asks Carney how fast we are going.
“14.5 miles per hour,” Carney says.
“I don’t think I could go any faster if I had to,” Ryan says. As long as someone else is suffering as much as you are, your own misery is easier to accept.
In the distance between Ogunquit and Dover, all the coffee, water and juice I drank during the ride decides to make my miserable state worse. Within the next fifteen mile, I stop to urinate four times. Each time Ryan groans, “Ahh … again?”
The rest of the ride might as well be a black spot in my memory. From South Berwick back to UNH, the ride turned into an exercise in pain management – how to block out every piece of sensory input that tells your body to stop. Every muscle ache and joint twinge compels you to bail out of this flaming wreck that is your body.
As we head south on Route 4 from Southwest out of Berwick, I try to hide in Ryan’s draft so that I don’t have fighting against the wind. I float around behind him until I hear the least amount of wind noise. When it’s relatively quiet, you know you’re in the sweet spot – that he working harder than I am.
As we cross the Dover town line, I have never been happier to in Dover. Only because it means that I am one town closer to the end of this ride.
We roll through downtown Dover, Ryan and Carney say me that they are going to stop at Dos Amigos Burrito’s.
Should I stop and gorge on burritos, try to make a dent in my 4453 kilocalorie deficit?
“If I stop now, I won’t get started again,” I tell them. I say good-bye, thanks for coming on this adventure with me.
I tell Ryan that it was a great idea, again.
Before we split up, Ryan says that we should do this again – when the weather is nice, when we’re in shape. “Like, April.”
“Yeah, sounds good. I’ll do it, just let me know when. Enjoy your burritos,” I say as I keep pedaling my way up Central Ave.
Then, there is just me.
And 6 measly miles between me and a pointless success.
All rights reserved.This is the property of Phil Heckler and only Phil Heckler.I rode it, I wrote it and therefore I own it!Any taking, biting, sampling, plagerism or copying will result in legal action.You've been warned.
