Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “Do one thing every day that scares you.”
I did exactly that on Saturday night although it wasn’t my intent.
Several weeks ago, I had come across an advertisement for the L.A.T.E. ride in Chicago. Several thousand cyclists riding through the neighborhoods of Chicago during the wee hours of the night with headlights and taillights shining as bicycle enthusiasts explore the Windy City.
What could be more fun!?!
I asked my friend, Tamara, who has recently gotten into cycling if she wanted to go and she did. We paid the registration fee, an amount which would be used to help the neighborhood and parks association.
Saturday night rolled around and I was extremely excited about the ride. It was a beautiful day and the 25 mile ride was slated to begin at 1am. After parking the car at about 9:30 and picking up our packets, we took our bikes for a short ride and found a small sushi place where we ate dinner.
Never would I have imagined that this would be the highlight of the evening!
Fast forward to 1am Central time. Color themed corrals were spaced down the closed street outside of the Buckingham Foundation neatly placing the 10,000 riders into groups that would leave at various times. We happened to be green, the group that left at about 1:30.
In 2002, I rode in a 100 mile ride down the coast of Florida and there were thousands of riders present. I’m not sure how the spacing was established, but we didn’t move at a snail’s pace. Unfortunately, that was not the case on Saturday night.
I had been afraid that I would be tired during the ride and I wouldn’t be able to stay awake. Instead, my mind was on high alert as I dodged the cyclists in front of me, in back of me and to both sides. We crept along at four miles per hour for the first several miles.
This wasn’t at all fun. At one point I decided that if the ratio of morons is one moron in each group of five, we were surrounded by thousands of morons.
The Chicago Police had many streets blocked off and we crawled through the intersections in downtown Chicago, Greektown, Chinatown and the trail along the lakefront. I wish I was able to look up and enjoy the atmosphere, but I was concentrating more on the potholes and the riders surrounding me.
At the halfway mark, Tamara and I stopped at the SAG and grabbed an energy bar and a water, and found our way back to the course. It was a little faster pace on the way back to the Fountain as we cranked it up to between 7 and 11 miles per hour. Not nearly the pace we are used to, but a little more spread out than the first half. Unfortunately, there were less road closings and obeying the traffic signals really slowed all the riders down.
We agreed at about mile 16 that we wouldn’t be signing up next year, but that it was a good experience to try.
Then there was mile 20. We were riding on the trail by the lake and it was so crowded that I was basically towing a straight line with only inches to move from side to side. I had a death grip on the handlebars and was concentrating hard not to crash. Out of nowhere came a pothole and I tagged it hard.
“I’m surprised I didn’t get a flat on that one,” I yelled to Tamara.
We continued riding and all of the sudden it was harder and harder to go keep the bike straight. I was clipped into the pedals and drifting hard to the left. I had a flat. I can’t believe I was able to drift to the left without being hit.
This was the icing on the cake, never again. We started walking the three miles to the finish when we saw two people on the side of the trail with a flat, also, and they had a pump. I put a new tube on my front tire and thought we were off, but it wasn’t right and we had to continue walking.
What else could go wrong? Well, Tamara twisted her ankle while walking on the uneven pavement. What a night!
There were so many other “interesting” moments on the ride and I could write pages about our observations of drunk people yelling obscenities at us, bottlenecks along the course and even an eye witness account of a cab hitting a guy on a bike, but it all adds up to one thing: the whole night was stressful.
As the sun came up and Tamara and I were on our way to South Bend, I was glad it was mile 20 when I got my flat and not mile 15. I was glad the police and ambulance sirens we heard weren’t for us. And I was glad that my scary experience for the day was over.
Forget downtown, I’ll take my South Bend country roads!
