GOBA 2004

This year presents two new challenges: bodacious hills and my type II diabetes. There were few hills the last two years, but the Amish area of northeast Ohio has them in endless supply. My part of Ohio has very few hills, so practice is difficult to find. And changing the programming language for the CS 208/209 series gave me two new courses the spring quarter. Furthermore, it has rained steadily since the middle of May, ensuring there were few rides long enough for good preparation.

The rains did cease on Friday. It was threatening rain on Saturday, but no liquid dropped from the skies. A front came through from the north and the low temperature Sunday morning was 43! The skies were clear and it was a glorious start for the 2004 GOBA. And there were hills. When I reached the point where I didn't want to see what was at the top of the next hill, they started to die away. The last third of Sunday's 51 miles had no nasty hills. I walked only one hill. But it was so tough that I was breathing hard just walking the bike up. And not a single person passed me! That was most astonishing.

I ride an ancient Schwinn 10 speed. Two of the ten gears are not meant to be used, low-high and high-low. For this type of riding only 4 gears are really used: low-low, middle-low, middle-high and high-high. And you are constantly running up and down the entire range. Low-low is barely more than a walk and I hit 40 mph one the biggest downhill. That was measured by a guy running it with me. The other 4 gears are: two-low, two-high, four-low and four-high. These are more nuanced gears for a grade that remains constant for long enough to make setting it worthwhile. I spend a lot of time in four-high on trails built on old railroad grades. Newer bikes have a granny-gear in the front cluster and typically one more gear in the rear cluster for 21 speeds. The extension on the high end means only a few extra mphs. 40 mph is plenty fast for me. But on the low end it makes a real difference. The Schwinn is such a beautifully stable bike at speed that I am unwilling to abandon it. And the new rims I put on it make it roll effortlessly.

I lost one of my biking gloves somewhere on Sunday's ride. I lost one of my biking gloves on the first GOBA I did. I just can't seem to hang on to them. Last year I wore a pair of brown cotton work gloves and didn't lose them at all! There is a message in all this for me. I really don't need the extra padding as I have thick foam rubber handles on the Schwinn. What I need is the sun protection for the back of my hands. I am too cheap to buy the fancy biking jerseys, but I found several cotton long sleeve shirts at the new second hand shop. I am wearing these in place of my long sleeve dress shirts. Not only am I much more stylish, but I don't have the shirt tails flapping in the breeze and slowing me down. All I need now is a big pocket in the back hem to keep my wallet!

Medina is basically a suburb of Cleveland. It is not really appealing to me, though I am sure it is a nice, quiet place. Orrville does not appear to be an active town. There is industry here with two dairies and the Smucker company. But there is little life in the downtown. And only the smaller franchises are here such as Subway and Dairy Queen.

As soon as the tent was up, I headed for the massage tent. My legs were a mess. And even after that, the first sun salute was agony. They improved after that, but squats are not without pain. I will be taking a pain killer before I go to bed tonight. I am guessing I averaged 10 miles an hour while riding Sunday. I arrived in one of the early waves of riders. But it is hard to guage how much of what to eat. Sticking to the low glycemic diet is hard and expensive. At least there will be a day off on Tuesday to try to reset my diet.

I pitched the tent in the sun so it would dry well. It was a wet, sopping mess when I packed it early Sunday morning. I spent the hot part of the afternoon watching the new Harry Potter movie. I agree with Colin that it is much better than either of the first two Potter movies. By the time I took a shower in the evening, it was very cool. The forecast highs this week are only in the 70's which will make for great sleeping weather.

My new tent is humongus. It is 5 feet high and 49 sq. feet in area. The thick, self inflating mattress is very comfortable, but it is so luxurious. It doesn't feel like camping. Only the 200 sq. foot tent with two rooms standing 7 feet high made me feel virtuous again. The great thing about the tent is I can do most of my yoga in it. There was very little I could do in my old tent. I think I will call it my yoga studio! Interestingly, this tent is on the small end of the scale in Gobaville.

Sleep came early for everyone Sunday night. Gobaville was silent before it was dark, including all the children. Everyone was exhausted after all those hills! My new rule is to not get up until I can distinguish the different colors of the tent. This keeps me from getting up at 4AM. The most sensitive elements in your eyes cannot see color. Color only kicks in when there is quite a bit if light.

It was 6:02 when I returned to the tent from my morning abulations. I meant to sleep later, but I was up and that was that. It took and hour and a half to do my yoga, pack, tear down the tent and eat breakfast. I was on the road by 7:30. And it was an easy road to the AM snack stop. We were heading south. The hills are encountered going east/west. These are part of the Appalachian mountain chain which runs north/south.

We were in Amish country early in the ride. The first notice of that is on the roads. I saw that long before I saw my first buggy. The trick is to make sure you don't strike and fresh horse apples, as my father would call then. The cars and trucks quickly mash them into the pavement. Just before Kidron's AM stop, I saw 4 Amish ladies on a porch watching our precession. They all had blankets on their laps... it was chilly, especially if you aren't pedaling a bike.

We headed east out of Kidron and it became very ugly very quickly. The road runs straight east and straight up and down the damned hills! It was hills all the way to the lunch stop. My interest in them quickly waned. Often I went straight from lowest gear to highest gear and vise-versa. The gear constant and rapid gear shifting loosened the shift wire to the point where I was hard put to find the right gear. Near the top of one hill I had to make a equipment failure stop (thank you, Janet Jackson!).

After lunch there were some nice level runs with the nastiest of hills interspersed. I walked two of them. There just was no point in trying to pedal up the monsters. Many riders walked them as well. By the end of the ride, I was even more tired than I was yesterday. And I was not the only one. The good news is tomorrow is a day off. And I can cut 40 miles off the Wednesday ride. That will make up for missing the layover day on Friday. I am going to bike to Medina on Friday to be able to attend the trail opening Saturday morning.

There is a traveling Schwinn Bike Museum here at the park in New Philadelphia. I am very grateful that they do not have a Continental model in the museum! I checked the lost and found pile and found my missing glove. Thank you, whoever turned that in!

We are camping in a park in New Philadelphia. It is a great place for children with its own amusement park. But the food for Monday night can best be described as greasy fair food. And breakfast was non-existent, especially for a diabetic. I headed out on my bike and found exactly one breakfast place downtown. I highly recommend Micheal's omlets and they even come with salsa! Catsup is the second hardest thing to give up with my new diet... bread will always be at the top of that list.

I continued on the mini-tour today to Dennison, OH. It is a surprisingly vibrant small town that is off the beaten path. That may be the reason for its apparent success. I am not sure where people work, but they were selling 30k building lots far from the edge of town. Dennison is best known for the service canteen at the railroad station. During WWII the local women kept it open 24/7 and supplied it with home made food. They served 1.3 million service people during that period. There is a sign that states:

    This station runs on
    Eastern War Time which
    is one hour ahead of
    Ohio time.

Shifter cable slack continues to vex me. I am just too used to flatland bicycling! I am dubbing this the silent GOBA. Way too many riders give no warning when passing. The rules (which each rider must sign) clearly require warning to be given. And it is just plain old common sense. You can't hear many bicycles coming and the road is full of bad spots you must avoid. We all have mirrors... but! It seems that the faster the rider is, the less willing they are to announce the are passing. In a couple of instances they were traveling much faster than I was. It is a recipe for disaster. I made a few caustic comments the first day and then gave up. What is, is. I am certainly not looking forward to any more GOBAs full of discourtious riders.

I did find two paperbacks to read at a second hand store. Tore right the Tony Hillerman and was more than halfway through the Helen Macinnes by bedtime. Both were old books, but ones I had not read before.

The ride on Wednesday was devisive. It was 55 hard miles of hills. But the first 40 miles were a loop that actually returns to Dover along the same road as we entered on Monday. It didn't take much effort to create Plan B which was only about 17 miles long! And a lot of others followed plan B. My knees will get enough abuse on the ride to Wooster tomorrow. The problem is the plan B folks arrived early and took all the best camping spots, distressing the plan A folks who worked much harder. They were not pleased. GOBA seems to be 1/3 superbikers, 1/3 families and 1/3 older folk. It is the first category that became upset. It is also the first category who feels no need for courtesy of announcing passing. I came to one intersection where there were a group of superbikers grousing to someone in a big SUV. I didn't notice I was to turn left and one of the group was kind enough to help me. It seemed part of a plan. I was rewarded, however. When the up ended, I had the best downhill run of my life! And I didn't have to worry about being overrun by the kamakazi bikers. At the bottom were smooth, level roads that took me straight to my next stop, Zoar Village. And a GOBA rider appeared who had learned of this most sensible route from local folks. We had a great conversation. In the end, those riders did me a great favor!

Zoar Village is a restored religious commune of German Lutherans. They come to Ohio from their native Germany to practice their religion in their own manner. They did not start as a commune, but evolved to that form of organization. They paralleled the Shakers in many ways and disbanded just before the beginning of the 20th century. I had lunch at the nearby inn and rode the rest of the way to Bolivar.

Bad news. According to the old guy who cut in front of me in the ice cream line in Bolivar, a 52 year old GOBA guy died of a heart attack on one of the monster hills today. His wife was with him. "What I don't know is if they were on a tandem." Only at GOBA would you get that sort of speculation. Certainly the bearer of the news has not seen 52 for some years. If true, there will be many silently reflecting on the old saying: there but for the grace of God go I. And I wonder if the penchant for routing us over the biggest, baddest hills possible will abate a bit. It certainly validates my decision to skip that big loop south today.

Bolivar is a small town at one of the exits on I77. They put on a great welcome, closing the downtown street and providing a pop/country band. And downtown was FULL. The population of the town more than doubled! Finally ate a church lasagne dinner at the nearby Methodist church. The meal was great, but that came in second place to the air conditioning! I lingered there quite a while.

Thursday morning came early as usual. Everyone was in a hurry to get to Wooster and set up tents before the afternoon thundershowers that were forecast. And my forecast of unending hills was sadly true. I did find a lower gear: standing on the pedals. It is not a stable as I would like, but it gets the job done. I was able to climb many of the hills. But the last two hills in Holmes County defeated me. Many of the hills here get steeper at the crest and that is where I was forced to give up and walk. Someone wrote the following in chalk at the bottom of a particularly obnoxious hill:

GOBAW
Get
Off 
Bike
And
Walk

Cell phone conversation are everywhere. My favorite is:

"I'm at lunch break."
"I'm at LUNCH break."
"I'M AT LUNCH BREAK!"
    .
    .
    .
"BYE!"

The hills started to level out after the PM Snack Break. I hit lunch at 9, PM Break at 11 and Gobaville in Wooster at 12:30. Rode in with a quite capable marathoner, so I didn't feel too badly. I average about 10 mph. Considering the hills, that was nothing to be ashamed of. I did have one scary moment on one of the fast downhills. An old guy drifted into my path just as I was about to pass him on a curve. There was no one to the right, so I changed my line through the curve and nearly lost it! At 35 mph or so, it would have been an ugly wipeout. Next time I will yell well in advance.

Heard a great story from one of my camping neighbors at New Philly. He has a friend who wears one of those double billed hats under his bike helmet (one bill shades the eyes and the other shades the back of your neck. The friend was wearing said hat and he asked Greg how he liked his biking hat. "That's a fishing hat." came the reply. "Its a biking hat! Would you sign it?". Greg wrote the following:

This is a fishing hat
   Greg Lemond

Wooster is an amazingly vibrant town sporting a large local department store. I wandered into an art gallery and found an interesting artist working in B&W. Interesting presentation of a 6 x 6 negative. The print is no more than 9 x 9 cm and it is matted with an 8 ply matboard with a black core. Price was reasonable, $125 for a framed print. But there was only one image and it was not quite interesting enough to buy. I'll check the next time I am in Holmes County to see if the gallery has more of his work

We did have some worry when a severe weather front came through Wooster Thursday evening. Fortunately there was plenty of shelter and what hit us was just rain and lightening. They had plenty of shelter for everyone. I returned to my tent early and it was dry as guaranteed on the front of the tent. I was worried about possible hail, but it did not appear. If it blows over by morning I will have no problem riding to Medina. The route is already marked with the yellow As.

Tomorrow will be the last day for me. I plan to ride to Medina, drive the truck back to Wooster to pick up my gear and head home. Had another encounter this morning that left a bad taste in my mouth. As I was walking the first of the three hills I walked today, a superbiker sped by saying: "Racing bikes don't cut it on these hills!". I resisted the urge to yell back "neither do 62 year old knees!". I simply yelled a sarcastic "Thank you!". Later in the day a GOBA staff person (she was wearing a GOBA saftey vest and had no GOBA number on the bike) rode on a busy highway right next to the centerline and blocked a car from passing for a long time. So even the GOBA staff don't pay any real attention to the rules or even simple courtesy. It is clear to me now that I can't get upset about the lack of courtesy in some GOBA riders when the staff is no better. Best to just let it all go and remember all the good encounters.