Jim Willis

Over the weekend I rode Bike NYC’s Twin Lights bike ride. The ride was noteable for a couple of reasons. First off, it was my first organized road ride since I got back into cycling last year. Secondly, I rode despite having a really nasty head cold.

When I was younger, like maybe 10 years old or so, I was totally immersed in long-distance cycling. Instead of baseball or football idols, Lon Haldeman was my boyhood hero.  I can still remember getting totally psyched when one of the major TV networks gave the RAAM its 3 minutes of coverage on the weekend sports shows. I rode almost every day and tried my first century when I was 9 or 10 years old. I only made it 80 miles but I continued to ride long-distance trips (doing several centuries in the process) pretty regularly until high school. Once high school came, the massive amount of time involved in hanging out with friends and doing homework and stuff pretty much ate into my cycling time to the extent that I only did one or two long rides once I began high school. I think the last ride I did was a 150 mile ride near Harper’s Ferry in Virginia. 

So since the late 1980s I had only ridden a bike a few times. When we moved to Providence in 2000 I lived only a mile from my office so I bought a Cannondale touring bike off of craigslist for $100 and rode it to work. Up until we moved back to NJ a couple of years ago, those one mile commute rides were the extent of my riding. Then, last summer, my brother in law gave me his old Cannondale MTB on semi-permanent loan. I began to ride the trails that I rode when back when I was a kid. I road Hartshorne and Huber Woods and Tatum Park. And then, at the end of last summer, I rode in a race organized by our local park system. 

I was psyched to be back on a bike. There are many times and places where I feel a little bit out of place. However, when I’m on a bike, I am unwavering in my sense of belonging there. The mountain biking was fantastic but the feeling of blasting through singletrack or through the fields back by the reservoir in Colts Neck was just a gateway drug to getting back on the road for some long rides. I fixed up the Cannondale that I’d bought for commuting back in Providence and started to do some longer rides. That feeling of relaxed concentration that hits after a couple of hours of turning the pedals came right back to me and soon enough I was trying to carve out longer blocks of time for riding. 

It became apparent that the geometry on the Cannondale just wasn’t right for me and no amount of saddle or neck/stem tweaking was going to fix it. So, a few months ago I bought a Surly Long Haul Trucker and really started accumulating some road miles. I work three days a week at a place that’s about 10 miles from my house. I ride my bike there at least two of those three days. Then I do two other rides during the week/weekend, usually between 40 and 50 miles. However, carving out time for a 100 miles with two young kids at home is just really, really tough. 

When I read about the Twin Lights ride occurring on my birthday weekend, I asked my wife if I could get 6 or 7 hours of bike-riding time for a birthday present and fortunately, my wife agreed. So last week I started to plan to ride the 100 mile option of the Twin Lights ride. I was psyched. Psyched that my wife was cool with giving me the time window for a present and psyched that the ride was a big, well-organized event that began in Highlands, NJ, just a few miles from my house.

I awoke Thursday, two days before the century, feeling that old familiar dizzy, feverish head cold feeling and I was pissed. Pissed that I’d picked up a cold somewhere and that it was probably going to peak just around Saturday when I was scheduled to do my first 100 miler in about 20 years. I decided to ride my bike to work anyway. My head wasn’t so congested, yet, and I thought I might be able to sweat the cold out. No such luck. By Friday I was tired and had a full-on head cold. By Saturday AM, I had to make a judgement call about what I would do about the ride. 

Should I ride sick? I googled around and found a bunch of studies that pretty much said, if the cold stayed above the neck, you were OK exercising as long as you didn’t push it too hard. If it was below the neck (in the lungs, stomach, etc.) you should rest. Since my cold was above the neck, I decided I’d go ahead and ride but just do the 50 mile route instead of the 100.

This was a pretty big deal for me. Usually my inclination when I get even the slightest bit sick (whether abover or below the neck), is to stack up a bunch of books next to the bed, pull out the heating pad and ginger ale and just wait it out in bed until the cold goes away. I’m pretty much a total wuss when I feel sick. To actually go out and exercise while feeling sick would never have been in my array of available options.  But there I was, getting my bike up on the subaru’s roof rack with a head cold, putting the research I found on Google up against my better judgement and heading out to Highlands.

I only know five people who live in Highlands so it was really incredible to pull into town amid the hordes of people looking for parking spaces and find that one of the people directing traffic was one of the five people I knew in town. Anyway, she not only hooked me up with a sweet, convenient parking spot but told me that as a local business owner in Highlands, the tour organizers had given her some complimentary registration passes. She hooked me up with a pass and that saved me the $55 registration fee. So far, despite my cold, the ride was shaping up pretty nicely.

The window for departing on the 50 mile ride was between 8:15 and 10AM. I rolled out around 9ish I think. I put my heart rate monitor on just so that I could keep an eye on my exertion and not push myself too hard. The ride followed a really well done route through Rumson into Oceanport to Lincroft/Middletown to Holdmel Park and back into Highlands. I took it very easy and maintained a really comfortable average speed of around 15.5 MPH. It was a bit chilly and I wore some hiking shorts with a “technical” synthetic running t-shirt and a light wool sweater on top of it. Except on the longest of downhills, I was really, really comfortable.  A wind-breaker of sorts might have been nice. 

There were several well-run rest stops along the route. Between stops I kept playing cat and mouse with a large group of lyrcra-clad racing bike types who left at the same time I did. They were averaging a much higher speed than I was but they were also taking really long breaks at each rest stop so that by the end of the ride I finished up the ride a good 5 minutes before them. 

I think I made the right decision w/r/t the 50 instead of 100 mile ride. The ride didn’t seem to make my cold any worse. Better yet, I got the opportunity to prove to myself that just b/c I’m a bit under the weather doesn’t mean that I have crawl into bed and not feel like I can accomplish anything.