By Adam Lisonbee
The Rim Ride is over, and all I can think about
are some of the bizarre thoughts that crossed
my mind during the endless miles along Gold
Bar Rim.
I finished. I finished well after dark. I never
anticipated being out there that long. Which
is ridiculous. I knew how arduous the route
was. I knew it plays to all my weaknesses on
the bike (slow technical rider, slow technical
climber, and slow). But even still, I thought
I ought to roll into the finish around 6 or
7 PM. Instead, at 6 PM I was having a running
dialogue with myself on the Gold Bar rim about
what the jeepers must have been saying about
me as I skittered past them, feeling nimble
compared to the laborious lumbering of the whiny,
modded vehicles filled with mulleted men, anxious
women, and oblivious children. And I thought
I had a strange recreational hobby...
The day was very even keeled. I never hit the
wall to hard, but never felt real high either.
The weather was great, and the company even
better. One of the best views all day came just
minutes into the ride when the sun peeked over
Arches, illuminating towers and stone in a misty
morning. I reached for a camera that I did not
have.
Later in the day, as so often happens with me,
I found myself in a bitter argument with myself
about whether or not to finish. The bickering
continued all through miles 50 through 67. I
knew that at mile 67, the last bail out point,
that it was all or nothing. As I rode along
I said, aloud, and probably a little bit angrily,
"you have no excuses!" If anyone was
around to hear me I am certain they would have
been alarmed at the sudden outburst.
Tom
and I had spent a lot of the day together. As
we approached the Gold Bar trail I asked him
if he was planning on heading home, or continuing
on. I was hoping he was ready to quit, because
then I could go along with him. He didn't hesitate
in his answer. "Nope, I am going on"
he said. "I bailed at this spot last year,
that's not happening again."
I pretended to share his enthusiasm, but inwardly
I was annoyed. I had no excuses, but I was determined
to find one. However, the bail out point came
and went, and I found myself pedaling upward
toward the summit of the mammoth rim, instead
of heading downhill to the highway. I caught
a glimpse of Tom as he spun along out of sight.
I stopped for a moment, and then decided it
felt good to not be moving. I sat down, washed
my face, ate the last of my food, some Excedrin,
and had a chat with a guy in a Fat
Cyclist jersey who was enviably descending
toward food and ice cream probably.
After this is when things started to go bizarre.
In my head. Thoughts that cross through one's
mind late in events are golden. Some funny,
some dark, most, at least for me, strange and
random. Yesterday I reached a new high, or low,
with these bonk induced musings.
As I climbed Gold Bar Rim, I started quoting
The
Little Mermaid. "Somebody's got to
nail that girls fins to the floor."
I also started to commentate on the ride. "Oh,
he's in a world of hurt now, he's off the bike
again, hiking things young children could ride."
The commentating led to me imagining the riders
back at the park who had finished were gathered
around a screen and were watching me creep along,
heckling and hooting as needed. So of course,
I was vocalizing the heckles and hoots.
"I'm going for drinks, someone holler if
he actually rides down one of the ledges"
And so on. This game went on for what seemed
like hours. In fact, the rim itself seemed like
an eternal abyss, some sort of parallel universe
where I was the only man on the planet. I envisioned
myself coming across ancient rusted jeeps, artifacts
of a forgotten time. I wondered if somehow I
had been trapped in a time continuum, and that
it was actually the year 2156 or something.
Everyone I ever knew was dead, and yet, I was
still traversing the forsaken rim. I thought
of No
Exit by Sartre, and then the immortal
words of Heston, in Science Fictions greatest
accomplishment, "You blew it up! You
blew it up! Damn you all to hell!"
And that's when I looked up and saw Tom. I was
struck speechless for a moment. His presence
contradicted all my rational thought. All the
commentary, the twilight zone, the parallel
universe... he was not supposed to exist!
Together we crept along, and slowly my presence
in the real world started manifesting itself
again. Forward progress seemed tangible, and
almost suddenly the rim was behind us, with
only Poison Spider left in front. The sun sunk
below other, far off rims and not long after
I heard the trickle of the Colorado River. I
don't know that I have ever heard a more welcome
sound. We rode Potash Road in the dark, our
lights flickering off the red cliffs, cliffs
that hours earlier we were peering off the tops
of, wishing for the ability to fly, or at least
fall slowly.
A camp fire and friendly faces greeted us at
the finish. I am pretty sure I made lame jokes
about doing the "hardest 300 miles of my
life". But the fire was warm, and so were
the smiles. Eventually I was back in the trailer
eating a Wendy's frosty, and fighting off sleep.
And again, the imaginary TV schtick started
up again, and somewhere out there, someone watching
was saying,
