How far?

I used to ride my bicycle a lot.

Actually—I rode it so much that most people thought I was weird.

But anyways, I really liked it so I didn’t care what people thought. I wore those skin-tight little shorts. You know, the ones with the pad in them that makes you look like you’re wearing a spandex diaper. I shaved my legs religiously and was proud of my incredible tan lines.

Most serious cyclists have ridden 100 miles in a day. It’s typically called a ‘century,’ and is to the cyclist what a marathon is to the runner.

I’d knocked off my first century at 15 years old and routinely rode 75 miles on a Saturday, come ‘that one place’ or high water. During the winter I stuffed newspapers up my jersey to block the wind and during the summer I’d drink two or three gallons of water to combat the 100-plus degree heat of an Arizona morning.

I raced the regional junior races and did fairly well, winning in the smallest local races, hitting the top five in state level races, and finishing around tenth in the bigger regional races.

I didn’t have all of the best equipment but I loved to ride and loved the weirdness and recognition of participating in a sport that doesn’t usually attract teenagers.

Out of that love to ride hatched the insane idea of riding 200 miles in one day.

Two hundred miles is not outside the range of the possible, but it is definitely on the far side of the absolute fringe of the extreme. Normal riders, even most who’ve been riding for years, haven’t ridden 200 miles in day, nor even want to.

There really isn’t that great of a reason to do it. It isn’t really that great of training because that sort of distance is ultimately more debilitating the constructive. It produces a physiological strain on the body that takes months to recover from.

And nobody really cares.

That’s probably the real reason few pursue riding ultra-long distances. There is no recognition. Pretty much everybody thinks you should be committed to an asylum, but then after a week or two everybody forgets what you did and things get back to normal.

Kind of like a runner. A runner is cool if he runs a marathon. There isn’t any added ‘coolness ranking’ if the runner ran 30 miles instead of the 26.2. The same with the bicycling thing. If you want coolness, ride you’re bike 100 miles. Normal people think that riding your bicycle 25 miles is a lot, so 100 is amazing, but 200 is so unfathomable that people don’t place it higher than the ‘amazing’ of the 100 mile ride.

Regardless, that is what I wanted to do. I wanted to ride my bike 200 miles in one day.

I posed the idea to my parents and they actually went for it. They just wanted me to tell them when I was leaving, give them a detailed route description, and call them from one or two points along the way.

First, I worked on figuring out where I wanted to ride. I knew I had absolutely no desire to do an out-and-back course for two reasons. I thought it would be too boring and the opportunity to turn around was too great.

I settled on a loop riding from my house in Glendale up I-17 to Cordes Junction, over to Prescott, down to Wickenburg, and then home to Glendale.

I got busy with other things but held the ride in the back of my head for when the opportunity was right. I couldn’t go in the summer because it’d be to hot; since part of my ride was over 5,000 feet of elevation, I couldn’t go in the winter because it’d be to cold and snowy. The challenge with the spring and fall was getting the right blend of weather over the whole 200 miles. It might be perfect in one place and not in the next.

At dinner one night in April, things just felt right. So just like that I announced, without much fanfare, that tomorrow was the day.

I set my alarm for 4:30am and went to bed around 8:00pm. I slept fine, but woke up earlier than I wanted to around 4:00, probably because of my nervous excitement. When I get really nervously excited about something I shiver, so I quietly shivered my way around the kitchen packing up some food, filling my water bottles, and eating a quick bowl of oatmeal. I let myself out the garage door and left without an audience around 4:30.

I wound through the quiet, cool suburban streets of the fifth largest metropolis in the U.S. Past hundreds of sleeping households, a few barking dogs, and just stirring birds. The sun was pausing behind the horizon’s curtain, waiting for its cue to shine on the day’s stage.

All was well. I was the boy on the bike.

I rode slowly knowing what was ahead, making sure not to crash into anything in the dark. I had a handlebar bag full of food, warmer clothing for the mountains, and a map, and my three jersey pockets were full of even more food and water.

After thirty minutes I was on the wide shoulder of the interstate, with warm breezes washing over me whenever semi’s chugged by. I picked up my pace and was faced with the biggest climb of the ride.

About thirty miles from my front door is a climb of 10 miles. From the relatively low desert to the high desert plateau, the Black Canyon Freeway climbs roughly 1,500 feet. Nearing the top of this climb, I was starting to get hungry. I knew 35 minutes ahead was the first real chance of stopping that I’d had yet. I started craving—I know it’s strange, but after a few hours of hard exercise, you crave weird things—I started craving a McDonald’s number one value meal. You know, the Big Mac, super-sized fries, and replacing the pop with a strawberry milkshake.

Well that’s what I wanted.

So I pulled into the only restaurant in Cordes Junction, which conveniently is a McDonald’s, leaned my bike against the glass window in a spot where it would be clearly visible to me on the inside (it would be bad to have your bicycle stolen partway through a 200 mile ride), and walked up to the counter.

“Can I have a number one value meal please?” I asked the older lady behind the counter.

She looked over the counter at me, the gangly teenager, salt-crusted from sweat, wearing funny looking shoes, let alone funny looking shorts, and said, “Sorry honey, we don’t serve burgers ‘til 10:00.”

So I asked the next obvious question. “Could I have a large strawberry milkshake then?”

“Weeell, I’m real sorry son, but our ice cream machine is broken, so I’ll have to say nope to that too.”

I was crushed. For nearly an hour I’d been fantasizing about this meal. All they could give me was something from their breakfast menu. I settled—grumbling all the way—for a couple of Egg McMuffins and an orange juice.

I finished my breakfast, refilled my water bottles, having drank three of them, and set off for Prescott around 9:00am.

The road to Prescott is nothing spectacular, but…it was struggling through a resurfacing and widening project. For two hours I rode squeezed against a concrete barrier, cars blaring their horns trying to get by me on the single grooved concrete lane that the Department of Transportation had left open. For the first few minutes I pondered the road sign stating that fines were doubled in construction zones. Wondering first if it would apply to whoever ran me over, and second if my parents would get any of the fine. After that I just concentrated on my riding and trying to keep my front wheel from being captured in a groove.

I rode into Prescott with a new craving. I wanted Mountain Dew. Everybody says that sugar is bad, caffeine is bad, blah, blah, blah… Well, it can be, but that day that was what I needed. I figured most people argued against sugar because it caused a sugar high, which is generally followed by a sugar low, which can be difficult to recover from. I resolved that I just wouldn’t let myself come off of the high. If you keep pumping in more sugar then you’ll have a hard time achieving the low. Besides, I needed the sugar because at this point I’d ridden 91 miles and climbed a total of 8, 500 feet.

The only place that I could think of that served Mountain Dew was Taco Bell. That’s not a problem because I’ve always liked Taco Bell. Same routine—I leaned my bike up against the glass window, walked in clicking my carbon fiber bike cleats across the tile floor, and asked the employee for six bean burritos and three soft tacos and an extra large pop.

He kind of looked at me funny.

He got me what I wanted and I started in on it. I ate all of it except two bean burritos which went into my jersey pockets. Then I walked out to my bike and grabbed two of my water bottles and filled them up with Mountain Dew also. Then I pedaled away.

The next part of my ride was the hardest. The wind turned against me and I was lethargic from having sat down to eat. I rode up over a hill to get out of Prescott heading south. The sun was full blast and it was the pits. The absolute pits. And then the sun went behind some clouds and it got really cold, but I’d been sweating from the sun and the climb, but then I was freezing and couldn’t get warm, and…it was the pits.

I rode through Yarnell and was hungry again. I pulled off the road but there weren’t any establishments that sold real food. I stopped into something like a general store just to stretch my legs and bought a few candy bars (sugar again).

Then came the best part of the whole trip.

The Yarnell Hill.

This isn’t just any hill, it is one the biggest climbs in the state. It soars 2,500 feet up the side of Table Top Mountain in a scant four miles. I however, had the privilege of going down it.

At the crest of the mountain I looked down onto my desert home. The warmth of desert floor was calling me and I answered by one again stepping into the pedals and dropping my bicycle into its biggest gear. Four miles wasn’t enough to pay for my suffering, but it brought the balance closer to being back in line.

It was probably around 3:00 when I got to the bottom. I pedaled my way to Wickenburg and finally got to treat myself to that number one value meal from McDonald’s. And then a second one.

Just one last leg home. About 45 miles.

It was getting dark and I was about 10 miles from home when I endured my only mechanical mishap of the trip. A flat tire. I was pretty close to past caring, so I just reinflated the tire and kept riding without patching it.

Two miles later it was flat again. I just wanted to quit, but no, I had to deal with this joke of a tire. Exhausted, I pulled out a spare tube and inserted into the tire casing and inflated it once more.

I climbed back onto my bike with my body screaming no.

I said yes. Audibly.

I pedaled the last few miles to my house and looked down at the computer on my handlebars. It read 195.70. That wasn’t going to cut it so I rode straight past my house.

My knee was throbbing and visibly swollen. My feet were blistered, my hands were numb. But I rode on.

Phoenix at Night

The last two miles were giving me such excruciating pain in my left knee that I unclipped my left foot and just pedaled with my right.

Around 8:15pm I pulled into my driveway and unclipped my right foot from the pedal. My body was disagreeing with me and I nearly fell over. My legs didn’t want to walk they wanted to turn circles so I stumbled up to the garage door, just as I’d left it nearly 16 hours before, audienceless.

I opened the door, pushed my bike in, and leaned it against the wall in its customary place. Next I pulled my helmet off. Sweat trickled out of the foam pads that help it to sit comfortably on your head. Then I took off my shoes. Then my gloves. I took one last swig of warm Mountain Dew out of my bottle and walked into the house.

My body ached, but now it could rest. My family was in the living room watching TV and I didn’t immediately announce my presence. I just sat down in the kitchen and sat.

Sat still.

I had ridden myself into a hallowed land. The few who really knew were amazed. A 16-year old—200 miles in one day, and with 12,500 feet of climbing at that, and alone, without the psychological assistance of competition or friends.

Simply unbelievable.

And to most it was. And to most it will be.

And it needs to be that way or wouldn’t mean the same thing.

But me, and to you. We know.

-Eddy Zakes
eazakes@juno.com