(*Abandonment, or something like that)

Despite what people think, I don’t actually get everything right (although I’d certainly like to wish ;-) ) or achieve everything I set out to. And finishing Paris-Brest-Paris was one of them.

Someone once asked how you end up doing ultra-long distance events (although I think the same could be said for anything crazy) and off the cuff I said that I had fallen in with the wrong crowd. But I thought about it and really, that IS actually what happens – you start hanging around with this group and they’re really great people and you like them and you’re pretty OK at whatever it is the group is doing, and then they take it to the next level and somehow, you think that’s pretty reasonable. And before you know it, you’re riding your bike for 38 hours on 3 hours sleep, through the dark to qualify for some event you had never even heard of 3 years before.

Paris-Brest-Paris (known as PBP) is so long, and so rigorous, that they won’t let you go to France unless you qualify for it ahead of time. It’s 750 miles in 90 hours or less and yes, you get very little sleep in that time. And they only do it every four years, and the last time was in 2007. So I spent the spring getting the qualifiers knocked out, and they were no cakewalk – there was the 200k (127 miles) which was 50 degrees and raining the whole time, finishing with about 2 miles to go with one of the worst hills in Austin, a 300k (190 miles) which had the dog-chase in the dark – you haven’t lived until you’ve been chased by a black dog, and you can hear him barking, but you can’t see anything but white teeth getting closer. Then there was the 400k, which was 250 miles, which my office manager and her boyfriend helped crew, and she told me later that she had been too scared to pee in the dark, because the area was so deserted and she was terrified for me, and then the 600k (350 miles in less than 40 hours – they all had time limits) which is mostly a blur, but I remember a lot of wind, and the fact that one of the people in our group died of a heart attack the next day – he was 59, I think, and a doctor and they found him in his hotel room. It was very sad. And a bit scary, to tell the truth.

All this, so you could have the PRIVILEGE of riding 750 miles through the French countryside, on an historic ride that even has a pastry named after it (it’s round, like a bike tire). My first mistake was getting caught in the momentum – there were airline tickets to buy, and organization with my crew, and other people I was meeting in Paris and I couldn’t stop long enough to realize that I was really DAMN TIRED. More tired than you should be going into something like that. My second mistake was having hopes about the weather. It was August in Europe – it’s not unreasonable to expect something, maybe, comfortable? As we stood on the start line, it started to rain. And then it never stopped, and the temperature dropped to about 50. And stayed there. Really, I had never known misery like that. I hate being cold and wet and I’m willing to deal with it to some degree if it’s going to end soon, but this wasn’t going to end soon – there was still over 3 days to go. So at one of the checkpoints around 250 miles, I simply stopped. I told my crew I had enough and considering that it was nearing midnight and we were standing in the cold, wet rain when I said it, they didn’t argue with me much. I hadn’t slept in nearly 40 hours at that point.

So don’t ask me what possessed them to agree to let me drive – I guess I seemed so AWAKE at that moment? But when Jonathan asked me, rather calmly, if I was OK because I was crossing the white line, I said, No, I didn’t think so. And from nearly the second I sat down in the passenger seat, I fell asleep, right in the middle of a sentence.

It took months for me to recover from all that – the training, PBP itself and the lack of sleep. My adrenals were SHOT. I’m really clear that the people who do it have an enormous feeling of satisfaction and achievement, as well they should, but I’ve decided that I’ll be getting my kudos from someplace else. It was a damn good lesson in overdoing it – the local paper did an article on me, despite not finishing, simply because the mentality of agreeing to something like that, and training for it is beyond most people’s imagination.

So don’t fall in with the wrong crowd and you should be fine.

And the only reason I’m smiling in this picture is because I’m off my damn bike. ;-)