Blog

Friday, June 5: All trail today, and I was in a really good surprise, followed by a really bad surprise. 


Got back on the Cardinal Greenway Rail Trail around 8:30 AM. And my first support stop would be Williamsburg, about 10-11 miles to the northwest. Now I was expecting the worst considering what I related to you yesterday at the end of the blog. To reiterate my notes from 2 years prior, they said, “BITCH, BITCH, BITCH is what this is going to be. The asphalt trail is awesome, BUT the berm is this thin strip of limestone atop RR ballast - both on a slant.” So I went into this thing fearing a lowly 3-5 mph ride fighting to keep the bike upright amidst the slanting gravel and ballast, not to mention fighting all the vegetation on the side of the berm that was extremely overhanging back when I did recon here.


Well, when I got going, starting down in the Whitewater River Gorge where I ended yesterday in downtown Richmond. So I took the trail and it was just everything my notes had detailed. I mean the berm was just nonexistent. Rather I was riding in this berm of weeds and nettles and just plain crap. And then there was the “Trail Closed” sign that I totally blew off. “By God this is American Dirt, and I’m coming through ya!” Well, it was indeed under construction, and I had to ride through all this overturned earth and past construction equipment and such. My only hope was that if I was hassled I’d just play the dumb bike rider from out of town card. But no one said a word. They just ignored me, so I rode on to where the other side of the trail was intact. Again, more crap. It was like riding through the woods, and within a half hour I was at the trail’s end? 


And that’s when it hit me….I didn’t look at my cue sheet in the morning and did the Whitewater River Gorge trail NOT the Cardinal Greenway Trail. God was I stupid! All I had to do was to give the cue sheet a quick glance and I’d have seen what the hell I needed to do. So I pedaled up this road hoping to junction with the right trail. No luck. And that’s when I saw a sherif going out to his car. Stopped and asked him if there was a shortcut on roads to get back to the right trailhead. The guy was so cool…and told me to just follow him back into town and he’d get me to the right spot. Did just that, blowing through stop signs and red lights as this guy was doing like 30-35 mph ahead of me. I didn’t figure he’d give me grief, and he didn’t even blink. We arrived at the right place, which was just up above where I started this morning????? 


Thanked him for the escort and then got going on the right trail, by this time some 45 min behind schedule. So I kind of applied what I’d done on the Whitewater River berm, to the first 2 miles on the Cardinal Greenway, doing this to make up for the near hour of getting nowhere. And once I did take to the berm, it really wasn’t that bad - by my standards I’m talking! But it looks as if within the last couple of year since I’d been there, that work had been done on the “berms from hell” that I’d written about in my notes. Looked to be fairly fresh limestone gravel poured on top of the old limestone gravel and RR ballast. And on this little 1.5 foot to 2 foot berm was a nice flat surface. The gravel was nicely hard packed and I could ride this thing at anywhere from 7-10 mph, which to me is like heaven. What’s more, all the branches and vegetation that was tucked right up on the berm two years ago…it had been cut back by what looked like a brush hog that chewed that junk up to a heigh of 6-7 feet. This was like manna from above. God, I was just elated. I just fully expected a total beatdown.


Now to be honest, I think only I could be happy about riding on this thing, because as Judy said, (she rode her bike today on the asphalt for about 2-3 hrs) “I tried to ride that shit for a minute and couldn’t stand it.” But to me, heck I wasn’t tramping through streams, and pushing the bike up embankments, and carrying it though brush and waist high vegetation, so I was pretty dang happy about the situation. The real issue was the amount of concentration I had to devote to holding a great line, like a line on about 1.5 feet of flat surface. Go too far to the right on one side or to the left on the other, and you wash the wheels down this 30-degree angle slope that’s was about 2-3 feet down to the gully. What’s more there was a very slight lip on the asphalt, so you couldn’t really overlap a lot on that side because the front wheel could kind of slip and then ditch you. 


It was way more of an upper body workout just trying to keep that front wheel tracking properly than it was a leg workout. And I did wash it a couple times, which involved even more upper body for control of the wash. But most of the time I was able to keep it going pretty darned fast for the conditions I was dealing with. I had envisioned a total cluster*&^&# of a day riding that horrible berm from two yrs ago and getting raked by all the overhanging branches.  Reached Williamsburg at nearly a 9 mph pace. Grabbed a quick coke and then got back at it to the next support stop, Losantville. I was riding so slow that Judy didn’t even want to ride with me. She just did her own thing cruising alone at about 13-15 mph. But the great berm situation continued still, so I could just keep it going, surpassing my time estimations that I had made last night. Made Losantville at just around a 9 mph pace. 


So when I pulled in to the trailhead there were like five cyclists talking to Judy. And they kind of clapped as I pulled in. And I recognized the guys when they went by me like I was standing still. And the guys had kind of looked back at me when they passed, probably wondering what the hell I was doing, doing this balancing act on a thin strip of gravel berm. So anyway, Judy had told them what I was doing and they were taking a break when I arrived. The one guy even said something about not understanding what I was doing riding that berm as I was. Well, they took off for Muncie and I grabbed some lunch. By this time the temp was a sizzling 86 degrees with some good humidity. 


Now my notes had said that the next section, about a 20 mile stretch to Muncie, was good, where the berm was wider and flatter. So I figured I’d gotten away with something when the ratty 25 mile section from Richmond to Losantville turned out to be pretty good. And the first 5 miles of the Muncie section was indeed flat and fast, so flat and fast that I could get in the big ring and crank out 12 mph. Did this until the berm seemed to be getting thinner, and higher up and pretty deteriorated. And be damned if the branches and vegetation were NOT trimmed and thinned like the prior segments. Got harder and harder to keep my line as the actual top of the berm narrowed down to 6 inches in places. But it was a progressive thing, where over the course of several miles I noticed it more and more until it was just a real chore to keep that front wheel tracking in a good line. 


Not to mention that I had to one hand it many a time to keep my right or left arm from getting scraped, stabbed, raked and torn by all the overhanging vegetation and branches. So on many stretches I was bringing my right arm in, Xing over my left, or visa versa, so as to not end up with big scratches on the arms and shoulders which were on the vegetation side. And oh yea, then there were the deer flies, who seem to sense when you’re vulnerable, and then bite the living hell out of you because you can’t do anything. And it just got progressively worse and worse. Looked as if my so called “good” area had deteriorated, and my so called “bad” area had been fixed. So I was back in the shit for the second half. The only good thing about all of this was that I was still able to maintain 7-9 mph. 


But then things really got worse, and the vegetation just turned into a tunnel about my head, doing all the scraping, stabbing, raking and thrashing that I had envisioned the night before. And my little gravel berm line was no more than 6 inches wide. Now it was really tough to keep that line. And the shoulders were starting to ache from all the bar steering and stabilizing stuff I’d been doing. And round about then I took a biff when my rear wheel washed and then my front wheel got cockeyed and kind of got caught between the asphalt trail and the gravel berm. The front wheel did this bulldozing thing and I ended up sliding on my left side for about 3 feet on the asphalt. Funny thing though, is that I was perfectly fine. Just sounded like hell with the left pedal scraping the asphalt as I slid. 


Now there is a horse trail on the side of the trail for about 4 miles, and I did try it, but wow, what a bloody mess. It was mud, deadfall, mosquitos and a host of other undesirable obstacles that made that option not even an option. So it was back to the tiny gravel berm in the tunnel of vegetation. There was one section that was just impossible to ride, so I just bike walked for about a quarter mile. Them by the time I got into the burbs of Muncie, the berm got a bit better - aka: Ridable. By the time I got to Judy I was just beat to a pulp from all the steering and concentrating stuff. But I did do 40 miles of balancing on gravel berm. And that I was pretty happy with. Actually feel like I got somewhere today despite the 10-mile beatdown at the end. We got a cheap motel in the city, did this AMAZING chinese buffet, and now we’re just chilling with some HBO. More fun tomorrow!!