Heartbreak Hill

For most of Saturday’s Pan Mass Challenge it felt as though all 5,454 riders passed me at some point during the nearly 7 hours on the road.  It’s always a great feeling when a wave of cyclists blow by you like an 18-wheeler on 128 South. But you battle through, gobbling six peanut butter cliff bars for extra energy, taking short breaks on rest stops, and somehow, with all of your body telling you to stop, you finish. My bike crossed the line in Bourne Massachusetts among one of the first 2,000.

“So basically what you’re saying Dad, is you lost” Arnie said later.

I suppose he’s right, though thankfully we like to think of the ride across southeastern Massachusetts as a challenge, a cause.

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A nametag dangles from the bar on your bike during the near 90-mile jaunt. Event planners require it in case you take a spill and need medical attention, but there’s a side perk: crowds can cheer for you in a more personal way, particularly if you’re like me and travel along like a wobbly red wagon. Three miles before the Mass Maritime finish line Saturday a group of Bostonians wearing pink wigs and yellow Ts started shouting my name – “You got it Bryan! You can do it! YOU….CAN….DO IT!!”

They were like my personal Bela Karoli cheering section.

I was mixed in with maybe 5 other cyclists at this point and no one from the pink wig gang was shouting their names. I’m guessing I looked like I needed motivation. Maybe the double layer of sweat beads was an indicator, or maybe it was the moment up a short hill near Buzzards Bay when my bike essentially stopped and I contemplated unclicking my shoes and crying a little.

I rode with different people that day – most imaginary, but some real.  Mary Ellen from York Maine, a 72-year-old, was riding in her 19th Pan Mass. Cancer had never affected her family until 1998 when she felt her first lump. “It was like I was putting a downpayment on my medical care,” she quipped as we approached a flat stretch of the ride, with oak trees dangling over us, keeping the sun out momentarily, injecting a gentle breeze. Mary started to pedal faster. “I go at my own my pace, not as fast as I did back in my 60s.”

Mary was easy to spot in the sea of bicycles and blue jerseys. She had an orange bike, purple and yellow streamers dangling from her helmet and hair the color of a perfect cloud on a sunny day. Mary’s breast cancer treatment worked thanks to Dana Farber. Six years after Mary’s first infusion, her sister was diagnosed with a more aggressive tumor, found in stage III, and despite a great fight ultimately lost her life in 2006. Mary says she feels her sister grab hold of the pedals on heartbreak hill every year. “Maybe it’s my imagination, but I feel something.”

There were a hundred Marys in the Pan Mass, maybe not all so colorful and certainly not quite as seasoned, but no less full of stories about why they were on the road. It was not a great day to be out of air conditioning, much less ride nearly 100 miles.  The air was stale and the sun stuck to us like cellophane even before Red Sox DH David Ortiz signaled the official opening at 6:55 a.m.  ‘It’s your day,’ he shouted, first pointing to us, then to the sky.  At that moment, riders were already wearing a layer of sweat, some were already drenched, some hunched over their bikes. We wore humidity like a hoodie. But Bono’s “It’s a Beautiful Day” blared on the loudspeaker seemingly giving everyone a jolt of mental energy to take off.

Before we started I had already finished 2 bottles of water by the time we left Babson College. It helped. At mile 12, I was riding at a good clip through Needham Massachusetts when we passed a “Thanks Ali Raisman” sign. The New England trees made the ride early much easier and by the first rest stop at mile 20 my legs felt surprisingly good for a guy who hadn’t trained. The medical tent was unusually crowded at the first  stop – two men were getting IVs, others were getting muscle rubs. By mile 26, we left the tree covering and turned toward a farmy stretch of Southeastern Mass with much less shade. A group of teenage fife and drummers played on their front lawn and an old fella wearing a fishing hat and dangling a Marlboro from his mouth watered down riders with a fireman’s hose. You didn’t care if you risked slipping. A group of kids passed out red lollipops. It was a community event, stretched out over dozens of towns and states, even countries. John from Indianapolis, Penny from Tyler, Texas, Michael all the way from Toronto. ‘I lost 2 nights sleep getting here, but it’s worth it to see these crowds,’ Michael told me.

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At traffic lights, you could see more riders unclick and suck down a half bottle of water aid, others slouched over their bikes. Dehydration, cramps, nausea–they all set in even for the Olympian- like riders who train year-round.

The nausea couldn’t have been worse than that 24-hour bout you get after a night in the hospital, the kind of nausea that sets in after the chemo nurse starts the drip of that yellow syrupy stuff and you sit there twiddling your fingers, telling yourself you can do it, wondering if the medicine is really helping you, because you don’t feel like it is. Said Mary: “My counts looked good and my doctor was happy with my progress, but I felt like I was being tossed around inside a dryer.”

It’s a kind of nausea many riders are reminded of first hand when they approach the ‘Sad Stop,’ a rest area entrance lined with giant posters of children who battle cancer.  There were a lot of moments where you battle the emotions of the event, the objective of beating your best time and the physical toll each mile takes.

By mile 39 we started hitting the harder hills. At one, you could hear the Scottish man playing the aptly titled “Lost Song” on his bagpipes, a tradition that every Pan Mass rider knows.  You love and hate the sound, because in one sense the music is the marker that you’ve arrived at probably the toughest hill of the ride’s first day yet is for some of us the only thing pulling us the through. A lot of us were beat up pretty good at that stage, probably closer to dehydration than we realized. We were about five miles to the mid-way point lunch stop.

The hill sneaks up on you around a tight corner flanked by tall grass reeds, then a series of oaks. It’s at most the length of a football field but sends you straight up a shoot. I didn’t quite hit it hard enough this year so my ride up the bagpipe hill was slow and painful. I was the tortoise, not the hare in that moment. I shifted into grandma gear, tried to get lost in the music, kept my head steady and imagined myself on a ski lift pulley, moving slowly to the top.