Ride Report: Autumn In Bonham (Bonham, TX)

I didn't do the Autumn in Bonham ride last year, because of some sort of schedule conflict. This year, I wasn't planning on it just because I felt I'd maxed out my 2006 entry fee budget. However, word on the street is that it's a really nice ride, and I felt an obligation to take a crack at the Leonard Leviathans—three very large (for Texas) hills—after missing them during the Cotton Patch Classic, so I signed up anyway.

The drive up ended up taking less time than I expected, so I parked up close, picked up my ride number and t-shirt (my second favorite design of this season, by the way), and set about unloading and assembling my bike. The guy parked next to me turned out to be Blanca from over on BikeJournal.com, so we chatted with each other for a while and then with various other acquaintances as they arrived.

It continues to amaze me that I go to these rallies with hundreds of other riders and always seem to run into at least a dozen people I know (including Lance, Lance's son, Allez, and Allez's husband). I think that's kind of neat.

Shortly before 9 am, everyone lined up and we got under way. I started off riding with John, local legend and webmaster of the popular bicycle-stuff.com, but we got separated early, at an intersection where a police officer had his SUV parked right in the middle of the intersection and gave confusing instructions about which groups were supposed to go which way. I went left; John went straight, never to be seen (by me) again.

Almost immediately, we came to a long climb. And then another. And another. Cool, I thought. We're getting this all out of the way early, while our legs are still fresh.

But they kept coming... and coming... and by my first stop at the second rest stop, my quads were already grousing at me. I'd maintained a 16.3 mph average to that point, but I knew that I was going to have to back off my assaults on the climbs if I was going to survive the rest of the 64-mile route (which, in typical bike rally fashion, was actually .1 mile short of 67 miles).

While I was eating a banana and chatting up one of the grandmotherly volunteers, a couple of those acquaintances I mentioned before rolled up at the rest stop: Steve (who rides a fire engine red Bacchetta Café recumbent) and Peggy (who looks and sounds enough like our blog buddy, Allez, that they could be sisters) from Frisco. Knowing that I ride a more sane pace when socializing, I joined up with them and their friend for the rest of the hilly, energy-sucking-chip-seal-plagued, beautiful-scenery-having ride.

This was one of those routes that really made me wish that my digital camera weren't quite so bulky. There were surreal fields of some sort of golden-flowered weed clumps. There were barns and cows. There were interesting little near-ghost towns that just begged to have their weathered facades and peeling columns photographed. Everywhere we went, people smiled, yelled, and waved from porches and front yards.

I was impressed, overall, with how the drivers in the area didn't feel compelled to threaten us with their vehicles. In fact, the only close calls I had all day were near Leonard. In one case, I had come to a full stop at a four way intersection and awaited my turn to go. As I did, the elderly woman in the PT Cruiser decided she wanted to go. So I stopped. She waved for me to go, and as I did, she started to pull out again. So I stopped. She waved me on. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

The other was a police officer, who came within a foot of clipping me with his passenger side mirror as I balanced precariously on the white line along one of the few stretches of road that didn't have a nice, wide shoulder to retreat to. At the next rest stop, I mentioned this to one of the volunteers. When I described the guy to her, she told me that this was "the Leonard cop", that he was a jerk, and that he'd been buzzing the rally participants all day.

Way to serve and protect, Barney.

Finally, we came to the Leviathans, and I remembered what I'd been told by others who had ridden them. The first two were steep but made manageable by the fact that they were prefaced by nice descents. When I saw the big hills ahead, I shifted to the biggest gear I had and gave gravity a hand. I reminded myself not to overdo it on the way down because I'd need my quads and hamstrings for the climb, but I needn't have bothered. At 37 mph, I spun out (i.e., ran out of top end gears) and had to coast until I reached the point of resistance on the climb.

Two down, no problem.

But the third hill... that one was every bit as nasty as I'd heard. It wasn't preceded by as much of a downhill, leeched away all your momentum, and then got steeper as it turned. And all on that momentum-robbing chip seal. When I was already into my small ring by the halfway point, I knew I was in trouble, but I kept churning away. Two thirds of the way up, I'd run out of gears on the low end. With my mucles wrung out by all the day's previous climbs, I could no longer spin and was reduced to mashing on the pedals. Twenty yards from the top, I was down to about 5 mph and nearing my stall speed—you can't really track stand a recumbent—but my guts were telling my brain to tell my legs that we were almost there and to stop being such wussies.

That's when my right quad flew all of us the bird and threw a cramp.

Rather than risk the embarrassment of falling over or the embarrassment of tearing something and having to ride the SAG wagon (although, now that I think of it, I can't recall seeing one all day), I put my feet down and walked the short distance to the top. Meanwhile, Steve veered around me and cleared the top. I could attribute his success to slightly lower gearing or to slightly wider tires that roll better on the chip seal. I may have used up too much of my legs earlier in the ride, or it may go back to the hammerfest I did with a couple friends after work, two days earlier. The bottom line is that I didn't beat the hill, and that's a bitter pill for me to swallow.

The rest of the ride was no sweat. Once it had made its point, my right quad behaved itself. We had an enjoyable, uneventful ride back to the starting point, where we discovered that most of the cars were gone and the organizers had pretty much folded up their tent. We must have dawdled at a couple rest stops longer than I'd realized, because even with all the climbing I still ended the day with a 16 mph rolling average.

Bonham was certainly one of the most challenging rides I've done this season, but I enjoyed the route, the scenery, and the company. I'm just thinking maybe I need to find a leg press to work out on before I consider going back for seconds.