RGR Portland

For those of you who aren't familiar with the event I'm doing I will explain a little about it. The Rapha Gentlemen’s Race, or RGR is a fox and hound style race where six person teams take off one after the other every 3 minutes with the slowest leaving first. First team back to Portland, Oregon after 137 miles of mountainous gravel and dirt roads wins. The race is unsanctioned, uninsured, and unsupported. If you’ve seen a bicycle race on TV like the Tour de France this bears no resemblance. There are no prizes, no bouquets or wreaths, no kisses from pretty podium girls for the winner. There is no team car to give you food and water, no support motorcycle to hand you a spare wheel if you flat or fix your bike if it breaks and no sag wagon to cart you home if you can’t finish. This is old fashioned hardman racing and people are begging to get in. It will be the hardest single-day race I have ever done, even ignoring that I haven't raced or trained seriously in seven years.

Rapha, who puts on the event, is a British cycling apparel company. They specialize in two things; exorbitantly priced clothing and creating an image of a hip lifestyle. They have been quite successful at both. The Gentleman's Race is an extension of the "Continental" rides they have been doing for several years where a group of riders cycles a great distance across scenic European or North American countryside. Photographers and often a film crew document these rides and the images are used on Rapha's website, catalogs, advertisements, Rouleur magazine, etc. The RGR Portland is the same thing with plenty of black and white digital images being snapped to create a feeling of some epic and classical endeavor. It all adds up to a strong marketing effort to justify charging $300 for a $75 jersey.

I am a participant in a "ride of pretentiousness" and I don't mind a bit. In fact I think it will be quite a bit of fun, at least for the first 90 miles. Other than Donnie I haven't met any of the other people on our team but we will have plenty of opportunity to chat and get acquainted as we roll across Oregon. I'm approaching this as a long ride with new and old friends rather than as a media event or a race. There will be teams there trying to win but I just want to finish. Finishing anywhere other than last place would just be a bonus.

I'm in.

“If Hurl raced it last year, you can at least finish it…”

Like so many colossally bad ideas before it, this one started with an email from my friend Donnie. He was telling me to come out to Portland for the Rapha Gentlemen’s Race, an invitation only cycling event that’s far too exclusive for an average Joe like myself. Donnie had secured an invitation and needed to assemble five more riders for his team. He asked our fit and experienced racer friend Darren (who wisely declined for “work related” reasons) to join and provide some needed horsepower to the team, and then included me for my gullibility and the ease with which I have been hooked into his schemes in the past.

With Donnie the next ridge “isn’t that far, it just looks like 5 miles,” you have plenty of time before the sun sets and the river ice is always thick enough to support your weight. A rock climb might look too unconsolidated and scary to attempt himself but Donnie will say “this will be easy for you” or “it could be a first ascent!” He always knows the magic words for me to put aside common sense and plunge headfirst into an epic. Not an epic in the literary sense I’m afraid. In cycling or climbing “epic” is synonymous with pain, length, and suffering. And most of my epics featured Donnie as a central figure.

I told him I was too out of shape to keep up, I was retired, I no longer raced, I hadn’t even ridden more than 50 miles in a single day in over three years. Donnie explained that it would only be 100 miles (the first lie) of gently rolling terrain (the second) and I had enough latent fitness to keep up without any problem (lies three through four). Besides, there was a girl on our team so we wouldn’t ride that fast. Never mind that the girl, Donnie’s girlfriend Suzanne, had just been competing in the Tour Divide; a 2700 mile long non-stop mountain bike race stringing together barely mapped trails and fire roads along the Continental Divide from Banff to Mexico. She was beyond tough and likely the fastest, fittest member of the team.

Telling me Hurl had done the race the previous year was the half-truth that hooked me in. Hurl Everstone, AKA Tom Everson, is a legend in the Minneapolis cycling scene. Half punk rock star, half fictional character, and all force of nature Hurl is maybe five years older than me but looks far more. He has lived a Keith Richards lifestyle and it’s starting to show in his face if not in his half-cocked smile or eternally puckish eyes. Almost as gifted a natural athlete as he is a raconteur, Hurl rides his bike as a lifestyle rather than a pastime. He doesn’t train, he simply just rides. It was pure hubris on my part but I felt that if he could compete in the RGR in his current shape I could come off the couch and at least complete it.

After only one day of thinking I ignored common sense and emailed Donnie two words, “I’m in.” His response was one word, at least the way Donnie says it, “F**kyeah! And so begins an eight week crash course (Get Fit In a Hurry 101) of progressively longer rides, stretching, and trying to eat healthier.