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BACK IN THE SADDLE

Just a handful of hours until the start of the 2005 Hudson Valley Summer Solstice Bike Ride - and the official international blogcast here on Side Salad.

We'll be blogging all day as rider Alan Snel calls in dispatches from the 160-mile route.

Alan's been training for months for this, fine tuning his body and his bike for the grueling challenge. Ever ride 40 miles before work each day? Al did. For weeks.

Day after day he did this, all so he could be ready to honor the memory of a friend.

In advance of the ride, he filed this pre-race report:

Newburgh, Orange County, N.Y. 6:10 a.m. -- It took 1,400 miles of driving, but it's worth the trip to the Motherland, Rockland County, where I grew up 30 miles north of New York in the lower Hudson Valley.

It's here in Harriman State Park, a sprawling two-county park of woods, creeks, lakes and hills where I'll feel the burn of climbing the rolling terrain less than an hour's drive from the Big Apple. Calling this place a park doesn't do it justice -- it's the size of several towns.

I will be pushing off from the George Washington Bridge at Fort Lee, N.J. around 4:45 a.m. and heading north to the New York state capitol lawn, an all-day bike trek of 160 miles, including crossing the Hudson River four times. I hope to reach Albany by 8:30 p.m.

At 4:50 a.m. there is enough light in the Hudson Valley to safely negotiate the roads on a bicycle. On the morning of the Summer Solstice, sunrise will officially be at 5:21 a.m.

The hills where I'll be starting the trek slayed me 20 years when I started as a neophyte cyclist -- but now I negotiate each crest with the controlled frenzy of a veteran. Remarkably, even though I haven't biked these roads for several years, I still remember every twist and grade and texture of the roads like I know the mood and personality and demeanor of my family members.

The weather for the ride is looking fine. Today, Monday, is a picture-postcard day. Temperatures will top out in the high 70s and the humidity is low. For Tuesday, the official 2005 Hudson Valley Summer Solstice Bike Ride in memory of Bill Fox day, the weather will heat up slightly into the mid 80s, with "partly cloudy" in the forecast.

No rain. And here’s a kicker – looks like winds out of the south, which would be a real treat since tailwinds are a bicyclist’s best friends.

The anticipation is exciting. And part of the bike ride's lure are the people I will inevitably meet along the way.

After slamming hills during a training run Sunday with Chris O'Connell, a strong-as-a-horse cyclist who carries the mojo of cycling in his heart, I shared a dinner Sunday night with my friend Rosemary, a second-grade teacher in the Gardnertown Elementary School in the Newburgh School District who tells me her class has surpassed the one-book report-for-every-mile project. A month ago, the class' goal was 160 book reports. The class has topped the 200 mark in four weeks. The kids are pumped to read -- even kids who have not shown excitement in the past are cranking out book reports. They're proud of the chart on the wall -- and that makes me proud about Tuesday's bike ride.

I’ll be meeting friends along the 160-mile odyssey – new ones, too, such as Rondout artist Jan Harrison and her husband, Alan Baer, an architect. Jan overheard my mention of Rondout, a historic waterfront section in Kingston, when I was chatting with Rosemary Evans at dinner Sunday night.

I told Jan and Alan I’ll be visiting Kingston along the bike ride Tuesday and one thing led to another and Alan, the architect, was already crafting a locator map to guide me and my biking pal Chris O’Connell to their home and studio to catch Jan’s art. Jan will be away around 1 p.m., when I hope to be cruising through Kingston en route to Albany, but Alan said he would be there and happily serve as guide. The Rondout neighborhood is a quick hop off Route 9W, the road I’ll be taking through Kingston.

Jan’s work can be found here.

By the way, I’m happy to report the Stewarts ice cream/convenience store chain is alive and well in the Hudson Valley. It’s the Saratoga Springs-based chain with more than 300 stores scattered around the Hudson Valley that purveys gasoline and ice cream in mammoth quantities.

Let’s just say there’s more than a few Stewart’s stores along the bike route – or as I like to call them, “Big Stews” – to carbo-fuel these 160 miles.

Mostly, I'm thinking of the challenge I'll face when pedaling all day Tuesday, the first day of summer -- the summer solstice. But then I think about Bill Fox, the long-distance bicyclist from Middletown, N.Y. who died three years ago in a bike accident. This bike ride Tuesday is in Bill's memory. I wrote about Bill for a local newspaper in the Hudson Valley after he died -- and its impact still motivates me.

Bill Fox shared his enthusiasm for cycling with everyone, wanting to infuse people with the love of cycling so that they, too, would experience the same feeling he did when he sat on a bike saddle. I plan to celebrate that feeling on Tuesday to celebrate Bill's legacy and to mark the first day of summer here in the Hudson Valley.

Posted by Jeff at June 20, 2005 10:15 PM | TrackBack