Crystal Ride

I rode in the Air Force Crystal Ride last Sunday, a 50km amateur bike race around Arlington. It was my first organised cycling event. The ride actually offered three options – 25, 50 or 100km. My friend C.S., who roped me into participating in the first place, and I chose the medium option.

The route was a series of laps, four in our case, that started on Crystal Drive in Crystal City (right behind my office, as it happened), headed North through the no man's land of Old Jeff Davis Highway (Arlingtonians know what I'm talking about), past the Pentagon and up to the Air Force memorial on Columbia Pike. The course was flat with the notable exception of the long climb up to the Memorial from the Pentagon parking lot.

The morning started out with pouring rain, and it was still coming down pretty hard when I parked my car a mile or so away from the starting line about 6:30 a.m., and C.S. texted me that he wasn't going to ride in this weather, but would show up just in case it improved. It did improve, as it happened, and by a few minutes before the 7:30 a.m. starting time, the rain had stopped and the clouds were beginning to part. It would prove to be a gorgeous morning for a bike ride.

The ride was, all in all, uneventful. I pushed pretty hard on the first two laps, with C.S., who is a far more experienced rider and a veteran of several centuries, both metric and imperial, loafing alongside. Scrambling up the final hill was no problem on the first lap, though considerably more challenging on the second. By the third, though I was still going pretty strong on the flat sections, I had to give up all pretense of being able to keep up, shifted the bike down to the lowest possible gear of my wimp-approved triple crank, and crawled up the hill, passed in the process by several of the spandex-clad poseurs that I was able to fend off until then. By then, C.S. lost me completely and I finished out the last lap and a half in solitude. Final time: 2:09:45, for an average speed of a hair over 14 mph. Now my right knee hurts, though given the lack of any riding practice this winter, and the generally ill-fitting nature of my bike, the rest of me is surprisingly intact.