Sometimes, when you accomplish something you didn't think was possible, you need to let it have its own glorious paragraph on your blog, just to appropriately savor the moment of typing out something you never thought you'd type.
I rode 52 miles on a bike in one day.
Yup. I did it.
That extra paragraph was just for bragging purposes. But on May 5, I, along with a group of 8 friends, successfully completed a ride through every borough of New York City - yes, including Staten Island.
The Five Boro Bike Tour is an epic annual event. Every year, the city shuts down the entire route to cars on this one amazing Sunday and leaves the roads at the mercy of thousands of eager cyclists. A few of my friends have been doing it for years, and they convinced me, somehow, that it would be a great idea.
I've never been much of an athlete, but I wanted to do the tour in the name of adventure and completing a personal challenge and having a really unique experience in my city. And as an even more awesome result, I've grown to really like bicycling during the last few weeks I've spent prepping for the Five Boro. My first long ride, a loop from my apartment in Astoria to the Queensborough Bridge, through Central Park, and back was pretty agonizing. My quads ached, and my butt was angry at me for days. The worst part? It was only 14 miles. How in the name of all holy things was I supposed to finish 40 for the Bike Tour, plus the additional 10 or so miles getting to and from the route?
It's kind of incredible the things your body and brain can accomplish when you just say, "Whatever, let's do this."
The ride started on a chilly morning in Queens when we rode to meet some friends for the first leg of our journey. We heaved our bikes up stairs and onto the LIRR, which we rode down to Penn Station. Seeing Penn Station teeming with hundreds of spandex-clad cyclists at 7 am? I recommend it.
We biked the path alongside the Hudson and met up with more of our crew. I'm not a morning person, but the river looked pretty gorgeous in that early light.
We got down to the Financial District and pulled up alongside the thousands of other riders that were joining in the quest for glory - there were as many as 30,000 riders from all over the country and the world sharing the road with us. We waited for awhile until our start time (8:30), and eventually started slowly rolling up 6th avenue.
We rode up to Central Park, all the way up to Harlem:
Then took a brief swing through the Bronx (my second time there! The first was at the zoo). After that, it was a zip down FDR Drive and over the familiar Queensborough Bridge. We made a stop in Astoria Park for bathrooms, Clif Bars, and Stinger Waffles (WHICH ARE AMAZING), then headed down to Brooklyn.
For the final stretch, we took over the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, a multi-lane elevated highway that was surreal to ride on. At this point, I was 30-40 miles in, the wind resistance was bad, and I was starting to get a little tired, with still the formidable Verrazano Bridge to conquer. But I chilled out, focused, and pushed through the last miles of hills and wind and crossed the finish line in Staten Island.
Hell. Yes.
After milling around the finish area for a while, we swung our legs over our bikes yet again for a three-mile ride to the Staten Island Ferry (where I ate a terrible soft pretzel from the snack stand) and stood up on my pedals half the way back through Manhattan to soothe my aching bum. It felt like I had been stung by a thousand miniature bees on every tender part of my backside, if miniature bees were a thing. Finally home after hours of toil, I collapsed onto the couch and immediately ordered a cheeseburger from the greasiest spoon I could find. Because, like the old saying goes, "When you burn 3500 calories in one day, you deserve to eat a greasy cheeseburger."
The ladies of our crew celebrating our finish:
Things learned: I'm not as physically inept as I always feared. I am capable of accomplishing great things. I didn't train excessively for this ride, but I signed up, and I showed up, and sometimes that's the hardest part when it comes to doing something totally foreign.
I hope this is the start of something great between me and cycling, and at the very least, the start of a grand tradition of many more Bike Tours completed!
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