Day 4, Battles: Rooster Rock → Champoeg Park

A fierce battle raged within me on this day. My knee hurt. I woke up and it hurt even before I got on the bike, but I decided to give it a try. The ride started with a few miles of a flat warm-up and then made a serious climb (close to 1,000 ft) from the river up to the Vista House for a gorgeous view of the Columbia River below. And my knee felt okay. Not great, but it didn’t seem to be getting worse, so I was feeling optimistic. The knee stayed about the same for the first 22 miles of the ride that day, but after the second water stop it started to seriously hurt. By the time we got to lunch at mile 32 I was peddling with only one leg, going exceptionally slow and was exceedingly grumpy. I also wasn’t concentrating on my actual riding and came fairly close to eating pavement a few times.

For the rational mind this is a very clear-cut situation. Don’t keep riding you idiot! I wasn’t even really able to ride, I was doing further damage to my knee and I wasn’t enjoying myself. Additionally, if I was going to miss some part of the ride, this would be a good section to miss as it had more traffic and was right around where I grew up and where my dad still lives so it isn’t like I’d never have a chance to ride those areas. Also, by cutting the day short I would have the rest of that day to rest and the whole next day as Day 5 was our layover/rest day.

However, for the reptilian brain the choice is not so clear. She is driven by irrational competition (in a situation where there is NO competition as it isn’t a race of any sort) and a desire to NEVER SAY DIE! To make matters worse, the other riders were absolutely horrible influences. First off, anyone who does a 425-mile, challenging bike ride as their “vacation” is a bit skewed from the get-go. All around me people’s bodies were failing. People were tapped and bandaged and hobbling and still planning on continuing on. I didn’t want to give up and be weaker than all these other people! I also really did want to do the “whole” ride and see what was going to be in the rest of the ride that day.

In the end I managed to subdue the reptile within and with some degree of lingering shame got a ride back to camp on the sag wagon. It didn’t help matters that all the others on the sag wagon were simply people who pansy-ed out on the day. They were “tired” or just wanted to get back to camp. Several were perpetual “saggers” who didn’t even plan on being able to do the whole ride and just take the sag wagon from lunch every day.

Limping around camp that night I knew I did the right thing AND there was BIKE RODEO to lift my spirits. Bike Rodeo is a battle of another feather. Imagine crazy bike mechanics doing barrel races (on bikes) and lasso-ing each other with the inner tubes of bike tires. There was also jousting where one person rides/drives the bike while another stands on the back with a joust and tries to knock over the other team. My favorite “event” was probably the one where they all race around crashing into one another trying to knock each other over. The only rule is that you have to keep your feet on the pedals and the last one remaining wins. The bike limbo was also pretty cool. The limbo stick got way lower than the handle bars yet the mechanics were able to do some tricky counterbalancing and make it under.