Prouty On!

Jeanne and I rode The Prouty for the fifth time last Saturday.  We've always done the full 100, on the tandem, of course.  The start was pleasantly cool, with a light fog, but things warmed up fairly quickly under a clear sky.  As usual, there was a huge number of riders participating, and we ran into a number of people that we know.  The tandem has its own speed, though, so we didn't ride for any appreciable distance with anyone in particular.

Moosilauke Highway

The worse part of such a popular charity ride is that there are almost always people riding slowly up every hill.  Tandems are not known for their hill-climbing prowess, though they descend like rockets, but it's really hard to go as slow as many of these riders.  On a single, you can simply accelerate around the group and then get back to your tempo, but it takes a lot more effort to do this on a tandem.  You need to time things so that you can get completely around the riders while there is a break in the traffic, and it doesn't help when they are going at different speeds.  It would be a lot easier if people would stay to the right, as the Prouty route features lots of wide shoulders, but this is, after all, a social event, so one can understand it if folks want to chat alongside their friends, where possible.

Sue & Dave approaching the bridge to Vermont

We caught up to Sue and Dave on their tandem a bit over half-way through the loop.  They had ridden the 100/200 back in June, the first to ever do so on a tandem!  They are a strong team and it was fun to ride with them, though they were stronger up some of the hills than we.  SAG stops are placed every ten miles or so on the Prouty route, and we were skipping every other one.  Being out of sync with the stops Sue and Dave were using, we were only with them for about 10 miles.  We added our names to those of the others riding for Team Hoss this year, mostly because so many Team Hoss folks have ridden the 100/200 over the past few years.  Team Hoss was the third highest fundraising team this year, raising over $86K.

Connecticut River, south of Wells River

As usual, we picked up a headwind when we headed south in Wells River, but it wasn't nearly as bad as in some previous years.  By the 80-mile mark, we were both pretty cooked and were happy when we passed the steel drum band on the final (and steep) hill, just before the finish.  We finished with an average speed of just over 17 mph, which was significantly slower than last year, but still respectable.  We'll be in good shape for the Eastern Tandem Rally in a couple weeks.

At the post-ride festivities, we loaded up our plates and headed for one of the three huge tents, randomly selecting one of hundreds of tables, where there happened to be two vacant seats.  After a few minutes, I noticed that a person sitting at the other end of the row of tables looked familiar and, sure enough, it was John Painter, along with Phil Surks and his family.  Now, it is a bit odd to randomly end up at the same table as someone you know in an event this large, but it's far stranger when this is exactly what happened two years ago, with the same people, and it's not like we were even sitting in the same place!  It reminded us of last year, where we ran into two friends at the 25-mile SAG stop and they each started introducing us to the other person.  It turns out that the two guys had never met before, and had randomly found themselves riding together and struck up a conversation on the climb to the SAG.  They didn't realize that we knew both of them already--and very few of the thousands of other people there.

We've lost too many friends of ours to cancer and have known far too many others who have contracted one form or another of the disease.  I am reminded of Richard Thompson's verse, "Too many friends of ours, blown off this mountain in the wind."  As we get older and that circle grows, and we realize it could happen to anyone, including us, riding the Prouty becomes more and more a compelling experience.  With our clutch of yellow ribbons bearing the names of some of these folks streaming from the back of our tandem, it's hard not to be reminded that any of them faced much greater obstacles than we did on this little ride on a beautiful summer day, climbing our little hills.  They were the giants.  They climbed mountains.

Prouty On!