Thanks to Balaramacandra prabhu and Bhakta Justin, my bicycle has been salvaged from the hook it was gathering dust on in the basement and is once again road worthy. One aspect of the needed maintenance was changing a tire that was so old it was dry rotted.

The last time I remember riding it was a bike trip with Tulasi and Marken down the back way into Elm Grove along the creek. Marken has been gone for 5 years, and they were young when we did the excursion, so that had to be last century.

I have a difficult time doing pointless exercise. I can’t run just for the sake of running. I can run in a soccer game, as there is a point to it. I acknowledge that to some it is a meaningless point, but my mind doesn’t see it that way so it is incentivized to put out the effort.

I need to be exercising to help struggle against the side effects of the interferon and ribavarin I am taking, although the side effects themselves are fatigue and shortness of breath, so that is an internal contradiction

Vidya had gone to town with the car, so no lunch being served at home. Full of optimism, I decided that even though any sort of burst of energy had me panting within 5 seconds, I could leisurely pedal to the temple, take some lunch prasadam, rest as long as necessary, and return when I was recovered. An incentive.

Hah.

Making it there wasn’t too bad. I only had to make two stops, the first half way up the Bahulaban hill. I have 18 speeds and in the lowest one was able to pull the hill pedaling with the single break.

Coasting down the hill from the Palace to the temple, it started to rain, and some dim memory of biking down a hill decades ago in the rain and having brake failure due to wet rims flickered through my memory, but never developed in this case.

After an executive lunch break, I felt tired but still confident. While there is basically no level parts in the road — one is always either cranking up a hill or coasting down — the temple is on a higher elevation than my house, so the net effect was more downhill than up on the return journey,

Fatigue soon asserted her cruel grip though and by the time I reached the Palace, I was taking my second break already. The third break was sitting on the bank by Raghu’s, watching the view, across the hollow, of Snyder’s farm.

It was made even more breathtaking by a passing thunderstorm. I was waiting to see if I was going to need to take shelter of his barn. Snyder’s was getting hit, and I could see the lightning and hear the pleasing rumbles of thunder, that natural sound that heard acoustically can exceed even a great requiem mass for beauty.

The thunderstorm passed so closely that I could hear the rain falling in the leaves of the trees at Lalita Gopi’s, but was untouched where I sat.

Once I was sure it had passed enough so I would be behind it, I set out again. I made it down to Bahulaban, but the exhaustion was really setting in.

Another storm was starting to roll in. I didn’t have the juice to make the hill up into the Bahulaban barn, where I have spent thousands of hours, so ducked into Floyd Coffield’s (Krishna rest his soul) old barn and waited it out there.

The rest didn’t revive me. There were no reserves to draw on. If I was in a soccer match, I would have been raising my hand for a substitution. Not an option in this case. I still had to pull the hill to my place.

I had it in the lowest possible gear, but by the time I got to Judy’s, I was dismounted and my mind was telling me it was over, making it home was not possible. Which was a great feeling, as it was real, a real problem, a real danger (okay, not that much of a danger being on a road well traveled by devotees, but it had a real feel), a physical adversity to overcome. What a relief from being a prisoner in cerebral land!

Fortunately, I have pushed myself to the limit on previous occasions, and know that once the physical reserves are depleted, there is still a mental energy that can be harnessed.

Plus, all the kids Judy day cares were out on the porch, so there was no way my false ego was going to let me collapse in front of them, so I kicked in with “poser power”. I had to acknowledge to Judy I had bitten off more than I could chew, but by the time I had passed through the zone of “hi” and “goodbye” with all the kids, I was only a hundred yards from home.

Vidya asked me if I was okay when she saw me walking in, and I said no. She took the bike and I continued into the house, hydrating and flicking on a fan to cool down in front of.

So, the longest ride of the century for me ended ingloriously, a mere 6 miles in the record book.

I have a ways to go to worry last century’s record. That was an approximately 2000 mile solo ride from Grand Forks, North Dakota, to Daytona Beach, Florida. By the end of that trip I was pumped up, and a 100 mile day was routine. More about that another day.