May’s Year-Rounder ride was the “Biking with the Band” charity ride put on by the Middle Creek High School Marching Band in Apex, NC. I was joined by my good friend Dave Lennon for his first “real” bike ride and we rode the 32-mile loop. What’s that you say? How can a 32-mile loop possibly count towards the YR? Well… Middle Creek High School is 35 miles from my house. 
I got up at 4:00AM so that I could leave around 4:30. I left the house a little after 5:00, and was back at my house at 5:10. I had gotten all of a half mile away before I realized I had forgotten my helmet. Not the best start I could have hoped for, especially considering that I was on a deadline to get to Middle Creek High School by 7:30 to check in before the 8:00 start of the ride. As I left the house for the second time, I realized that, in order to make it there on time, I was going to have to keep an average pace of around 15mph. I was riding the mountain bike (because Dave would be riding a mountain-style bike and, for conversation’s sake, I wanted to be sitting upright as he would be) for which 15mph is a fairly rapid pace. No, not the best start to the day by a long shot…
As I rode south towards Apex, NC, I took (voice)notes of a few things:
- There are roosters living within a mile from my house.
- There are very few cars on the road at 5:00AM on a Saturday, but the cars that are there must be very late for something because they are all going very, very fast.
- “At 5:00AM, Roxboro Road ain’t all that bad.”
- It was at this point that I realized that I had to make 30+ miles in 2 hours, saying to myself “I gotta boogie!” and thus getting Weird Al Yankovic stuck in my head for the next few miles.
- In order to get Al out of my head (for, though I genuinely think the man is an absolute genius, the afore-linked song is hardly his best work), I fired up the audiobook of the day: Chapterhouse Dune by Frank Herbert. Unfortunately, in contrast to the extremely high production value of all of the other recent re-recordings of the Dune series, there was one glaringly, painfully, incredibly obvious and yet inexplicably uncorrected problem. One of the readers (out of the four who took over reading duties from each other for a chapter at a time) apparently hadn’t listened to anything the others had read, either in this book or any of the previous five, and was pronouncing many important and distinct words wrong. Painfully wrong. “Sky-tale” instead of “Sigh-tale”, “mah-truzz” instead of “mah-trays”, and three or four other instances that I can’t remember at the moment. It took so much away from the book to hear names and book-specific nouns mispronounced (or, at least, pronounced differently than everyone else) that I almost stopped listening. Thankfully, this particular reader had only a few chapters.
- Riding down NC-55 for most of the way was not nearly as bad as I’d expected, but I was breathless as I was olfactorily made aware of the existence of Durham’s Triangle Waste Water Treatment Plant. Phew!!
I arrived at MCHS in plenty of time, signed in, got my cue sheet, and wondered where Dave was. (wait… wait… wait…) Dave got there in plenty of time too, just without as large a plenty as I had. We both filled up bottles and grabbed a last bite before the start, accompanied musically by the MCHS Band the entire time. I had selected my Cheez-It jersey for the day’s festivities and, due to several entertaining outbursts (yelling “Tequilla!” as the band played the song of the same name, following the Looney Tunes trailer music with a hearty “Buhdee, buhdee, buhdee, buhdee, that’s ALL, folks!”), I became known to the band and their supporters as “the Cheez-It guy”. Dave noted that this was perfect because, in his honest onion, I was “one cheesy cracka!” After a rousing rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner (and an appreciation by both Dave and I of the rather slow speed at which sound travels), we were on our way.
The ride itself was largely uneventful, but was not the restful cruise I was anticipating after my 15mph sprint to get there. Turn out that Dave’s bike is a “hybrid bike”, with a MTB frame and road-bike gearings, while my MTB had typical MTB-gearings. Translation: Dave was able to (and did) go much faster than I would have preferred. Oh well.
Highlights from the “organized” part of the day’s ride:
- As expected, Dave and I were cracking each other up the whole time (just like we do at work!), but the best chuckles came when I looked over, saw a rather portly gentleman dressed in camouflage while driving a riding mower around his yard, and said to Dave in a voice filled with wonder and amazement, “Woooooow! That mower is driving around all by itself!!“
- Many folks jokingly complained that my jersey was making them hungry. Next time, I should carry a few snack-packs of Cheez-Its in my back pockets to proffer to such individuals, if not just for the laughs.
- The band had been shuttled past us (cheering “Cheez-It guy!” out the window) to play at the first rest stop where Dave and I asked them to “play Misty for me” and play the “Theme from Shaft”. Ignoring our requests, they decided to play “Money, Money” (which in reality was “Mony, Mony”… ah, kids these days…)
- I managed to get up to 43mph on one particular downhill, but the race-car noise I made while passing Dave sent him off the road thinking I was a real car. Sorry about that, again, Dave.
Dave and I after the 32-miler
Eventually, though, Green Level Rd meets back up with the route I had used coming down. I had planned to simply cross the presumed busy road and use another side road to travel the rest of the way north. I found, however, that this road was not nearly as busy as I had expected, so, after the Greenway and Green Level, I ended up going home the same way I had come, largely without issue or event. All in all, a good long ride.