Because this grand adventure is but a series of thousands of everyday mundanities, and because it’s very hard to convey what all of this is really like through the mere depiction of a few spectacular moments, I thought I’d blabber on for a bit about what a typical day in the life of a Bike & Builder is like nowadays. For easier digestibility, this will be broken up into three parts.
(First, an aside, by way of facilitating the understanding of certain logistics: All of us are divided into five groups, assigned on a weekly rotating basis to a specific set of chores or responsibilities. There’s cleanup crew, which is responsible for cleaning up the host location each morning, returning it to a respectable condition after the horde descends on it; trailer crew, charged with stuffing everyone’s stuff into the trailer every morning; cooler crew, which mixes up the Gatorade coolers for the ride and takes care of managing all of our perishables; breakfast crew, in charge of setting out and cleaning up all of our breakfast stuff, and cooking if there’s more than cereal on the agenda (this crew is also responsible for doing laundry); and dinner crew, whose job is to cook dinner if it’s not provided for us, and facilitate set-up if it is. This is our fifth week, so at this point everyone’s done everything.)
We’re in Oklahoma now, where the 110-degree heat and nasty winds in the afternoon can make any outdoor activity—especially the activity of riding directly into those nasty winds—severely unpleasant, so on the longer days we’ve taken to waking up on the obscenely early side of things. At 4:30 or 5am, typically in the gym of a middle-of-nowhere church, about twenty cell phone alarms go off, competing for obnoxiousness and prompting their owners to frantically pound and claw at all available buttons, until one by one the ringing and chiming things go quiet and a disgruntled sigh of relief echoes through the space.
At this point, someone very rude usually turns on the lights and many cranky and sore cyclists begin to emerge from their sleeping bags. The next wave of sounds starts with the buzzing of sleeping bag zippers and continues with the pop-and-hiss of Thermarests being uncorked and deflated. This step usually takes a minute or two, since the task of stuffing a sleeping bag into a sac that’s entirely too small for it, and then completely compressing an inflatable sleeping pad, is surprisingly difficult when one half of your brain is still asleep and you’re stumbling over the various articles you’ve already managed to disperse all around yourself in the brief evening that you’ve had to set up your territory.
Ruffling through my bag to locate a toothbrush with corresponding paste, I shuffle in a haze to the bathroom to splash some water on my face, and swap out the comfort of nice cotton undies for a very different sort of comfort of spandex bike shorts. Returning to my bag, I cram everything that’s not my bike into it, and take it outside for loading into the trailer. Once the trailer is all packed (our target is 20 minutes after wakeup) we’re allowed to start eating breakfast. Sometimes that’s cereal and oatmeal and donated stale bagels with peanut butter and many bananas and orange juice; sometimes we get a crazy eggs-sausage-bacon concoction whipped up by the hosts; occasionally we make ourselves some pancakes (my group made some killer blueberry ones a couple of days ago).
By this point, most of us are awake enough to be able to handle mid-sized mechanical devices without injuring ourselves. So the next object of the game becomes figuring out which of the identical-looking bikes is yours, getting it outside, pumping some air into the tires and giving it a quick once-over to make sure it won’t fall apart mid-ride. Cooler crew digs all of our food out of the fridge and packs it into the trailer, we fill up our Camelbacks with water and bottles with Gatorade, douse ourselves with sunblock, apply a generous helping of DZ Nutz and chain lube (careful not to confuse the two), and gather outside for our pre-ride meeting.
One of our four wonderful leaders is in charge of each day’s route, and puts together and prints out the requisite cue sheet with turn-by-turn directions for getting to that evening’s destination. We all grab one and clip it to our bikes. While we stretch and have a dialogue with our quads about our motivation and the meaning of life in general, the leader goes through the cue sheet to point out tricky turns, etc on the route. After a brief and always entertaining display of the Dance Move of the Day (the honor and responsibility for coming up with a Bike-&-Build-related dance move is bequeathed on a member of the group by the person who had it the day before), we all say a few kind words to our legs, apologize again to our butts, and set off.
update! …ahem, please =]