Coyote Flaco was pretty good.  Well, to be more precise, the food and drink was good at Coyote Flaco.  There was some disappointment expressed about the size of the Nacho Grande starter since it didn’t seem terribly “grande” to four very hungry guys but the margaritas were huge and the wine was acceptable.  The main problem with Coyote Flaco was the resident annoying guitarist who spent most of the evening cruising the tables playing faux classical guitar pieces or singing Spanish and Mexican classics at the top of his voice.  We tried very hard to avoid catching his eye at any point during the evening.  Boy was it annoying although he did have the last laugh.  When JJ and I retired to the car park for a cigarette, Lee attempted to pay the guitarist to come out to the car park and serenade us.  A good practical joke you might think.  However, Lee gave him $20 and then asked him to go out into the car park.  The guy made the $20 disappear into his pocket and said “nope” and then zoomed off into the kitchen never to be seen again.  No doubt $20 was more money than he’d made in a week.  Oh how we laughed at Lee’s expense but since Lee had “borrowed” the $20 from Terry maybe we should have been laughing at Terry.

On the way back there was some talk of going to a bar for beers but JJ and I declined.  Lee and Terry stayed out to watch the Yankees win at baseball and to drink a lot of beer.  They had world class hangovers in the morning which should mean that I’ve got a better chance of keeping up.

So the following morning dawned wet and cold.  We went to a local diner and had the traditional “eggs any style with bacon and sausage” breakfast.  Now take note here because the breakfast is going to make another appearance later in this story…

We all got on our bikes with the traditional groans and moans from everybody as their painful butts hit the saddle.  It turns out that the Howard Johnson’s in Williamstown is 200 metres from the start of the Mount Graylock climb.  So no warm up, just straight into the climb.  The first section was absolutely horrible.  12% grades and vicious switchbacks.  I got dropped off the back pretty early and just concentrated on trying to keep the pedals turning.  I had the lowest possible gear on the bike and still I couldn’t get the bike up the really steep sections. 

I had to stop four times.  Once for a pee because I thought that I could unload some weight and it would be a bit easier.  The second time was on a very very steep section where I just couldn’t keep the pedals turning.  The third time was when I hit my red line on the heart rate monitor.  My heart was at 175 on a steep section out of the saddle and I had to stop.  It was then when the aforementioned “eggs any style with bacon and sausage” made their unwelcome second appearance of the day.  As I was leaning over the Armco barrier losing my breakfast a big posse of hairy Harley Davidson riders went past.  Those people have very fat arses.  I shouted “you should try the biking induced bulimia barf to lose some weight you big fat bastards” after them but I shouted it quite quietly since they were kind of scary and there were a lot more of them than me.

The fourth stop involved the rear wheel slipping on the leaves.  The entire road up was covered with slippery wet leaves and if you’re pushing down on the pedals when you’re on a leaf the rear wheel slips alarmingly.  Unfortunately when this happened, I fell forward and…err…there’s no easy way of saying this…caught my testicles on the stem of the handlebars.  Had I not lost my breakfast earlier, this would have been the moment that I would have lost them.  I didn’t quite lose consciousness but it was very sore indeed.  The following 20 minutes were like cycling with a couple of red hot coals in my trousers.  If any of you reading this have cycled with red hot coals in your trousers, you’ll know what that feels like.  Actually, if any of you have cycled with red hot coals in your pants, you’re reading the wrong blog.  You want www.i-like-red-hot-coals-in-my-pants.com.  Oh and get some professional help too.

Eventually the grade relented a bit and I could at least make forward progress.  The early part of the climb was tremendously brutal but the final part was only ugly and nasty.  Long 6% grades with rain and fog.  I stopped to take some pictures but they didn’t turn out that well because I was shaking a lot.

Finally, after a lot of pain I reached the top of Mount Graylock.  The highest mountain in Massachusetts.  As I cycled in to the car park at the top I shouted “oh yes oh yes I’ve fucking done it thank you sweet Jebus”.  I think the children in the car park might have been slightly offended.  JJ and Lee and Terry had arrived a bit before me and were in the lodge eating really really bad food but it sort of didn’t matter.  It was done.  We sat around in the lodge in front of the fire and tried to recover.  A huge fat guy in a red sweatshirt came up to me and said “did you ride one of ‘em bike things all the way up here”?  I said yes and he said “I just wanna shake your hand”.  How nice.  I was actually quite touched.  Maybe I was delirious.

Mount Graylock is famous for its panoramic views but the fog made the panoramic views a bit rubbish really.  There is a war memorial on the top of the hill which is pretty impressive but it just looked like a lighthouse in the fog.  One has to say that for a war memorial, this is unusually phallic in construction.

The stats for Graylock were 16km at an average of 11km/h.  Average heart rate at 144 with a max of 175 (I think this was the vomit point).  3000 ft of climbing.  These aren’t great stats but given how tough it was it’s not too bad.  Obviously Lee, Terry and JJ did better than me on this so their stats should be better.

Terry (in his usual duplicitous way) had told us that the descent was “downhill all the way” neglecting to mention the uphill bits.  Hmmm.  The decent was cold and long.  It could have been great but cycling on tyres less than an inch wide down wet roads covered with very slippery leaves isn’t much fun.   We got colder and colder on the way down and had to stop at the slightly sad Visitor Centre at the bottom of the south side just to heat up.  There were lots of worthy exhibits about how to make an axe handle and how fabulous the conservation work is in Graylock but to be honest it was all a bit tired.

After that, for some weird reason I got a really good second wind.  I was feeling bloody great.  It was quite a short route after Graylock and we absolutely flew along.  Nice rolling countryside with very short steep sections that you could attack and get to the top before you blew up.  Good tarmac.  Just perfect.  Terry and I blew along Route 7 at super high speed and got to West Stockbridge in good time.  The rain stopped, the sun came out, and I think the wind might have been behind us. 

We’re staying at the Williamsville Inn just outside West Stockbridge MA.  This is a fantastic old inn run by a German couple named Eberhart and Candy.  Candy?  That’s a German name?  Eberhart is a “certified master chef” and so we’ve decided to eat here rather than go into Great Barrington for pizza.  It could be interesting I guess.  The menu looks great.  We are trying to avoid mentioning the war although a few times an involuntary “ya” has slipped into the conversation.  We’ve all been sitting in the lounge of the Inn being entertained by Candy’s stories of the novel she’s writing and drinking organic beer.  And wine.

So, for me this was a good day.  Obviously one might think that losing one’s breakfast on a brutal hill climb, smacking one’s nuts on the stem of your bike and being cold, tired and worn out would take the shine off the day but in fact it was just great.  My best day so far.  Terry is holding up best of all and Lee’s early bottom problems seem to have subsided.  Rather disturbingly the right side of JJ’s body has gone numb from the waist down and I’m getting knee twinges on the steep stuff.  I guess you just have to expect this stuff at our ages.

The stats for the whole day are about 4200 ft of climbing.  73km at an average speed of 20.3 km/h.  That’s a crap average but given the that the first half of the day was averaging 11km/h I’m not too unhappy about it.

Usual photo album below.

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Well, some of it is the end of Day 1.  After a bit of blog writing and a few snoozes, Lee, JJ and I headed off to a restaurant in town where we met Terry.  Terry’s (very charming) wife Ann had driven up to meet Terry and have dinner.  We also met Aldo who is the bike guru in town.  He runs Ride Noho with his wife.  They arrange bike tours round north Massachusetts and know the area really well.  He had helped out Terry and Lee in coming up with the routes for the four days.  He’s also a really nice guy.  If anybody is insane enough to want to do something similar to this trip then Aldo is your guy.  He’s also a great advert for cycling as a way of life.  He’s 55 and looks 35.

One thing that I hadn’t known about Northampton, MA is that it is the lesbian capital of the USA.  No really.  Number one on the list.  Who knew?  Anyway, as you can imagine, four middle aged guys fitted in really well at the restaurant.  The food was superb especially for people who had just cycled 100 miles.  My starter was a duck and bacon sausage.  Battered.  And then fried in duck fat.  Mmmm calories….

Terry and Ann sensibly retired early and JJ, Lee and I decided to go and catch some of the Boston Red Sox baseball game in a very loud (and diverse) bar in town.  This mostly involved getting taught about the intricacies of baseball by Lee while drinking and insanely large amount of whisky and beer.  This was really a very very bad idea and I woke up with a rather bad hangover and no knowledge of baseball whatsoever.  However, it’s the playoff season and so it’s baseball every night for us.

We got up fairly late on Friday and went to Sylvester’s for breakfast.  The menu seemed to revolve around weak puns e.g. “The Lox Ness Omelette: our tribute to Scotland”.  Once again, I made the schoolboy error of massively underestimating the size of the portions.  My “breakfast quesadilla” was bigger than my head and came with fries and bacon.  JJ had a toasted muffin and a bucket of yoghurt.  Who toasts muffins?  Weird.

The weather looked ok when we set out and the first hour or so was really nice.  Some rail to trail bike paths but as Aldo had warned us the previous evening, it got a lot lot tougher from there.  We’d planned a break in Savoy. which was 35 miles from the start and it was basically uphill all the way.  Some rolling bits but mostly relentless climbing.  Not especially steep but in the rain that had started to fall and the wind it was really punishing.  JJ, Lee and Terry did pretty well but I just got dropped off the back.  I’d like to blame the previous day’s ride for the fact that my legs felt like they were made out of cheap rubber bands but I think I just hadn’t done enough hill training.  There were times when I was only managing 7 or 8 km/h in the granny gear and really really suffering. 

I reached Savoy a bit after everybody else and we loaded up on peanut butter sandwiches and Snickers.  We also put on our wet weather gear although in my case, I was so bloody wet already that it just kept the wetness inside.  Eventually the water heated up like a wet suit but it was not pleasant.  And I was completely bushed.  As tired as I have ever been.

After Savoy, it was only 18 miles but it started with two really hard climbs.  Guess who got dropped again.  As soon as the gradient went up, I just lost it.  Ugh.  From the top it was a long fast descent but the rain made the roads very slippery and so it was hard to get much joy out of the descent when you were always thinking about the bike disappearing from under you on the corners.  By the time we hit Adams, we were very wet and dirty.  I’d been drafting Lee down the hill and although there’s a lot of advantage in drafting people (i.e. staying close behind them to get so that you don’t get as much head wind) the downside is that you get covered in the crud that gets thrown off their wheels.  I was filthy, wet and had grit in my mouth.  Terry turned off at the bottom to do the terrifying Mount Graylock.  This seemed to me to be particularly foolish since we’re doing it tomorrow but Terry wanted to do it from the south as well as from the north.  Hmmmm.

The ride into Williamstown was pretty flat and we had a nice tailwind.  JJ was absolutely flying but Lee and I also managed a reasonable pace.  All the roads around here have “shoulders”.  Bits at the side around 1m to 2m wide.  These are great for cyclists except they have the storm drains and bits of crap in them.  They also have “rumble strips”.  When some amphetamine addled hairy trucker falls asleep while driving his 18 wheel semi trailer and he starts to veer into the side, there are a series of brick sized holes spaced about 20 cm apart which make a big noise on the tyre and so the aforementioned trucker wakes up and can continue on his transcontinental mission to deliver Twinkies to LA (or something).  Going over these brick sized holes at 30km/h on a bike is about the most painful thing I’ve ever done on a bike.  It hit some sort of resonant frequency and caused considerable pain in the nether regions.  Something to avoid in future I think.

Finally with the needle on empty we pulled into the Howard Johnson in Williamstown.  I was completely wiped and freezing.  I had to stand under the shower for 20 minutes before I could be sure that I was still alive.  But, once I was sure I was alive, Lee, JJ and I went out to watch Zombieland at the local mall.  Sitting for two hours in front of a mindless and lightweight movie was actually a perfect thing to do.  The movie is very lightweight but Woody Harrelson is great and I did think that Emma Stone was quite fetching.  So tonight we’re going to Coyote Flaco “The best mexican in Williamstown”.  It’s also the only Mexican restaurant in Williamstown so it could be interesting.  Restaurant review tomorrow.

So this was a really really tough day for me.  I think everybody else found it ok today.  The stats aren’t that impressive.  3200ft of climbing, 84km.  The other guys managed a better average speed but mine was 20.4 km/h.  Pathetic.  Also, my average heart rate was low and the calories used was about half of yesterday.  I just didn’t have the strength in my legs to do enough exercise to raise my heart rate.  Not pleasant.

Tomorrow we’re going up “the steep side” of Mount Graylock.   This is going to be very tough indeed.  I’m a bit apprehensive about it.

Here’s the photo album from the day.  I was too tired to take very many pictures.

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Izzy and I had a fantastic time in New York.  Izzy spent a day at Goldman Sachs and then spent Tuesday and Wednesday zooming round NYC on her own.  Being a Dad, this is a pretty scary thing for one’s 15 year old daughter to do but it all seemed to work out well apart from the obligatory stalker.  We went  to the Gordon Ramsey restaurant in the London NYC on Tuesday night and ate the best meal either  of  us had ever eaten.  Sadly, it had to end and so we left NYC around 3.30pm on Wednesday to go out to JFK.  After a lot of messing around with Izzy at the Virgin Terminal, I dropped her with the UM (unaccompanied minors) people and zoomed over to terminal seven add pickup JJ.  We drove up to Warren CT in a really pimped up van which was quite cool.  We arrived at Lee’s house around 8pm and didn’t really get to see it in the light but it is truly beautiful as you can see on the left.  Lee had produced a fantastic dinner with the world’s best sausages and a lot of wine.  It’s hard to beat that.  JJ’s headset had fallen apart in the bike box but we managed to fix it in a slightly drunken way but it seemed to work.

Early the next morning, after coffee (and cigarettes for me) we headed off into a cold chilly morning.  The weather was beautiful and the scenery in this part of the USA is absolutely outstanding.  The leaf fall is in progress at the moment and the hills are covered with orange, red and ochre trees.  It is incredibly rural for an area which is about 1.5 hours from the throbbing heart of New York. 

There’s four of us doing the trip.  Lee Vance, his brother Terry, JJ McNeil from Cambridge and me.  We’re all about the same standard (i.e. middle aged blokes with bikes way too good for their cycling ability) and since all of us work or have worked in some capacity in the financial industry, there’s a certain commonality of views…Lee on the left, Terry in the vintage Eddy Merckx cycling top in the centre and JJ on the right in the Bianchi gear. 

The beginning of the route was pretty reasonable.  Not too many hills and a lot of good stuff to keep us interested.  Terry has done a fantastic job sorting out the routes and so we’re all very grateful.  However, we stopped after 37 miles (!) for breakfast and there was a little bit of grumbling about that.  We had stopped early for a “comfort break” which basically involved relieving ourselves behind a church.  I’m sure that that is illegal in Massachusetts.  In case anybody wants to press charges, here’s the photographic evidence.

Carlos is driving the car complete with  UHaul trailer and has stocked the car with Snickers, Gatorade, peanut butter and V8.

 V8 is either a delicious combination of vegetables and tomato which is packed full of vitamins and minerals or a disgusting red sludge depending on your viewpoint. Terry and I are in the first camp and I’ve had four cans already.  Yum.

The second bit was pretty tough.  A lot of really quite horrid hills and although the weather is beautiful, there was a lot of climbing and a lot of swearing.  JJ had put his back out before coming, Lee was having some…err…comfort problems, I was pretty keen on coffee and cigs.  Only Terry seemed to be without any obvious complaints although that might change…

Lunch was a repeat of the peanut butter sandwiches and V8 experience and we hung out in the car park of the Huntingdon Country Store and generally frightened the school kids by being Lycra (spandex) clad and old I guess.

After lunch it got serious.  There was a very long climb up which pretty much finished me.  Long, steady and unpleasant.  There were many moments where I thought to myself “just one more revolution of the pedals and then I’m done”. 

Then a long fast descent down into Northampton MA.  A really nice studenty town which is pretty and very relaxed.   The Northampton Hotel where we are staying is good although it took me five attempts to get into my room…

We’ve beered up, eaten some appetisers and now we’re going to go out and have a big evening….yeah, right…a few burgers and then sleep seems the order of the day.

The stats?  100 miles and one mile of climbing is the summary.  23.4km/h average which isn’t hugely fast but I’m not too unhappy about that.  2511 calories. A quite tough day and I think everybody is feeling it.  I’ve uploaded a selection of the photographs as a web album.  Click on the link below.

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