It's 2 AM when the alarm goes off and jolts me out of a sound sleep.
That's good news; usually I'm so nervous on the night before a brevet
that I don't really get any sleep at all.  This time I slept about
four hours.  I try to keep my morning rituals as normal as possible
under the circumstances: cup of coffee, bowl of oatmeal, then off on
the bicycle to meet Max in Porter Square at 2:45 AM.

The 400K brevet starts and ends at Hanscom Field in Bedford.  Since
Max and I both live in town and neither one of us owns a car, this
usually means that we get an extra 25 miles or so added to each brevet
from riding to the start and home from the end.

As we ride off from Porter Square, Max and I tell each other our dirty
little secrets.  His is that he's been up since midnight with a severe
case of lower-GI distress.  Mine is that I took up my girlfriend
Cindy's offer to rent a car for the day to sag us if necessary.  Max,
who had objected to the idea when it was first suggested, has changed
his mind in light of the new circumstances.

The 400K brevet offers two starting time options: 1 AM with a 27 hour
limit and 4 AM with a 23 hour limit.  Max and I had opted for the 4 AM
start on the grounds that it was just too brutal to miss a whole
night's sleep and then ride 250+ miles.  But this means we will be at
the end of a group of really fast riders instead of in the middle of a
group of merely insane riders.  I'm content to be the last one in, but
the 4 AM start does mean that it's almost inevitable that we'll be
riding after dark the following night.

We set off with the group, who quickly set a brisk pace.  Max and I
stayed with them for about the first 25 miles until Pepperill, and
then dropped back to pace ourselves more gently.  Not long after, Max
needed a stop at a convenience store near Townsend.  After a longish
pause during which I consumed a PowerBar, Max emerged and reported "My
activities shook the building."  That didn't bode well, but we set off
again, crossed the Willard Brook State Forest and started to get into
some hills around Ashby.  Max was falling behind, which worried me
greatly since that never happens.  I slowed down and tried to set a
very easy, even pace.  A little while later Max needed another
roadside pit stop.  It was pretty clear that this was going to be an
excruciating ride for him, and he decided to drop at that point and
ride home.  We were 55 miles from home, meaning that he would have to
put in 110 extremely punitive miles with his gut in a state of
rebellion.  That seemed excessive to me and I encouraged him to call
Cindy for a lift.  Max's pride was still intact even if his gut
wasn't, so he turned around to make the trip home under his own power
with Cindy's telephone number programmed into his cell phone.  I would
judge his 110 miles on an uneasy stomach as one of the most heroic
feats of cycling I've seen.

So then I was alone: the lead pack must have gained an hour on us with
their faster pace and fewer stops, and the slow riders has left three
hours ahead of us at the 1 AM start so I wouldn't be joining them any
time soon.  I decided that, under the circumstances, I should just
accept my position of riding "sweep", set a reasonable pace that I had
a chance of maintaining all day and try to keep from injuring my
knees.

As you ride west into the Quabbin reservoir area, the state of
Massachusetts becomes a truly beautiful place.  The sun was finally
coming out and buring off the overcast, and temperatures were warming
up.  I found myself really enjoying the ride and tried to take it easy
without being lazy (although I would always err on the conservative
side).  When I reached the first checkpoint at Bullard Farm in New
Salem 74 miles into the brevet and 88 miles from home, I was feeling
pretty good, although the official there confirmed that I was indeed
the dead last rider in the brevet.

From the first checkpoint in New Salem, the brevet goes north to
Warwick, west to Northfield and then southwest through Gill, Montague
City and Deerfield, crossing the Connecticut River twice between Gill
and Deerfield.  Riding in the Connecticut River valley is relatively
flat and easy, and this part of the ride goes by quickly and
pleasantly.  I'm feeling strong and well rested compared to how I've
felt at this point in the other two brevets (200K and 300K).

At South Deerfield, the route starts climbing out of the Connecticut
River valley and the next sixteen miles are an almost unbroken climb
up to the second checkpoint at Ashfield.  Near Conway, I start meeting
other 4 AM starters mixed with 1 AM starters coming the opposite
direction down the hill from the checkpoint.  I am surprised that
Sandiway Fong is not the first person I meet coming down the hill.  In
fact, he is riding pretty far back behind Melinda Lyon's lead group.
I wonder if it's been a bad day for Sandiway.

Just short of the second (midpoint) checkpoint, I pass a 1 AM starter
struggling up the hill.  He is the first brevet rider I've passed
today, and looking pretty poorly.  It's a brutal climb into Ashfield,
but nothing compared to what's in store for him on Pelham Road, and a
not particularly fast rider (me) has gained three hours on him in 130
miles.  When I reach the checkpoint, I'm still feeling pretty good,
and I'm especially heartened to see that there are several other
riders there, both 4 AM and 1 AM starters.  One woman has had a
catastrophic failure of her shifting mechanism and is reduced to using
just three speeds out of 27.  I resist the urge to mention something
about the simplicity and reliability of my low-tech downtube friction
shifters and wish her luck on the return.  There's a bike shop in
Amherst that could probably do an emergency repair.

Leaving the second checkpoint is a joy, the sixteen mile climb in
reverse becomes a sixteen mile descent, and after crossing the
Connecticut river again there's a long, relatively flat strech
approaching Amherst.  As I enter Amherst, I start overtaking more
riders, and I'm feeling pretty good.  Then I roll over a broken bottle
on the street that I noticed too late and get a flat on my rear tire
right in the middle of downtown Amherst.  That'll give those riders
I've passed a smug feeling to pass me as I sit on the sidewalk pulling
a 10-carat hunk of glass out of my rear tire.

Leaving Amherst is murder: the entire climb out of the Connecticut
River valley is done in one stretch, called Pelham Road.  Infamous
among Boston Brevet Series cyclists, it is a relentless climb that
lasts six miles at a point when you have over 150 miles on your legs.
Pelham Road kicked my ass and marked the point where I stopped feeling
pretty good.  After Pelham Road, I was just trying to finish.

The top of Pelham Road is not the end of the climbing, as getting to
the third checkpoint requires quite a lot of bopping around in the
hills west of the Quabbin Reservoir.  As I'm getting close to the
checkpoint, I come up on another rider, Jules Meunier, who had gone
off course and then backtracked to the point where I found him.  We
rode into the second checkpoint together, where we met a third cyclst,
John.

All three of us were pretty worthless at this point, but seventy miles
remained between us and the finish in Bedford.  I called Cindy and
told her to plan on meeting me there to take me home.  I needed the
thought of seeing her at the end to keep me going as much as I needed
the ride home.  John, Jules and I left the third checkpoint together
and started the long, slow final stage of the brevet.

The last leg is essentially route 122 to Barre, then route 62 to Stow
where you pick up route 117 to Lincoln Road in Concord and follow that
back to the finish in Bedford.  Route 122 is hilly, but graded
reasonably well, so although it is always up-and-down there are no
deadly steep hills.  As we are nearing Barre, I start to remember that
I have riden route 62 between Barre and Princeton before, and it was
not a happy memory.  I tell Jules about it, but try to take out the
sting out of it by also telling him that route 62 after Princeton is a
bodacious four mile downhill.

As I remembered route 62 out of Barre was brutal.  The road is barely
paved, and essentially ungraded.  The builders just poured asphalt on
the local angle of repose and left it there.  There were plenty of
white-knuckle descents followed by a creep up the opposite hill, only
to lose the hard-won altitude again on the other side.  The four mile
downhill leaving Princeton became a favorite topic of conversation.

It was getting dark again by the time we reached Princeton, so we put
on our cold-weather gear such as we had and turned on the lights.  At
this point, the ride had really degenerated into a slog, and we just
wanted to finish.  Temperatures dropped into the 40s, and we all felt
the need to keep moving or risk getting chilled.  Cars would dazzle us
with their high-beams, making it impossible to see or dodge the
thousands of potholes in the roads left unpatched by a three billion
dollar state budget defecit.  We rode at a brisk pace, letting Jules
lead since he had the brightest headlight and the best chance of
spotting hazards in time.  The night was filled by our warning cries
of "holes" and grunts as we hit them.

I felt an enormous sense of relief when we reached route 117 in Stow,
because now we were on territory so familiar from weekend joyrides
that I could ride home in my sleep.  At that point, it seemed that I
might have to.  I was having trouble seeing for reasons that I
couldn't understand; my eyes felt swollen and dry, I was so tired I
couldn't concentrate and the buzz of traffic around us and potholes
below us was keeping me constantly on edge.  I wonder if I have
developed some kind of instinct for riding in groups because I would
find myself waking up out of a daze to see Jules' rear wheel in front
of me exactly where it should be, but unable to remember paying any
attention to it over the last ten minutes.  I consider it a minor
miracle that there wasn't a collision.

About twenty miles short of the finish, Jules' battery gave out and I
took the lead with my Schmidt dynohub.  It was not nearly as bright,
but at least I didn't have to worry about batteries.  Jules and John
were willing to trust me to lead them into the finish, none of us
could read our cue sheets and it would have been easy to miss the last
turn on Lincoln Road in the dark.  Lincoln road is another road in a
sorry state of repair, and about three miles from the finish it caught
up with us as John hit a hole and pinch-flatted.

He wanted to let Jules and I go on ahead and just walk the remaining
distance, but by now it was quite chilly out and we were all shivering
after we stopped.  A three mile walk would have taken an hour, and
none of us were in any shape to walk that long in those temperatures.
John's hands were too numb to pull the tire off the rim, so Jules took
over.  The valve in the replacement tube was broken, and had to be
screwed shut to hold air.  Jules pulled a C02 cartridge out of his
pannier, filled the tube with air in about two seconds, and then
threaded the valve shut.  It held enough air for the last three miles,
and that was all anybody cared about.

Jules and I stepped on it for the last strech, riding in at about 20
MPH.  Half a mile short of the end, Cindy passed us in her car.  She
had come out to look for us, and then saw us riding in the opposite
direction.  I have never been happier to see anyone in my whole life.

We finished at 11:34 PM, 19 hours and 34 minutes after starting.  My
odometer read 272 miles for the day that had started at 2:45 AM with
Max in Porter Square.

Chip