6/3/00
Blythe, CA
Mileage 101.6 miles
Max. ??
Avg. 14.11 after 10 mile climb.

Today was an important test of my endurance and my chutzpah (nerve). After Indio, the next motel room was in Blythe, 100 miles away across the Sonoran Desert. Since the CHP yesterday said I might escape being written up by getting out on the freeway early, I set up my lighting systemso I could see and be seen. I felt so conspicuous, like a Christmas tree in July. By 4:30 am, I was on the freeway. at 4:30 am.

It was dark and with the trucks roaring by, the shoulder seemed mighty narrow. The same tension I felt when first getting on the freeway jumped into my throat. Nonetheless, I had five miles to cover so teeth gritted, I hammered to the Dillon exit which came quickly. I stopped for cakes at a truck stop. Meanwhile, the sun appeared and when I pedaled to the entrance ramp, the "Bicycles prohibited" sign had changed to "Bikes may use shoulder only" or something similar.

As might be assumed by knowing that Indio is in the valley, the 25 miles from Indio to Chiriaco Summit were uphill. The first 10-12 miles are one long slog. I burned a lot of calories. Despite the low humidity and the early hour it was already 90 degrees. Since I was in the desert, I knew to carry a lot of water. That amounted to about a gallon altogether plus what was in my stomach. I downed a lot of liquid at breakfast but I noticed I did not need to stop to pee. I wasn't sweating either or at least water was not pooling on my skin. We use sweating as a prompt to drink plus thirst itself. That was when I realized how easy it would be to ride through the desert on my way to a sun stroke. At a brief rest stop, I accidentally reset my computer and messed up the calculation of the average and maximum speeds.

I stopped at the Patton Museum but of course it was still closed at 8:00 am. Given that I had been up since 3:30 am and felt like I had already put in a half day, I wondered why it wasn't open, that is, until I looked at my watch.

Several members of a church group on their way to Lake Tahoe expressed interest in the bike. I encouraged them all to sit on it for pictures. To avoid the bonk I experienced yesterday, I ate a sandwich and drank a quart of Gatorade.

After conferring with several independent sources about whether Desert Center, 21 miles away, would be a sure source of water I refilled both of my one quart squeeze bottles and a two quart bladder. The ride was through treeless narrow valleys much like the brown, moonscape like environment I had seen in Tibet several years ago. I felt out of place but not altogether like an intruder. A nice tailwind together with flat terrain helped push the pace higher.

Desert Center (pop. 212) was a dusty way station with a closed post office and café across from one another on a cattle-herd-wide street. I ordered a pricey burger ($2.75) and bought a Gatorade power bar ($1.75) at a flat roofed sandwich stand. Both would prove important in the next 48 miles to Blythe.

When I asked to fill up with water, I learned that the residents' principle problem with water was cooling it. There was no such thing as cool or even tepid water from the tap. It came out at 150 or so degrees. I decided to fill my gear with the hot water thinking it would be the same temperature when I drank it regardless whether it was put in hot or cold. With the thermometer at over 100, I was correct even though it was only 10 am. The high for the day would come several hours later.

At around 1 pm I ran out of gas. I felt tired and washed out. An overpass shaded a short meal of sunflower seeds, dried fruit and the Gatorade bar from the sandwich stand in Desert Center. In 20 minutes, I felt recharged. Sixteen miles from Blythe, I stopped at a rest area for water but only enough to make it in. No sense carrying extra weight.

I arrived in Blythe around 5:00 pm just in time to visit a bike shop. I needed tubes but they didn't have the correct size for my front tire. Last night I had patched three tubes as a result of two days worth of flats. Each tire had picked up wire strands off the shoulder from radial tire debris. The strands had worked their way through the tire into the tube and started a slow leak. Over the course of a day both tires lost air or by morning they were flat altogether.

My patched tubes didn't leak, nonetheless, I did not have a spare front tire tube that hadn't been patched and would need to wait to buy one in Phoenix. That was a degree of risk I was willing to take on.

At dinner, while tasting a side of cole slaw that looked a bit tired, I bit down hard on something equally hard, heard a loud crack, and felt one of those stabbing pains that takes my breath away. I sat there for several minutes, tears welling, trying not to move as if staying still might make the pain go away. It did gradually but a pronounced ache lingered. I finished the meal out of need for calories and hoped the pain was just a momentary concern, but I knew at some level that I had suffered a significant injury. I worried how it would play out given the heat and stress of the route through Arizona and New Mexico.

Compounding this physical problem was an equally concrete problem with my email system on which the Internet course depended. During the evening in Santa Monica, I downloaded email and then tried to get a GPS system initialized. Back in Lexington, I did not have the time to install and initialize the GPS on the Palm where I had installed several maps of the LA area. After a second downloading session, up flashed a fatal error message on the Palm accompanied with the statement that all my data would be lost if I reset the computer. Well, the damn thing was frozen so I had no choice but to comply with the directive telling me to delete all of the programs I had so painstakingly installed and that were needed to serve the needs of the Internet course beginning in four days.

When I reset the Palm, it was useless. I needed to express mail it to my office in Lexington and arranged for my assistant, Brent Hutchinson, to send a replacement. He was so helpful, a godsend. Trouble was, the replacement did not have the camera software or the information I needed but it would serve to start the course, and that was what was of most concern. Meanwhile I had another 100 mile day waiting tomorrow and went to bed hoping my legs and my tooth would be up to the challenge.