By: Bethany Cates
4:20AM
I roll over in my sleeping bag at Bob Scott Campground, in Toiyabe National Forest. It's cold, and quiet.
Hm, sun's not up yet. Can still see moon. Must not be time to wake up. Zzzzz.
4:53AM
WHY DO I ALWAYS WAKE UP BEFORE MY ALARM sadsaghjdkafsd
5:02AM
moon is still up but i guess we're moving now. sky is pretty i guess. wow today is going to be hard. at least i can breathe through my nose tho!! grumble grumble grumble.
6:30AM
All the tents are packed up, and team members are finishing up their breakfasts of cereal and yogurt and bars, clad in bike shorts and jerseys, ready to hit the road.
6:50AM
An, Alex and I are just about ready to head out. We decide it'll make for a funny Instagram post to document ourselves through the course of this 116-mile day, so we solicit Lisa to take a picture of our bright-eyed, bushy-tailed selves before embarking on the ride. An gives a motivational speech, and we complete our first pedals, enshrining our commitment to the rest of the day.
I really want to finish this day.
There's no way I'm finishing this day.
7:30AM(ish)
We summit our first hill, the largest of the day, without taking any breaks before the top.
Huh, maybe today will be alright. I mean, only 111 miles left now.
10:30AM
We're flying through a gorgeous downhill in a canyon. We've finished two summits, and are only a little worse for wear. The haze from nearby wildfires is incredibly thick, and I can only make out faint silhouettes of mountains less than two miles away.
11:00AM
We meet Lisa, our van mom for the day, and have our first lunch break. I drink a delicious beverage called Electrolit. I have not determined whether the name of this beverage made it more delicious.
1:00PM
It's about 1 million degrees out (102F, but who's counting?) and we've been fighting a 20mph headwind for 10 miles. I've been drafting An for all of them, struggling to keep up despite the fact that she has only one functional leg, but hey I'm actually doing okay right now! I must've gotten better at biking! Oh... wait.... "Hey, An, your rear tire is flat."
We sit by the side of the road and change the tube, and at least 4 cars slow down to ask if we're alright, if we have enough water. I can never get over how kind strangers have been to us, throughout this journey, in every single state we've passed through.
1:30PM(probably)
We finish changing the flat, which took us far longer than it should have with three people and a tire lever at our disposal, and set off again. I continue to draft An, honestly for most of the rest of the day. The winds are brutal and the air is hot and thick with smoke.
How can we still have 60 miles left? There's just no way we're finishing this.
3:30PM
We arrive at a very strange bar called Middlegate Station, named after the old Pony Express stop. The food is good. Alex gets a burger that is larger than his head. I fill my Camelbak with ice from the soda machine, feeling only a little bit shameful as the other customers look on.
5:00PM
We finally leave the bar; an hour and a half was probably a bit too long for a lunch stop, but we avoided some of the day's hottest heat, and we all needed the break. There are still 46 miles left, and only about 3.5 hours of daylight.
Maybe we'll get in around 9? That's definitely optimistic, but there are only 650 feet left to climb before we're cruising downhill!
6:00PM
We've gone less than 10 miles since lunch. It's still really hot, and sunny, and windy. I can feel the beginnings of a sunburn on my left calf, but I don't have any sunscreen in my backpack. I'm nauseous, and so is Alex. Turns out an hour and a half still wasn't enough to digest. The first of our post-bar hills, the "easier" one, wrecks me. 38 miles to go.
7:20PM
We reach the final summit, and the sun is getting really low in the sky. My nausea has worn off, and I'm actually feeling great.
"I think I've reached that point in the day when my body has stopped registering it's in pain!" I tell Lisa, giddily. She looks concerned.
"It's less than an hour till sunset, and you guys still have 29 miles... what do you want to do?"
An, Alex and I have been thinking about this for the past 10 miles or so.
"I personally feel comfortable continuing after dark - we have lights, this road isn't very trafficked, and the sightlines are pretty far. I really want to do this day."
I really want to do this day.
I've been sick for almost two weeks, and haven't been able to finish most days that I've attempted to bike.
This is the last century we'll have before the end of the trip, and I really want to finish one.
7:45PM
We're coasting down from the summit, and the sky is a pale blue fading into pink fading into a purple-grey horizon. The sun, hidden behind mountains for most of our descent, emerges a bright reddish-orange, now maybe 15 degrees above the horizon. The haze from nearby wildfires, while a reminder of drought and of the ever-encroaching dangers of climate change - and of the destruction of many homes and many lives - certainly does make for some beautiful sunsets.
9:00PM
It's really dark, and we can't see much beyond the faint ovals of our headlights on the road, save for the distant pinpricks of approaching cars' high beams. We've now clocked in 101 miles, with 15 left to go. At this pace, we won't finish until 10:30, and it's already getting too dark for cars to see us. We start to wonder if there are coyotes in the northern Nevada desert. We stop for a water break, and talk through our options.
"What was our goal today, to finish the ride or to finish a century? Are we just doing this out of stubbornness?" An asks. She's right: it's not very safe to be out anymore, and we've been on the bikes for 14 hours. We decide to call Lisa, who swoops in to save the day one more time. While we sit on the side of the road waiting, a man in a pickup truck passes, stops, turns around, and asks if we need a ride into Fallon - human kindness shines through once again. We thank him, but tell him we have a ride on the way.
9:45PM
We pull into the parking lot of Epworth United Methodist Church, where an amazing feast prepared by churchmembers awaits us. The food - roasted chicken thighs, green beans, mashed potatoes and homemade gravy - reminds me of Sunday dinners after church at my grandma's house. I am grateful for the real food after a day filled mostly with granola bars. After a long, hot shower, I nestle into my sleeping bag, ready for the soundest sleep I've had this entire summer.
So An, Alex and I didn't end up biking 116 miles (shoutout to Annie, Kate, and Delia who did finish this grueling day!!), but we did finish 101 of them. There's definitely a small part of me that feels like I...cheated? Like I don't deserve to feel the accomplishment I do, since I didn't actually finish the day. But there's a much larger part of me that thinks the self-doubting part is stupid, and that part of me feels really content and satisfied and proud of myself and of my teammates, of the hard work we put in today and every day of this trip. Spokes has been incredibly demanding, with sprained ankles and sinus infections and thunderstorms and headwinds and gravel roads and angry rottweilers and just straight up exhaustion giving us a new reason to quit each day.
But we haven't quit, and that feels like a good enough reason to be proud.