by Dawn Dais

After my peaceful journey through the Swiss Alps, I decided that I would try a slight change of pace with the NYC Century Bike Tour. And by “slight change of pace,” I mean the complete friggin’ opposite of a peaceful journey.

Why do I do these things to myself, really?

I had been looking for a century ride, and the NYC Century seemed like a fun one. It had thousands of cyclists and would wind its way through Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. This sounded like a cool way to see New York and an exciting way to tackle a century ride. The words “cool” and “exciting” started to fade away, though, when I found out that the ride would involve cycling one hundred miles “with traffic.” “With traffic” means that the roads we would be traveling on would be open to traffic as well as bikes. That concept is not cool or exciting so much as it’s scary as hell.

Not wanting to take on New York City by myself, I enlisted two friends to come on my adventure with me. Ruth, a die-hard cyclist, was also a native New Yorker, so I figured she could assist me with all of my bike problems, as well as give me someone to follow throughout the city. I was going to have enough problems navigating the busy streets of New York without trying to actually navigate where the hell I was supposed to be going at the same time.

Ruth would have to fly to New York from her home in Portland, but I knew she’d be up for the adventure. The woman will ride her bike pretty much anywhere and actually has a bike that can fold up and fit into a suitcase. It’s very “Transformers, more than meets the eye” when she pulls a functioning bike out of a suitcase. She had the bike custom-made by a company called Bike Friday that has an entire business catering to people who feel like a bike in a suitcase would complete their travel experience. This seems somewhat foreign to me, seeing as a Cinnabon is the only thing I ever try to cram into my suitcase while traveling. To each her own, I guess.

Ruth and I were also joined by our friend Sherry. Sherry has a Bike Friday bike as well, but she is not a supercyclist like Ruth. Honestly, I think she just thought it would be cool to buy a bike that she could pull out of a suitcase. It’s highly probable that she’d be just as excited about pulling my Cinnabon out of a suitcase if she could get a custom-baked one with her name on it. Sherry is my kind of girl.

So the three of us descended upon the city, ready to hit the mean streets of New York while wearing padded shorts and colorful helmets. Bring it, NYC.

Our New York Bike Adventure from Hell began on a Friday evening. It was late summer/early fall, so I expected the weather to be decent. Instead, when I got into New York and was waiting for my luggage, I caught a glimpse of a weather report on a nearby TV screen. What I saw was a map of New York with a very colorful blob heading its way. Apparently, a tropical storm was moving toward the city—which seemed hugely unfortunate and unfair.

When I woke up on Saturday morning I looked outside the hotel window, half expecting to see people blowing by in the wind. Instead, everything looked peaceful and clear. So I figured maybe the storm had taken a turn and gone to drop buckets of water on other cyclists. This was great news.

Since I’d come to a different state to do a race and I couldn’t fit my bike into my suitcase, I had to rent a bike for the event. I found the closest bike shop with an available road bike and headed down to rent it for the following day’s event. As we walked the seven blocks to the bike shop, I discovered the joy that is New York humidity. It felt like all the huge city buildings were closing in on my lungs and pushing massive amounts of sweat out of my body at the same time. Overall, it seemed like perfect weather for a strenuous athletic event.

We made it to the bike shop, where they fitted the bike to my body, and I was ready to go. I pushed the bike outside to where Sherry was waiting for me, and I almost instantly felt my heart rate double. Cars were zipping by, honking, screeching, swerving in and out of lanes with abandon. I looked down the street to see that most of the available bike lane was filled with double-parked cars and/or open passenger doors.

“You ready to go?” Sherry asked. I clipped on my helmet and tightened it so hard that I nearly decapitated myself. “Um, yeah. There are a lot of cars.”

“It’s New York City. What were you expecting?”

With that, Sherry took off down the street, leaving me no other option than to follow her. Unlike hers, my bike could not fold up and fit into one of the many passing cabs, so I threw my leg over it and started pedaling in the direction of what I assumed would be my first hit-and-run police report.

Right off the bat, things did not go well. My first instinct when riding in New York was to brake. Unfortunately, when I reached down for my hand brakes on my handlebars, where I usually find them on my bike, there was nothing there. My poor fingers were left flailing in the wind, grabbing at air while trying to stop the bike. Most normal cyclists might have actually taken inventory of little things like brakes and maybe even tire pressure before leaving the store. Reason number #2348 I might not be an elite athlete. This bike’s brakes were on the lower part of the handlebars, so in order to stop the bike I had to bend over and reach one hand down to the brake. This was an extremely convenient way to ride along a busy street, let me tell you.

The humidity I spoke of earlier seemed to close in on me even more with every rotation of my wheels. I could feel a trail of sweat forming and running freely between my breasts, as well as down my back. The obstructed bike lane meant I had to veer into traffic and hope that it did not veer back into me. I kept an eye on Sherry, not wanting to lose visual contact with the only person in New York who might care if I fell down a manhole. I watched as she wove recklessly in and out of traffic, and as many large trucks came stupidly close to hitting her with their side mirrors. Each time this happened, I’d gasp and clench my eyes shut, not wanting to witness her impalement. Her reaction was a little different, however. She’d yell an obscenity and flip off the motorist, which seemed like a fantastic way to endear herself to NYC.

After the first two blocks, Sherry and I stopped at a red light and evaluated the ride thus far. “Did you see those asses honk at me?!”

“Yes, you sorta swerved into their lane.”

“Where was I supposed to swerve? There were cars in the bike lane.”

“How many more blocks do we have?”

“About twenty.”

“Awesome.”

I cinched my helmet a little tighter.

Twenty blocks later, we arrived at our destination and my blood pressure reached an all-time high. My hands were permanently attached to my handlebars, with two fingers permanently attached to my brakes, ready to squeeze at the first sign of an oncoming vehicle/person/traffic cone. The only good news was that it was starting to feel a little cooler. I had already soaked through my clothes, but the cooling temperature gave me hope for the next day’s ride. This hope was short-lived, however, because minutes later the cooling temperatures became a torrential downpour. Turns out those weather maps are pretty accurate and that tropical storm actually was heading toward New York City. At least I wasn’t hot anymore.

We still had several blocks until we got back to our hotel, and we didn’t have many options besides riding our bikes. During these remaining blocks, all the good times of city riding were still there, but now I had the added bonus of not being able to see anything at all. The crazy amount of rain hitting my glasses made it pretty much impossible to see, so I took them off and was left with the horribly blurry vision that makes said glasses requisite. Shockingly, I realized that vision didn’t really increase my odds of surviving New York City on a bike. With cars and people coming out of nowhere, your odds of avoiding death are only about 50/50, whether or not you can actually see your obstacles. The lack of seeing was actually kind of a relief, because I wasn’t aware of all the things ahead of me that might have caused my demise.

When we finally got back to the hotel, my clothes, which only a few minutes ago had been stuck to me with sweat, were now drenched and plastered to me as though I’d just climbed out of a pool. Wearing a bike helmet. The hotel’s A/C was still kicked up from the humid temperatures we’d been suffering from only thirty minutes earlier, and we all immediately went into a hypothermic state the second we reached the lobby.

So, Day 1 in New York went smashingly well. I could only imagine what wonders awaited me the next day when I actually rode farther than twenty-five blocks.

From the book The NonCyclist’s Guide to the Century and Other Road Races by Dawn Dais.  Excerpted by arrangement with Seal Press, a member of the Perseus Books Group.  Copyright (c) 2009