There is a scene in the Flying Scotsman where Graeme Obree is leading a club cycle race. He approaches the end of the race, takes the first place at the finish, and sort of perplexes the gathered crowd, by not stopping. He just keeps going, continuing his ride.
That’s certainly one way of going a bit too far.
What about the sense of getting in over one’s head? There are others.
There is certainly something magical about the number 100. “The Century.” For each aspiring cyclist, there is a “First Century.” The idea occurs, and it’s somewhat daunting. “Can I do that?” The new rider thinks. It wasn’t that long ago that a ride of an hour was an epic of Homerian proportions.
Some folks, when this mania takes them, approach it analytically. They actually take advice, do research, and train for it. They arrive at the day, toned up, rested, fueled, and riding the right bike. It’s still a milestone, but somewhat anticlimactic. They didn’t go too far.
There are others who show up for that “first 100,” in a somewhat different state. One sees them among the folks in the parking lot. They don’t look right. They stand out. There is something about them that says, “Noob!” Most of them actually do finish their first century, but with a feeling that the ride was maybe 20, 30, or 50 miles too long. They finished on determination and sheer will. Bravo!
On a slightly different note, there are some organized centuries that are not quite 100 miles long. On occasion, one will see riders hit the end of one of these rides, and then declare, “I need to go a bit farther. I want to do a real 100 miles.” And off they go, out for another 3 or 4 miles, just to round the thing off. Sometimes they even take four or five laps around the parking lot, just to be sure. What is it with that? Wasn’t the ride good enough? Why go farther than the end? Is there some shamanic power to the number 528,000? (If you are wondering, that’s the number of feet in one hundred statute miles.)
Some years ago, on a whim, I laid out a course, and proposed doing a “Nautical 100.” That is riding a route that was 100 “knots” long. A “nautical mile” is 6,080 feet. So I laid out a course that was 115 miles and 800 feet long. Too short to be called a “double metric,” and well over the “standard century.” Oddly, I didn’t get any takers.
Some years ago, I was riding a tough brevet. It was intentionally a hard course, mountainous, and challenging. The event was a 400K. That’s 400 kilometers, or about 250 miles. The weather was not cooperative. It was extremely windy, sometimes raining, and quite cold. About half of the entrants withdrew, some of them at the start.
For those of us who stayed the course, there was a feeling of dizzy euphoria as we neared the finish. It was dark, and there were snow flurries about. Suddenly, with only about 400 yards to go, four of our members decided to sprint for the finish! (It should be noted that brevets are not competitive events. Finishing matters, but not who finishes first.) One of these riders managed to pull out ahead of the other three, and then he went down, roll-blocking the others. Bad crash. Three of the four failed to finish the event. Their injuries were bad enough to require medical transport. Definitely a case of going to far, and not far enough.
Me? No, I wasn’t among the sprint-finish crowd. I limped in after them, happy to finish the event with an hour to spare before the allowed limit. I already felt like I’d gone too far that day.
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