based on a true story

The first time that I ever visited Paris was when I was twelve, and my parents had taken us there on an epic European sojourn. We traveled as children might, woken up at every morning with a schedule that our parents had determined for us, and obediently going along with whatever their agenda may have been. I had gone again when I was nineteen, after OlderSister had secured a semester abroad in Paris and my mom and I had gone along to help her look for an apartment. My mom had fallen ill on the trip, and so left us to our own devices. So, aside from the occasional appointment to look at apartments in the city, I found myself in this foreign country and for the first time, had to ask myself, "well, what do I want to do while I'm here?"

So, being a nineteen year old sci-fi/anime/gamer geek, I just grabbed the phone book and started looking for music stores, bookshops, game/hobby stores and comics places. Then, I took out a map of the city and started penciling in rough guesstimates of where the addresses were. When I realized that so many of these places were clustered in the streets around the Marais and the Universite De Paris, I thought, "well, this must be where all of the cool kids hang out."

( on traveling and the parallel worlds that we see )

of all the photos from this epic, I think that the best ones, without a doubt, have been the set taken by Gregg Bleakney of the Seattle International Randonneurs. If my words are not enough, and if you want to see images of fatigue, devastation and carnage then check out his Flickr sets.

He also has a lot of images of some neat bike setups in case you aren't interested in photos of people looking catatonic. I keep on looking at the photo of the double reverse tandem and think that it needs a shell that looks like a snowspeeder.

A few months ago, when preparing for our ill-fated fleche, our team met for dinner at Redbones in Davis Square. There, amidst plates of ribs and pints of Guinness, we talked about bikes, riding and collective insanity. One of my teammates, K, had been to Paris and was hoping to go back. He told us this story about how, on his way out of Fougeres, he was pushing the very limits of his sleep deprivation and finally, in the darkest Breton night, gave in and pulled into a little village to find a place to nap. A villager found him and opened up his barn. There, K spent a couple of blissful hours resting, and when he woke and was about to depart, he asked his host if there was something he could to repay the hospitality. The fellow wouldn't take money and instead pointed him to a wall of postcards and just said,

"Send me one when you return to your own home."

That was when I knew, in the deepest part of my heart, that I wanted to do this ride.

( the things we remember )

Bruce showed up a little after nightfall along with Glen, and they wanted to rest for a bit before heading on to Loudeac. I was kind of antsy to go before it got too dark, knowing that I would start falling asleep if we started too late, but strangely too awake to join Bruce and Glen in their catnap. I wound up spending the rest time talking to a New Yorker who was abandoning and hitching a ride in the minivan. He had done PBP once before and had nothing to prove to himself, so was quitting now that the ride was no longer fun. Another fellow, Mike from St. Louis, showed up later and hung out with us. He was staying at the same hotel as Bruce and Julie and had been adopted into our erstwhile pack.

We finally hit the road around 11pm and hoped to arrive in Loudeac by 3am on Wednesday night. At every control, Bruce had been asking me to update our timetables to get an idea of where we stood with relation to finishing the ride. He had tried it earlier, but had made the mistake of basing all of his assumptions on the route sheet that Julie was following for driving the support van. By the time that I reminded him that support vehicles were following a completely different itinerary than the rest of us, complex math seemed to have gone beyond him, so he deferred the scheduling to me. 4 hours to Loudeac, 4.5 from there to Tinteniac, 2 hours to Fougeres. We can sleep for 3 hours in Loudeac, rest for an hour in Tinteniac, sleep in Villaines, finish with a few hours to spare. It was getting tight, but was still do-able. All we had to do was keep riding, maintain speed and avoid stupid mistakes.

( on stupid mistakes )

The standard 90 hour approach to Paris-Brest-Paris is to ride 400km to Loudeac and sleep there for a bit, then ride 200km to Brest and 200km back to Loudeac to sleep again. Then, from Loudeac, one can ride to one of the intermediary controls, like Tinteniac or Villaines before pushing on to the finish at St. Quentin. On paper, this approached seemed fine. In a reality with 3000 other riders who were planning on doing the exact same thing, it practically begged for alternatives.

At Villaines, I caught up with Bruce, the stroke survivor who had ridden with me on many of the Boston brevets. Bruce wanted me to do most of PBP with him and Glen, and he planned to sleep at Carhaix, the next control after Loudeac, accepting a little more night riding to skip the congestion and crowds of Loudeac. The plan required us to ride for more than 24 hours, but if we pulled it off, it meant that we'd have shorter lines at each checkpoint and more time to sleep or relax. I called it the 27 Hours of Suck and 63 Hours of Bliss Plan, but for ease of reference, shortened it to 27 Hours Of Suck.

( a positive attitude is, of course, important to any randonneur's success )

I started PBP in the third wave of 90 hour riders, at 2210 under a light drizzle of rain that turned the narrow tarmac until a slick, dark avenue of cold and danger. My legs felt weak, the crowd of 100 riders who surrounded me wore on my nerves. I kept on expecting one of them to do something stupid, go down and take out a dozen of us in the process. Two hours in, nearing midnight, I started to doubt if I would even make it¹ as far as Brest.

Then, we entered another village, with a cafe staying open well past its regular hours. It was a bright, warm oasis in the midst of this freezing hell, and I signalled to pull out of the paceline, leaned my bike against a wall and went in.

The place was crowded, and I slowly edged my way to the counter, but before I could order, a local spectator cut in and got the barkeep's attention to order a cafe before me. Before I could protest, he turned to me and asked, "Voulez-vous une cafe, aussi?"

I gave a slightly testy "oui" and he replied back, "it is my policy to only buy a cafe for riders who will finish. If you promise to finish, then I will buy you a coffee. Do you promise to finish?"

And I looked at him and once again said "oui." So he turned to the counter and ordered another coffee, handed it to me and said, "bonne courage, randonneur."

So I let him pay for my coffee. Then four days later, I finished Paris-Brest-Paris. It seemed like the honorable thing to do at the time.

Index:
Day 1: St. Quentin to Villaines La Juhel
27 Hours of Suck: Villaines - Loudeac
A Survey of Breton pastrycraft by bicycle: Loudeac-Carhaix-Brest-Carhaix
Dark Road Ahead: Carhaix - Loudeac
It's Not Who You Beat, It's Who You Help: Loudeac - Tinteniac
Currency of Gifts
Breakfast of Champions
Epilogue and Field Notes

the rain would continue almost constantly for all four days of the trip. Before taking our first sleep break in Loudeac, my friends and I had heard that over 1000 riders (nearly 20% of the field) had abandoned before even making it as far as that first 400km.

One of the features of the computer game, Civilization, is that the players have the opportunity to build various World Wonders to boost aspects of their population. Want to automatically learn the technologies of your neighbor? Build the Great Library of Alexandria. Want to increase the productivity of all of your cities across the map? Build the Three Gorges Dam. According to the game design, all of your resources for constructing buildings are focused on your cities, and World Wonders are fairly resource intensive, so it usually falls to your most productive city to be the 'Wonder Factory'. If you pursue a 'culture' strategy in Civ, where you win if you can build three legendary cities, you will, inevitably, build one settlement that boasts the Great Library, Stonehenge, the Sistine Chapel, the Taj Mahal, the Eiffel Tower, and Hollywood all within its city limits ... except, of course, it wouldn't be the Great Library of Alexandria, but the Great Library of Nottingham, which doesn't have the same gravitas, I think. I occasionally wonder what it would be like to live in such a city, where monuments surround your life and you can't walk from your apartment to the grocery store without having to weave your way through the Hanging Gardens. Now, I suspect it must be a bit like living in Paris.

( Paris Day Three: quicksilver tourism and city bikesharing )

It only took two days before I opted out of French food. I like French cuisine very much, but I figured that I'd get a fair amount over the next few days, and thereby had my gaze distracted by a sign promising the "exotic cuisine of Lebanon" just around the corner. The Lebanese place, unfortunately turned out to be closed for summer vacation, but the Chinese/Vietnamese eatery nearby was open and a little more tempting than the Mexican place ¹ across the way.

The waiter pegged me rather quickly for an outsider and without me saying much, had me seated in the tourist's corner, with all of the Anglophone speakers and an English menu. Was my accent that rusty? Not that I minded, I could use a break from translating everything presented or spoken to me.

While contemplating a trip to Croatia spitcurl mused about how she would handle an extended solo trip, and I said that, in my experience, I didn't mind traveling alone since it meant that I could wander aimlessly and get lost without embarassment. It did get lonely around suppertime, but that's what the notebook and D&D campaign drafts were for.

I was about halfway through my stir fried frogs legs when another fellow was seated next to me. His French also sounded halting and nervous, and it seemed that he was also having trouble with the menu, asking for more time as the waiter would come by asking him if he's decided yet. Feeling sympathetic and mildly sociable, I leaned over and hoped that I didn't sound too condescending when I said that I ordered from an English menu and perhaps he would have better luck with that.

Turns out, however, that my neighbor was Italian and his English was just as bad as his French. Still, it was better than my Italian, where my vocabulary is limited to pizza toppings. Nonetheless, the fellow, who was named Julio, seemed game to ask me questions in his stilted English, but less competent in actually translating my answers. He asked me where I was from and unfortunately I gave him the full anser, but only got as far as "living in the US but born in the Philippines" before recognizing the panicked gaze and the fact that he was struggling to translate as quickly as I was speaking.

So, I took a deep breath and repeated myself. In French.

It turns out that, with French, we were fairly well matched in our linguistic incompetence. We both spoke slowly and simply and that was enough to get us comfortable with translating each other's words. Our grammar was atrocious, but we were able to infer meaning and didn't give each other a hard time over exchanges like --

"so, how long are you going to be at Paris?"
"I are here for one week. you?"
"a little longer. I am here for a bike."
"you are buying a bicycle?"
"no, I am here for an eventuality with a bike. It is like a race."
"but was not the Tour on the last month?"

in retrospect, it was probably good that we were in the tourist's section. I can't imagine the locals being happy with listening to diners talking like two LOLcats.

¹ because, you know, as much as I think that it's multiculturally awesome to have a prix-fixe with your choice of pork tamale, tomato salad or pate de campagne, I suspect that getting all "monsieur, le pate et un carne asada burrito s'il vous plait" would be less awesome if it was pate from a can and thereby not that far removed from spam.

apparently, there's also a fairly sizable music festival going on in the outskirts of Paris the weekend that PBP finishes; and it's totally on the way back to the city from where we finish. Bjork, Jarvis Cocker, The Arcade Fire, Faithless, MIA, UNKLE ... mmm, apparently, Mogwai goes on stage a couple of hours after the last rider gets in.

oh ... so tempted. oh ... so much sleep deprivation.