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Bear Mountain

Inside the Cadence Café, thirty-five or so guys, head-to-toe in tasteful kit, are duck-walking about, moving anxiously between bagel boxes and the espresso machine. It’s a classic pre-ride scene with lots of clacking and strapping and the filling of water bottles, and last minute FOOD purchases. And of course, the typical chatter about “not feeling it” and “man, my legs don’t have it today”. Hanging throughout Cadence, a backdrop to all of this, are 30 beautiful Rouleur prints from the exhibition opening a few nights before. Images of places and people handily harder and more heroic than the out-and-back gentlemen’s race to the top of Bear Mountain we’re about to set-off for with friends and customers. But still, it’s a 105-mile ride and at least half the people here have come to see how hard it is to put the East Coast Continental Team (Jeremy Dunn, Kansas Waugh, Richard Bravo, Pete Rubijono and Pierre Vanden Borre) into the pain cave. It’s 7:55am and the ride starts in five minutes.

Slate Olson, Rapha’s US GM, just like he did in February in a parking lot in Sausalito, is addressing the group – “Ok, we go up the Island and over George Washington to 9W. We take that to Nyack and the Runcible Spoon. Then we ride to the top of Bear Mountain where we turn around and come back to the Runcible Spoon, and home. Easy right?”

The group is about to disband and head out when Slate remembers to remind everyone that a Gentlemen’s Race is about camaraderie first and competition second. It’s a group ride — the whole group — with efforts reserved for the climbs and difficult sections. And just in case that wasn’t clear enough – “No racing until Nyack”.

The railing on the edge of the loading dock just outside Cadence’s front door, once layered in nanotechnology and handmade steel bikes, is now empty. Everyone is queued-up at the first intersection except for a few guys getting the jump. I see all this from inside Cadence where my bicycle is still in a stand. With Mark, Cadence’s service manager, trying to make sense of my bike’s many idiosyncrasies. I stand there with my hands and nose metaphorically pressed to the inside of the glass as if to say “but guys, I don’t know where I’m going and isn’t this going to be a long day with a start like this?” But nobody was there to hear me metaphorically or otherwise. Except for Mark and he wasn’t listening.

I leave roughly seven-and-a-half minutes later with a piece of scrap paper clenched between my teeth. On it, the directions are hastily written. It doesn’t matter because the first 8 miles are up the Westside Highway on a bike path. Actually it’s an anything-that-isn’t-a-car path and because it’s sandwiched between the highway and the docks, where planet-sized ships like Norwegian Thunder are berthed, it’s interrupted every fifty yards with a crossroad. It’s early and largely unpopulated so maintaining a 21 mph average into the driving rain wasn’t impossible. Just horrible and morale-crushing. Did I mention it’s raining and a balmy 48 degrees?

By luck and through sheer determination (who am I kidding it was all luck) I catch the main “field” – it’s already gone from group to field and we haven’t left Manhattan. I settle in and take stock. Everybody appears to be super-nice and very pro. From the bike path we move to Riverside Drive on our uneventful approach to the bridge.

Riding over the George Washington Bridge in a group this size is amazing in it’s own right. As you leave the main road the bike path grows shoulder-high walls on either side and takes a series of steep and narrow switchbacks on it’s way up to the bridge’s surface. Once topside the path is easy enough to ride unless it’s wet because of the many metal sections almost always located at the beginning and end of several 90-degree chicanes, and crowded. It was wet and crowded.

On the other side of the bridge we meet-up with the rest of the group led by Karim Pine, Cadence’s marketing manager and ride host. He knows where we’re going and what we’re doing, and he’s fast enough to manage both. After some handshakes and hi-how-you-doings we regroup and begin the next 25 miles on 9W, which at this point is a not too heavily trafficked side road bordered on either side by trees which disguise a highway. It’s a section of the ride called the Palisades, an enjoyable series of rollers undulating straight north to the town of Piermont.

Ten miles in and it’s raining even harder, and this is anything but a fender crowd. At the same time the pace quickens, almost uncomfortably so, moments after the Cadence team moves to the front. The Continental guys, along with a pack made up of messengers and racers, make up the middle. In the back, already yo-yoing and fading a bit, are those 15 or so riders who truly thought this was just a group ride. Slate thinks out loud, in a playfully aggressive tone, to anyone within earshot;
“NO RACING UNTIL NYACK”.

At Piermont, a quaint bedroom community with a brook running through the center and a block of even-quainter-still coffee shops and galleries, Karim has us organize into a single file. Apparently while Piermont is a friendly little town, it’s Police aren’t so excited about the constant flow of cyclists. If you hold up traffic or slow it down by owning the road as cyclists are known to do, it seems that tickets are a common part of the cyclists story. Somewhere in the middle of all this, Jeremy smiles and points to the nine foot German, Stefan, and his friend sitting two-up. The nine foot German I recognize from Cadence where he’s a nice and helpful coach. While the Cadence team is fast, you can tell most of them are working and pedaling pretty hard. But these two on other hand look bored, like they’re soft-pedaling and killing time to Nyack City limits. Kansas Waugh and Richard Bravo are expertly representing the Continental Riders with their flawless attendance up front as we approach Nyack.

The Runcible Spoon lives up to it’s reputation as an institution, it’s a classic small town diner and bakery where they make every manner of sandwich, baked good, soup, smoothie and shake. It’s packed with cyclists already and the seating is limited. We literally swarm up to the bike rack out front, pack standing room only into the shop and order, eat, and use, one by one, the bathroom. Like a helmeted tornado we’re back outside straddling our top tubes in 15 minutes.

The break was helpful and allowed us to once again regroup — even if everyone was now very cold and aware of just how wet they were. And even if the first climb of the day was just out of the town in which many of us had just slammed bananas, muffins and coffees, it was a welcomed way to get warm.

The climb was long and steep enough to break the group into essentially three mini groups. In front, the 9-foot German Stefan, and his friend (who never once dropped out of his 55) led Slate, Kansas, Jeremy, Pierre, Pete, the Cadence guys, a tri-guy named Darin, a former Mercury rider and two super fast NYC messengers. Just behind them, led by Piers, was Cadence rider Bill B., Dianna, a Cadence Coach and Iron man competitor, Richard Bravo, Craig, who had come down with the Boston Continental guys and me. Following us was everybody else would didn’t turn around with Karim and the 50-mile half day’ers.

Determined to reel in the gang out front, Piers started to lay down a series of seriously hard efforts. Through a number of rollers and small towns our group was gaining and it seemed like we’d be docking the mothership in minutes. So it was a surprise when we rounded a corner and saw nothing but cars and an empty shoulder. We didn’t know if it was bad luck related to missing lights or what but 10 miles and several mini prelude climbs away from the start of the KOM, Bear Mountain, and we were once again on our own. Later we came to find out that Stefan and his friend owned the front of the lead group, drilling it for the entire 20 rolling miles to the bottom of Bear. We never had a chance.

Our chase group stayed mostly together until the left turn onto South Mountain Road and the start of the 4-mile climb up to the top of Bear. The grade was even and the pitch constant and it’s the kind of climb perfectly suited to, if you’re feeling it, big-ring charging the whole thing. While broken here and there the surface is in great shape and surprisingly clean. It’s Sunday in spring in the middle of a beautiful wooded state park located just outside New York City and we don’t see a single a car the whole way up. As we advanced and the climb continued, Piers and Pierre rode off the front followed by Dianna and Bill, with Richard and I pulling up the rear.
At the top I ride into the usual parking lot rejoicing and recounting and soaking in the 360-degree view of the hills and river below. With everyone steaming and cooling down we quickly regrouped, hit the Coke machine and mounted up for the fast and fun descent back the way we came, passing a few of the third group stragglers still on their way up.

The ride home and back was more of, literally and figuratively, the ride out. With the addition of some popping and cracking—the kind that comes with riding too hard in the first half of a long day. The first section, back to Nyack and the Runcible Spoon, went by fast enough with an almost humorous amount of chasing, fading, catching and dropping; it was like a 15 mile-long game of rotating musical chairs down 9W.

The highlight of the day, except for the Bear Mountain climb, was our regroup and second longer visit at the Runcible Spoon. This time we owned the place and spread out across five or six tables. We all ordered hot food (the sausage, egg and cheese bagel a ride favorite) and relaxed for about 30 minutes before saddling back up.
It’s worth mentioning that while we rested and reposed to the clatter of coffee and food being served-up hot and tasty in the midst of enthusiastic conversation, Piers was unsuccessfully (almost but not close enough) chasing the German triathlon champ down the last 25 miles of 9W.

Back at Nyack we were, about 20 of us, leaving the Runcible and snaking our way through the Nyack Farmers Market to begin the final section back to the city. The group stayed together for the first 10 miles until the rolling hills of the Palisades, where Jeremy broke his shifter cable and was forced into two gear options: really hard and flat out super hard. And then Kansas, Slate, the ex-Mercury guy and two of NYC’s finest messengers decided to pin it all the whole way back. Most of the group got on that train while the rest of us (Jeremy, Craig, Pierre, Pete, Richard and I) rode slowly over the bridge and back down the very busy and entertaining anything-that-isn’t-a-car path to Tribeca and Cadence.

Once again we all regrouped this time back at the Cadence Café, where Michelle—the beautiful café manager—had an amazing assortment of sandwiches waiting for all those who finished. Story-telling, group-photos, showers and plenty of eating filled the last 30 minutes of the day before finally everyone went happily on their way.

-- Daniel Wakefield Pasley