Leaving the hotel at dawn, I stopped at a convenience store and bought snacks, coffee and three breakfast sandwiches. I sat down among the dead bugs and cigarette butts on the sidewalk in front of the store, ate one of the sandwiches and drank my coffee before gingerly mounting up and continuing through downtown Eureka Springs, a place I have found fascinating since my first visit with my family when I was about 14. Its hilly streets, hippie vibe, funky shops and Victorian architecture were so different from anywhere I had ever been, and the idea that the springs had healing powers lent credence to the proposition that the place had some kind of magic. I soon crossed the suspension bridge over the White River at Beaver that had been underwater the previous summer.  The chunky, wet gravel and frequent mudholes along the section that followed slowed me to a sub-10 mph average. Without realizing it, I passed over into Missouri and eventually passed through the town of Seligman ...

I put on clean, dry cycling clothes (thank you, Centerpoint Horsecamp), downed some coffee and leftover pasta and zoomed back down the hill through Ponca, rejoining the course at Boxley Valley. The road is flat and the scenery beautiful for a few miles.  It had stopped raining and the entire day was forecasted to be rain-free. I was not exactly doing cartwheels with happiness, though, because I knew a fearsome climb awaited me where the gravel road departed the southern end of the valley. The hill there is so steep I walked down it when I came from the other direction in June of 2020. My friend, Kate Geisen, wrote in her race report in 2019 that riding down that hill was the most afraid she had ever been on a bike. The hill showcases a climb of over 1,000 feet in three miles of slick gravel, and I didn’t even attempt to ride it. Just pushing the bike was enough of a chore, and the task tempted me with another opportunity to demoralize myself with “misery algebra.” One doesn’t have ...

  Richland Creek was up and running fast After a few hours of hearing rain steadily drumming on the roof of the community center, I woke, made coffee and tentatively started packing up my gear. I was very uncertain about what high water adventures awaited me. Rain was forecast for much of the day, contributing to my dread. Did it make any sense to get out there and ride ten miles down the road and have to turn around and ride back? I recalled an exploratory road bike ride I did a few years ago in  Tuscany   where I stopped near a home next to a road under construction. The most Italian-looking man in  Italy stood near the road like a sentinel. He   asked me if something was wrong. I responded that I didn't know if I could ride down that road. He gestured with a thick hand and said, "Prova, prova" (Try, try). That "prova, prova" phrase was on my mind as I rolled out from Witts Springs. Was I thinking a carrier pigeon would come drop me a note about the creek cr...

  “Be like a rocky promontory against which the restless surf continually pounds; it stands fast while the churning sea is lulled to sleep at its feet. I hear you say, "How unlucky that this should happen to me!" Not at all! Say instead, "How lucky that I am not broken by what has happened and am not afraid of what is about to happen. The same blow might have struck anyone, but not many would have absorbed it without capitulation or complaint."   -Marcus Aurelius,  Meditations I rolled out of the Dogwood Motel an hour later than I had intended and was rewarded for my sloth by arriving at Walmart just a few minutes before it opened at 7 a.m. I resupplied water and snacks and bought reading glasses that I slid down in the camelback pocket next to the sunglasses that hadn’t come out since Day 3. I continued riding north out of town past the signs advertising various productions of Ozark folk music. I knew from having ridden this part of the course in the other dire...

  You might think I came out of my ¾ day rest in Little Rock with rompin’, stompin’, leg-ripping energy and power, but I did not. I didn’t panic, though, because I had come to expect to ride the first couple of hours of every day with legs of sand and that’s what I had [1] . The going was easy up through Maumelle, though, and I stopped at the first open place I could see that had breakfast, a Starbucks. I caught my breath when I walked in and all I saw in the display case were pastries. “I thought you guys had breakfast sandwiches with eggs in them,” I said. “We do, but they’re hard to come by so we don’t put them out on display,” replied the barista. “Could you describe the sandwiches you have?” I asked. I stopped her when she got to the one with sausage, egg and cheese on a muffin. “I’ll have three of those, please,” I said. “We may not have three,” she said, walking to wherever they had those things squirrelled away, presumably under lock and key. It was starting to feel like I ...

  I woke up, ate some snacks, packed up, put my smelly, wet riding clothes and shoes on, and rolled out of Thornburg in the rain shortly after 6 a.m. The smartest thing I did during the night was to put my phone, charging cord and external battery inside my jacket while I slept in the hopes that my clean, dry clothes and body heat would dry the phone and cord enough to take a charge. It worked, and the phone was more than halfway topped off when I packed it away to start riding again. I picked my way through the mudholes and soft gravel of Tram Road for the first hour. The effect of hard rain on gravel, even in the places it doesn’t turn to mud, is to soften the road and riding a bike over that surface gives one the sensation of a million tiny hands reaching up to briefly grab your tires as you try to pass. What should be an easy 12 or 13 mph becomes a labored 8 or 9. Tram road was one of those sections of the course that turned out to be an object lesson in "be careful what you w...