Riding My Age, Take Two

I don’t usually (or usually don’t) make New Year’s resolutions, but since this year I did I tried to make a special effort to fulfill one of them. That was to “ride my age” before spring.

Rather than spending the winter months doing anything to actually make that happen, like training, I spent it eating and drinking too much. So when I went in for my checkup and saw my weight on the scale, my first reaction was “is this scale broken?” My second reaction was “Oh My God.”

Over the last couple of months, after changing my resolution from “before spring” to “before spring is over,” I’ve managed to get it down from “Oh My God” to “I could lose twenty pounds.” And doing some regular riding, as I’ve noted here, I’ve been getting stronger and faster. So, not willing to chance the weather on the real last day of spring next weekend, I went for it yesterday.

Here’s the basis of the route, downloaded from MapMyRide.com. I saw “Ravine Lake,” and knew this is where I needed to go.

Lake Road, the road that runs along the bank of Ravine Lake, is for my money the prettiest road in New Jersey. It’s a spot that for some reason medicates my mind and makes me all happy and peaceful. Knowing it was the midpoint provided its own motivation for me to to wuss out and head back early.

The route provided takes me through the usual towns that lie between Maplewood on the real countryside. First, ancient Short Hills. Here’s a cemetery along the side of Parsonage Hill Road, diagonal to the town ballfields teeming with little leaguers.

Down Parsonage Hill cutting across towards Chatham is the Passaic River, the dividing line between Essex and Morris Counties. Chatham was having a huge street fair all day, but I was distracted and didn’t get any photos, so the river will have to do.

In the far west part of Chatham is a playground where we used to take the kids when they were little. Back then, we called it “castle wood park,” because all the structures were built out of heavy lumber. There were towers, hidden tunnels, slides and obstacle courses. Sometimes you couldn’t find your kids, they’d be so well hidden. I don’t know what happened, but in the last year or two they ripped it all down and replaced it with this, a kind of dumbed-down version made of readymade components. Bah.

After dodging the pedestrians in downtown Chatham and riding west a few miles, the countryside opens up. Here, a little past Green Village, is peaceful farmland and a pond.

This is a landmark for me, and a sure sign that we’re getting in to horse country. This guy came up to the fence and tried to get my attention, but when I pulled out the camera he got a little shy.

I can just picture the person who put this route together. Assuming it’s a guy, he’s about 5’9″, weighs maybe 150 lbs., and his calves are bigger around than his waist. Which is to say, he’s a mountain goat and picks his roads based on the high degree of difficulty. This kind of person will make no bones about going up Tempe Wick Rd. past Jockey Hollow, a notable pain-in-the-butt hill. Jockey Hollow is a national historical monument, where Washington’s army spent a particularly brutal winter during the revolution. You can still see the barracks and campgrounds where they stayed. Valley Forge gets all the fame, but the winter they spent here was its match.

As the long winding hill to the park begins, there’s this large Victorian home set back from the road.

Trouble Ahead

Now after this it gets a little sketchy. The turn onto Cherry Lane isn’t marked. I had a feeling that was the turnoff, and looked closely, but I was already on the way down the steep hill. So I ended up in downtown Mendham. No biggie, it’s not a long way out of the way, and there was a convenient connector road that would get me back on track. My big mistake was not stopping for water. I didn’t realize it, but this was the last town I was going to see for a couple of hours.

Coming down Pleasant Valley, there was no indication on the cue sheet that it became Mosle Road. and the left turn wasn’t marked so I ended up all the way down on Mendham Road in Gladstone. I stopped to check my map (thank goodness I’ve got a GPS system built into my cellphone, it was a real time saver) and eat an energy bar before heading back to hook up with Willow Road, which leads directly to my destination, the fabled Ravine Lake. Here’s where I checked the map:

Somerset County hosts many of my favorite routes from the bike club. It’s full of quiet, tree-lined roads, bespoke colonial-era farmhouses and mansions set back on hillsides. Hidden bits of scenery play up the allaround beauty of the scenery, like this lake, screened off by trees.

I Reach My Goal

At long last, I’m on Lake Road. Here’s the exclusive Ravine Lake Club, at the north end of the lake.

It doesn’t look like much; it’s quite understated. But how exclusive is it? Quite. For one, there is no “application” process. You have to be invited to join. A business contact of mine who lives in the area ran it down for me once. This fellow founded a financial software company which was ultimately sold to Goldman Sachs. He made a ton of money and bought property a mile or so from the lake. He’s been there seven or eight years and has heard that they’re considering inviting him.

Here’s a view of the lake itself:

A little past the lake is a charming neighborhood that I’ve always admired. I particularly liked this house, with a little stream running through the back yard, and thought about how happy I’d be living in a nice place like this.

Sorry about the truck and the orange cones; I didn’t get a chance to art direct. After riding by this several times I realized it’s just the gatehouse to the big house up the hill!

Uh Oh

I knew I should’ve stopped in Mendham and refilled. I’m out of water, and the hardest part of the ride is coming up.

Now I’m sure once upon a time centuries ago there was an excellent reason for cutting Pennbrook Road out of the forest and running it up that hill. But actually putting it on a bike route is tah-wiiiisted. I read about this when I first started riding out here in the early ’90s, and have driven up it a few times out of curiosity. But my curiosity was never quite sick or self-destructive to actually ride it until yesterday. It goes up, and up, and up some more. And after one particularly steep section — 50 yards or so at an incline that I estimate to be around 30 degrees, there’s this:

You can’t really convey the slope of something like this in a photo. But this wiggles in the road are steps. It’s steep, and then flat. Steep, flat, steep, flat. They were cut into the road so that horses would be able to rest.

Got that? It’s so hard a draft horse could barely do it. And somebody puts it on a bike route. Like I said, twisted.

Just above, looking like something from “Gone With The Wind,” is this beautiful antebellum-looking manse:

I always expect to see Spanish moss hanging from the live oaks.

Just past the marked mile 30 on the map, another poorly marked turn, and I continued on Dryden down to Mendham road. This is the kind of neighborhood, I guess, where if you don’t know the name of the street they’d just as soon you weren’t there at all.

I was all turned around by the time I got to Mendham. After then mistakenly turning left, going down a hill, realizing my mistake and going back up, I was getting worried. The heat was really picking up, I hadn’t had water in a long time and had been sweating like a horse on the hills. While I’m fond of quoting Nietzsche’s “that which doesn’t kill me only serves to make me stronger,” one also has to remember that Nietzsche was insane. And also that someone with dependents shouldn’t really be rolling the dice on whether a bike ride is going to make him more like Lance Armstrong, or more like Tim Russert.

Salvation

So when I rolled into Bernardsville, mile 33 on this map but mile 43 after all my wrong turns, it was like a vision of an oasis in the desert, only it was real. I’d never been so happy to see a strip mall in my life. With many miles between places to buy groceries, everybody goes here.

I knocked out a liter of water, a 24-oz. Gatorade, plus a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream bar. I put another Gatorade into one of my bottles, and filled the other with water. I used it all on the way back — over a gallon. of liquid in all.

Bernardsville isn’t exactly close to Maplewood, but the trip back is at least manageable. Most of it is downhill, and I took 512 back into Summit (varying from the map on purpose, for a change). While Summit is in fact at the summit, 512 slopes up gradually enough that it’s never very hard work. But by the time I got back to Maplewood, I still had to deal with the valley. Coming from the west you run downhill to Valley Rd., and then you have to climb back out again. You can go diagonally across various sidestreets to break it up some, but it’s unavoidable. I was totally out of gas, and felt like I was just making it.

So? How Far Did You Go?

Not only did I fulfill my resolution, I even met my next goal. The total was 65.86 miles which not only is (considerably, thank you very much) more than my age, but is more than a metric century — 100 km.

So good for me.

And how does it feel?

Yesterday, after I ate and drank some more, not too bad. I played the show that night and actually did the best I’d done so far. Today my quadriceps feel like slabs of wood, but with a little stretching that will pass. I’ll bike to work tomorrow and that’ll loosen things even more.

I might even be up for the Princeton Century in August, but I’m not making any firm resolutions on that.