Given that we were
driving the TDI, we were all excited about 55.9 cent diesel...but, of
course, the high desert being what it was, we were in for
disappointment On Thursday night, Charlene and I drove up to
Truckee, and on Friday morning we got back in the car, drove up
highway 89 to Sierraville. A right turn on to highway 49, and we went
over to the little burg of Loyalton, at 5,000 feet in a huge valley up
in the Sierra, to start about 30 hours of being part of the support
crew for the
Christian
Encounters Ministries' Agony Ride, a 24 hour bike ride that loops
50 miles in a U, from Loyalton almost out to Beckwourth, back through
Loyalton, and up to Vinton (
my
best guess on Google Maps, it isn't quite right because the actual
course is almost exactly 50 miles round trip). Lather, rinse and
repeat for as many times as you can. The riders ranged from happy to
complete 50 miles on Wal*Mart special mountain bikes with knobby
tires, to one professional mountain bike racer sponsored by Cannondale
who cleared 446 miles, and his riding partner who managed 413 before
pulling in to our rest stop and then passing out and needing
professional medical attention.
The view from
Beckwourth SAG station, if you listen closely you can hear the theme
from "The Good, The Bad and the Ugly" as the wind blows through the
sagebrushWhen that last incident occurred I was over in the radio
tent managing rider dispatch info. He went down but was only
unconscious for a little while. However, I still giggle over what I
imagined, and what was reported was, the discussion with the
responding paramedics: "Anything out of the ordinary prior to this
fainting spell?" "Yeah, I haven't slept for over 24 hours, and I just
rode 413 miles in temperatures that ranged from the mid 90s to the
upper 20s, only stopping when I had to refill my water bottles...". It
takes a hell of a lot of professionalism on the part of the paramedics
to not just completely lose it and double-over with laughter.
Charlene had signed up to do massage at the Beckwourth rest stop, when
I'd signed up I volunteered to bring tools, which got me assigned to
do mechanical work. It turned out that after the first stop, where
there were some problems including a rear wheel that got torn up and
lost several spokes (that I'll be ready to tackle next year) the
mechanical work basically boiled down to tossing a zip tie on the
occasional light or reflector, and pointing people to the floor pump.
Until I let slip that I did, in fact, have a HAM license (KI6MZO, for
you keeping track at home), at which point I ended up spending a bunch
of time in the radio tent.
We showed up around 9 because we were worried that I might have to run
Charlene out to Beckwourth and then go back to Loyalton, but I ended
up staying at Loyalton where we did a tech inspection on every
bike. This was something of an eye-opener; I saw both the experienced
cyclists who knew what they were doing and were going for broke, and
people with knobby tires on cheap bikes, and a few folks with 30 year
old bikes that hadn't been ridden for most of those years. In all
cases my goal was "how can we make sure this bike is safe and these
people are going to have a good time", which meant some tuning up
happened.
About noon we drove out to Beckwourth and set up, they'd been putting
things together since 10 or so, the ride officially started at 1PM,
and we got our first riders about 1:40 (though those guys mostly just
turned around and booked back, the rush happened circa 2). Traffic
dwindled off at night, I think only about 7 riders actually went all
night, but that continued 'til 1PM on Saturday. We tried to get some
sleep at 11 or so, weren't sleeping well and Charlene got called out
to work on some sore muscles, we grabbed another few hours from 1 'til
roughly 5, and then hit the ground again.
There were 2
support people for every rider The Agony is something of an outlier
in organized bike rides. Most organized bike rides aren't profitable
until there are somewhere more than a thousand riders, and the support
to rider ratio is generally on the order of 1 to 10. The Agony is a
"pledge per mile" (although we've always just done block grants) ride,
and is a fundraiser for a camp with a whole bunch of interns and
former attendees who want to support the organization. So it manages a
support to rider ratio of somewhere on the order of 2 to 1, and had,
this year, just over 80 riders. One of the things you can do with a
support staff like that is track every single rider. So in the radio
shade we had a big board with a tag for every rider, with their status
in a rest stop, or en-route to another stop, or, for a very few,
pulled from the course.
In practice, this process took about 3 people: Out at the entrance the
people with the drinks and snacks would use FRS radios to send rider
numbers in and out, then in the radio tent we had one person logging
in and out times, one person on the radio sending these times back to
the other rest stops, and one person managing the big board.
Having the big board separately maintained at all 3 stops let us catch
the inevitable errors, but also gave us enough eyes on the boards that
we could start to see problems develop before they occurred. We saw
patterns in the groups of riders moving together, and when two arrived
at a rest stop without the usual third, flags went up and mobile SAG
drivers got alerted.
But the whole thing was really itching for some automation, so one of
the projects I can see working on for next year involves a couple of
phases:
Putting "the board" on computer. We should have a simple interface
that manages the display of which riders are where, and this could
then keep track of how long we expect each rider to take between
stops, and alert mobile SAG if they're overdue.
Finding some way to track individual riders automatically. That FRS
link back from the rest stop entrance was error prone, required an
extra writing step (one of the things I learned about radio
operations is that voice radio requires pen and paper).
Automating transmitting this data back and forth to other rest
stops via HAM packet radio.
Sunset over the high desert
On that last point, the valley is pretty flat, so we were almost line
of sight. However, there were a bunch of issues with... I don't know,
I'm not a radio guy (yet)... so we had a number of problems. The
packet radio had problems. And when the packet radio did have
problems, we had a situation where we could talk to Vinton and
Loyalton, and Vinton could talk to Loyalton, but Vinton couldn't hear
Loyalton, so when the packet radio link went south we ended up doing
relay of long lists of numbers from Loyalton to Vinton.
One of the things to experiment with is point-to-point WiFi.
But the other thing is that I need to look for is how to set up this
stuff via HAM packet, because in areas that have more interesting
terrain, point-to-point WiFi isn't gonna happen.
Sunrise. It is, after all, a
24 hour event. What was I, a declared atheist, doing helping out at
an event to raise funds for an organization called "
Christian Encounter
Ministries"? Charlene's brother and his wife are long-time Agony
riders, and their sons have both been to the camp that this
organization supports, and all feel that the kids got a lot out of the
camp. But, beyond that, it was quite good for me to spend the weekend
hanging out with people who see the world very differently than I do,
and I'm still processing some of those differences.
I didn't bring up the issue of religion, other than the usual things
that slip out ("I take my coffee black... like my soul."), and I got a
chance to listen and learn and maybe, some years hence, we'll bring a
little understanding.
Until then it's great to be out there supporting people who want to
push themselves just a little bit further, to find that extra reserve
that they didn't know they had.
