Shad Week: Heat of the Dub

It was all good from the start. 

May 28, 2016
En route to Amherst, MA

The plan was ambitious and my anxiety was elevated: Leave Team Shad HQ in Woo City by 7:30 AM Saturday morning and arrive in Amherst by 9:00 when the Amherst College Mead Art Museum opened; see the Shakespeare First Folio; then meet with Wing Nut in Sunderland at 10:00 with the intention of satisfying two goals:

First, the Strava Gran Fondo challenge that both Wing Nut and Dubstoevsky were on the books for: a single day 115k ride (approximately 71 miles) during the month of May.

First Folio! 1623
To be! or fucking not to be!

Second, the small matter of the Tour de Heifer, ride number 2 of Team Shad's Big Three events for the team's 2016 season. The Tour de Heifer (or, as we like to think of it as, the Tour de Filet Mignon), is next week, Sunday, June 5th. That's 60+ dirt road miles in hilly southern Vermont (key word "hilly"). While we've both been training separately and are both in viable mid-season form, it seemed prudent to get together in advance of Big Number Two and do a ride together, one longer than the Tour de Flank Steak itself.

These were serious undertakings.

And we took them as such.

I was standing before the Shakespeare First Folio by 9:05 AM, no one else in the gallery except the guard who cautioned me about leaning too close lest I set off the alarm. 1623. The first folio was published seven years after Shakespeare's death and collected many of his plays and poems. If not for the first folio, perhaps no Shakespeare! That's the gravity of this book.

Then off I went to Sunderland, which sounds like a bucolic land of candy and mashed potatoes with butter but was really just a point of convenient rendezvous. Though it be hereby noted that Sunderland has one of the largest sycamore trees in the country, a tree that predates the revolution of 1776. And we rode past it and inhaled its karma and honored its longevity and hoped that, as we passed, we would be imbued with its stalwart certainty.

Wing Nut and the Big Sycamore in Sunderland

Stalwart certainty. A desperately needed trait in the maw of Hades' fire.

Because the day was WICKED HOT (New England inflection intended).

We left Sunderland around 10:30 AM when the day's baby Chernobyl heat pulses were reasonably contained, a wee bit of heat leaking through the concrete tomb. But that would not last.

Across the river into Whately, into the rolling shaded hills of Conway and Ashfield we rode and the temperature rose as the day unfolded.

Climbing out of forested hillsides into open farm road hillsides, the sun boomed down like Jah's Breath of Judgment, a furnace-like blast of torturous purity and frustrating fuck-nattiness. Like all moral reckoning, the heat could not be ignored.

But we didn't care! We are Team Shad and we ride in all conditions and under all circumstances and when pressed to produce, we do so. To wit:

Through shaded forest:

Reservoir Style

And the watery reminder of the ever possible:

Deerfield River, May 28, 2016

To the Bridge of Team and the maw forward, the sweaty heat pulse cracked-tarmac way forward, the raw sun slap and mockery, grit and pebble way forward, the inevitable shad splash fin surge forward:

Wing Nut and Dubstoevsky, Shad Style

Until finally we come around full circle to Sunderland and it's only 63 miles and we still need 10 more miles so there's nothing to be done but to ride north along River Rd to Montague and loop back around and notch the requisite mileage. and we do! 73+ miles, the May Gran Fondo.

Scenes from the Road

Somewhere above Bardwells Ferry

Riding into one's own destiny

Ka-ching!