Un course finale:
After completing the brevet series, it was time to collect all the information and send it in to RUSA for entry to PBP. The RUSA application was in two parts: the official French-language form that had to be sent in, and the English translation for non-Francophones. You had to remember to fill out the information in French and to do the dates in the French style. We got those mailed in right away.
A few weeks after completing the brevet series, the medals were sent out. Each brevet has a medal associated with it- in this case, identical except for color. I've never been much for getting merit badges for riding my bike, but I have to admit it was pretty cool to get those mementos in the mail. There is also a medal, the Super Randonneur, for completing the entire brevet series within one year; those who go to PBP are presented with this medal when they check in to the event. And, of course, PBP itself has a medal which is sent to each finisher- each ancien- after all the results are tabulated and entered into "The Book."
The 8 weeks between the end of the brevet series and PBP is a long time. It's easy to lose fitness and endurance, so it's up to each rider to maintain their strength, speed and fitness. Tim and I had planned to do a number of long rides, 200 to 400 km, every other weekend until PBP. Life, as it is wont to do, intervened and we weren't able to keep this schedule. Don, who had been able to complete a 600K brevet and thus qualify for PBP, also got in touch about doing some long rides.
My right Achilles was still complaintive, although my knee seemed to have recovered and no longer bothered me. I tried slightly lowering my saddle and moving my cleats slightly to the rear. This seemed to help somewhat. Naprosyn- Vitamin N- became part of my diet, as did antacids and acid blockers. Ice was a routine occurrence. Despite that, my Achilles still ached on most rides over 40 miles and when walking downstairs. The weather became uncooperative as well, as Minnesota was huddled under a stormy weather pattern virtually the entire month of June- I've not been rained on so many times in the past five years combined as I was in June. After a lifetime high 1200 miles in the month of May, I was only able to ride 800 miles in June (still better than average, as June is the wettest month of the year in Minnesota and I hate riding in the rain). I focused on gradually building up my mileage, hoping to let my Achilles repair itself so that it wouldn't flare up in PBP and quite possibly end my ride. I was able to do a hilly 104 miles on June 12 and about 40 somewhat hilly miles the next day in pretty good comfort, so I was pleased. The time was coming to try something longer.
The weeks passed by, trying to get in an adequate amount of training. Martin Fahje sent around an e-mail to the Minnesota randonneurs that it wasn't necessary to keep doing 200-300-400 kilometer rides. He recommended doing one 100 mile ride a week and focusing on climbing and speed during the week, riding a minimum of four times. Because of my tendinitis, I wasn't able to consistently do long rides and hard, fast rides also seemed to make matters worse. Over time, however, my Achilles improved until the week before PBP I was able to do all my rides pain free. It was actually a strange thing to not have pain!
During the
final week, anxiety alternated with excitement. We were scheduled to
depart from Minneapolis on Flight 42 on August 15th, which would get
us to Amsterdam on Saturday morning for a connection to Aeroport
Charles de Gaulle in Paris at 9:40 AM. We planned to take the RER B
train from CdG to St. Michel in downtown Paris, then transfer to the C
train to St. Quentin en Yvelines. From there it was supposed to be
about 500 meters to the Hotel Gril Campanile.
August 15th, 2003
Ah, the best laid plans. Tim's travel
agent, Des Peres Travel, got Tim's ticket but did not get a seat
assignment at the same time. My ticket was purchased through NWA
WorldPerks, and also did not include a seat assignment. Our tickets
were in hand in April, four months before PBP. On the day of our
flight, we arrived three hours early because there were allegedly
"extra precautions" being taken for passengers with bikes (according
to Des Peres Travel). We checked in just like usual- no changes in
procedure which meant we were about an hour and a half earlier than
necessary. We were told to get our seat assignments at the gate.
Proceeding to the gate, there was no one yet staffing the podium. Not
surprising, given how early we were. About 1:30 someone started doing
seat assignments. We queued up only to be told that we would be
called by name for assignment. We sat down. About 2:15 PM, they
began calling for boarding by row and only called a few people by name
to get their seats. Lots of people were standing around uncertainly,
and it was clear that the gate staff had very little idea what to do.
With about 25 passengers left, we were informed that all the seats had
been filled!
Northwest had overbooked the flight, which is of course SOP in the airline industry these days. After much hassling, the best Northwest could do was to get us flights (with seat assignments) on the same flight the next day. Grrrrr! They gave us $750 travel vouchers each (which means they gave out about $30,000 in travel vouchers), which did not begin to compensate for being forced to miss our check-in time and bike inspection in St. Quentin en Yvelines. We could only hope the organizers would be understanding when we got there. Of course, while we were not going to Paris today, our bikes were en route as they'd already been loaded on the plane. I imagined them going around and around the luggage carousel in Charles de Gaulle for 24 hours.
I bit my tongue as much as I could, since it wasn't the gate staff's fault that the flight was seriously overbooked. The official excuse was the East Coast power outage the day before, but one of the other passengers on our flight had been through the exact same experience- on the exact same flight- the day before us: before the East Coast airports went dark and closed. She'd been bumped two days in a row by overbooking. There is no excuse for this practice by airlines. To top it off, the pay phone ate my money when I tried to call my wife to tell her the news. A friend of Tim's came out to pick us up, and I amused myself with draft revisions of a letter to Northwest Airlines management.
I woke up on August 16th, had breakfast and went out for a short ride to work off my anxiety and frustration. If we got bumped again- which I didn't put past NWA- we would miss PBP. Back at home, I had lunch and rechecked whether I had packed everything I needed. Jean dropped me off at the airport for the second time, where I met Tim. We proceeded to check in and had a chat with some of the Northwest counter staff. We were informed that on average about 60% of the people who hold tickets can be assured of getting a seat and the other 40% are taking their chances. Moral of the story is to get a seat assignment when you buy your ticket. Northwest Airlines does not really care if you get to your destination as long as their plane is full, so they routinely and will routinely continue to sell more tickets than they have seats. Before leaving check-in, we made sure we got seat assignments for every leg of our flight except from Amsterdam to Paris on our return leg.
With our boarding cards in hand we went to the gate. We had been bumped to business class, I suppose in partial compensation for the inconvenience, so we got to board first. I had never flown anything but economy class, and am barely able to afford that so I only fly rarely. For the billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidy that the airline industry gets from the US federal and state governments every year, air travel remains outrageously expensive. In 1991, Minnesota taxpayers bailed out NWA when incompetent management practices nearly put them out of business; our reward has been that we pay the highest fares in the country for NWA flights. It's not for nothing that NWA is known as "Northworst Airlines" around here.
The difference between economy and business class is astonishing. In the seven and a half hour flight, we were served food and offered alcoholic beverages an average of about every 20 minutes. There were as many flight attendants for 70 or so business class seats as there were for the 300 or so economy class seats. The difference in how we were treated smacked of classism and an economic caste system gone awry. While Europe is widely believed by Americans to still have a caste system, we found that the economy class service on European airlines was every bit as good as that in US business class, whereas the US economy class service was surly and irritated. (Overall in general I found French customer service to be superior to American customer service throughout my trip).
Having gotten very little sleep on the flight, we landed in Amsterdam and had a while to hang around the airport. The flight over Holland was beautiful. The country is indeed as flat- at least from the air- as its reputation. I saw no windmills near the airport, but Amsterdam and its canals were quite visible. Holland has a reputation as a bicyclists' paradise, with an extensive system of dedicated bike lanes and paths. Unfortunately we were not able to get out of the airport to see the country directly. KLM provided us with a clean, neat plane and very professional and pleasant multilingual flight staff. We were at Aeroport Roissy-Charles de Gaulle in 50 minutes after takeoff. I had previously flown in and out of Terminal 2, this time we were in Terminal 1 which is much older, shabby, frankly filthy and badly maintained. It was probably very dramatic and impressive when it was built, with rather futuristic architecture, but it has fallen into neglect and disrepair.
We went to the luggage claim area to see what had become of our bikes. The KLM desk staff wasn't sure, actually. We had a long wait to find out, but it turned out that our luggage had been held in Amsterdam and was put on our flight from there to Paris. Tim's suitcase came up on the conveyor, and then our bikes came up by lift. The desk staff wheeled my case over to me on a trolley, with the case looking like someone had run it over. Filthy black marks and scuffs were all over it. The zippers had been locked together with a blue plastic tag by someone, so I had to break that open to visually check my bike. I couldn't see any obvious damage but wasn't able to do much more than glance at it in the airport. Tim's bike arrived, and we took off through the airport to see about getting to St. Quentin in time to build our bikes and still make it to check-in.
Taking the Roissybus shuttle from Terminal 1 to Terminal 3, we found the RER station. An elderly French man with excellent English helped us identify our trains and I bought tickets at the counter. We descended to the voie to await our train. The last car had a bicycle icon on it, so we loaded our bikes into the entryway and sat down. From CdG we went to St. Michel-Notre Dame where we had to transfer from the B line to the C line. It took a while to sort out the timetable, but eventually we identified the correct train (probably missing a couple of them in the process). On the voie we met another cyclist doing PBP, an Australian. We got on the train together, only to find three French cyclists belonging to an Esperanto club also on the train. The entry was crowded with bikes and riders. About 2 1/2 hours after arriving on CdG, we debarked from the train in St. Quentin en Yvelines. Coming out of the gare, we didn't know where to go. There was a hotel near the gare, so I went in and asked for directions. It was about a 5 minute walk to the Hotel Gril Campanile.
Arriving
at the hotel, we checked in, through our luggage in the room, and
immediately went down to assemble the bikes. Taking the bike our of
my case, I discovered that the rear wheel had been smashed and bent.
It had about a 3 inch "wow" as it turned, not even making it through
the generous frame clearances of my cyclo-cross bike, and about a 1/2
inch hop that hadn't been there before. Drastic measures were needed
to make the wheel rideable enough to go to check-in at the
Gymnasium de les Droites du l'Homme in Guyancourt. We got our
bikes together and rode over in street clothes. Technical inspection
was slow mainly due to the lines (over 4000 bikes were being
inspected, after all); the inspection itself was less than 5 minutes.
From there we had to proceed into the Gymnasium to get our route
books, identity cards, etc. This was actually very fast and
efficient, with check-in areas being arranged by language. The total
time was probably an hour, the vast majority of which were spent
standing in line for the technical inspection.
After inspection and checking in, we wandered around soaking up the atmosphere and looking at bikes. I saw a number of dedicated bikes for randonneuring, but not as many as I expected. I saw several Gilles Berthoud bikes as well as a Pierre Perrin, two Rando-Cycles and a few others by small constructeurs. Sadly I saw no Alex Singer, Rene Herse or Jo Routens randoneuses. Most people were riding racing bikes with lights haphazardly clamped on in various places and interesting kludges for carrying luggage. Compared to the elegant randoneuses by Berthoud, Perrin, Rando-Cycles and others, these bikes looked very Rube Goldberg indeed. We departed from the Gymnasium, having to show our identity cards and be checked to make sure the frame number matched our ID, and went back to the hotel to finish tweaking the bike. I had to put nearly three hours into truing the wheel, and had some help from a bike shop owner who was also there for PBP. I had to debate whether the wheel would even be rideable for 1200 km. With some testing, I thought it might be. Scouting around St. Quentin, it was obvious there there was not going to be a replacement wheel available- the town does not have a real bike shop although the Go Sports in the Espace St. Quentin did have some useful cycling merchandise.
The tail
end of the French heat wave had warmed up our room to the point that
it was very difficult to sleep the night of the 17th, combined no
doubt with nerves about the event. On about 6 hours of sleep, I woke
up on the 18th feeling groggy. I planned to sleep in the afternoon to
try to be ready. We went into the Espace St. Quentin commercial
center and found a patisserie with excellent products and happily
munched French pastry for breakfast. We explored the Carrefour
supermarche and the Go Sports, the town sporting goods store
with a small cycling section. I looked at wheels but none were
suitable. After lunch at a creperie, we went back to the hotel
to nap for a bit. I got in another 3 hours of sleep in a broken
fashion, but felt better. In the afternoon, we delivered our drop
bags to the pickup point, then finalized preparations. Dressed in our
cycling clothes, we went to the pre-event dinner where we ran into an
enthusiastic Don McCall. After eating, we went over to the Gymnasium
for the official start. When we got there we didn't know where to go,
but we ran into Sharon who pointed us in the right direction.
And finally: Paris-Brest-Paris 2003
The 200Kbrevet The 300K brevet The 400K brevet The 600K brevet Paris-Brest-Paris 2003