Ride Report - Aurora City of Lights 400k Brevet

With bonus miles! As in planned bonus miles, not just missed turns.

At some point here, I’m going to write about DNFing the 2023 Moran 333 race. That’s not today’s newsletter, but it was an experience that I learned a lot from (and wrestled with for quite a while).

The reason I bring it up now is that, even though I didn’t finish that race, the distance I did cover has remained my single ride long, 423 kilometers. Now, because that was 423km of “gravel,” including miles of washboard roads so bad that 4x4 pickup trucks had to crawl through them and even more miles of hike-a-bike through deep sand, I figured I could go further than that if the occasion asked for it. I just haven’t been out on a one-shot adventure that long in the two years since.

Until this weekend.

110% ACOL

At first glance, the Aurora City of Lights 400k Brevet (emphasis added) would not quite make it to a new personal best long ride, either. However, much like last week at the Ten Thousand Ride, there was a bikepacking element involved, and that made the difference. More on that in a sec.

The brevet weekend began on Friday with a short 20km jaunt westward from the Aurora Metra station to the Big Rock campground. Fellow Chicago Randonneurs Sarah Rice and Kim Carlson shared the campsite with me (and, in fact, the idea was Sarah’s to begin with, as she was using the weekend as a loaded practice run ahead of this year’s Mishigami Challenge).

The camp setup this week was significantly leaner than last week’s, as I opted for my bivvy instead of my tent. The reasoning here was twofold. One, we got in late on Friday night and the ride on Saturday would likewise mean camp was little more than a quick pit stop for sleep. Two, I was trying to minimize the bags on/bags off changes I would need to make, and taking the bivvy meant that swapping my saddle bag with my sleep system inside for my tool pouch was the only change to the bike I’d need to make. Easy.

That brings us to Saturday morning, which is hardly an appropriate name for 3:30am (when my alarm went off) but I guess that’s not really the point.

This is where the “110% ACOL” (or #110percentACOL as you may have seen it on other platforms) comes in. At just a hair over 20km from our campground to the start/finish of the brevet back at the Aurora Metra station, riding to the start, then riding the brevet, then riding back to camp, would turn a 400km brevet into a 440km day for me. Said differently, I had a ride planned that, in total, was 110% of the scheduled brevet.

Which would also make a new personal long single ride. If I finished.

The Part Where I Rode With A Group

Among the many rules and awards that Randonneurs USA tracks is the “R60” ride. This isn’t a separate route or distance, but rather an achievement denoting that a rider completed a route in under 60% of the normal time limit.

For a 400km route, this means finishing within 16 hours.

A number of club members had decided ahead of time to chase this mark, and while normally I would have jumped in with them, I was seriously unsure how my legs were going to feel for this ride. I had accumulated fatigue from my Bikepack the Ten Thousand adventure the previous weekend, not to mention the Chicago-Milwaukee-Chicago brevet the weekend before that. Riding to camp on Friday night, it felt like I was really having to cajole my legs into pedaling as strong as I wanted them to.

So when we started the ACOL brevet at 5am on Saturday, I did not roll off the front with the six or so speedy riders chasing this goal, instead settling in as part of a group of eight.

A group that was decidedly not going slow. For the first 100km of the ride, the course pointed almost uniformly south, and we took advantage of a not-strong-but-not-inconsequential tailwind to average just over 30kph. That’s cooking.

Unfortunately the one major bummer of the day did occur during this period, in fact, it was less than 50km in. As our group of eight rolled along, a couple riders accidentally touched wheels, and one of our number went down. The crash was thankfully into soft grass on the side of the road, and as far as I know there were no meaningful injuries, but a cracked helmet meant their day was done.

PSA: don’t play around with potential head injuries.

Most of our group, plus a couple trailing riders, got rolling again while Sarah, Kim, and I stayed with our downed compatriot until a rideshare could come and pick them up.

Once we got back on course, the three of us stuck together until the 56km mark, where Sarah and Kim elected to make a quick stop at the first control point while I decided to follow my pre-ride plan to make my first of three resupply stops at kilometer 113.

At around the 65km mark, I caught my first glimpse of the riders ahead, though it was quite the tease: just some blinking red lights at the end of a long, straight road. Still, it was a carrot to chase, a promise that I might be able to link up with some other riders for at least part of the day.

Over the next 20 kilometers, I slowly reeled in the group ahead. I was careful not to over-exert myself in the chase at less than a quarter of the way into the day’s course, but bit by bit I clawed back until somewhere in the 80-90km mark I finally made contact. Grabbing a minor breather at the back of the group was much appreciated, as was simply talking to several of my fellow club memebers.

This group of seven (including me) stayed mostly together up through that first resupply stop, where we were fast, efficient, and gone again within 15 minutes.

The Part Where I Rode Alone

Shortly after that first stop, I decided to push on solo instead of sticking with the group. It’s not that I was going significantly faster than the group was, but even though I didn’t want to commit to riding with the fast group from the start of the ride, I still did want to use the ACOL 400k to test myself a bit.

So carrying momentum from a small downhill, I rolled through the front of our group and slowly extended my gap over the next 50 kilometers.

That may sound like it’s overstating the case, and indeed, after 20-30km I no longer could see anyone behind me, but it certainly felt like any brief pause was likely to get me caught. But again, good training for upcoming priorities like Mishigami. The most time you lose in long events like this is from stopping.

Case in point: I realized right after we left the resupply that I had failed to re-up on chamois cream while paused. So I decided to experiment - could I reapply chamois cream while riding my bike? It’s a bit of a silly thought, not the least because it does require some extra energy to pull it off, but in the end it was doable. Good to know!

I did make a short unscheduled stop at about kilometer 175 for a bathroom, but otherwise pushed on to my next planned resupply, 234km in. I don’t know if it was because I knew the day’s ride would be longer than normal or something else, but I managed to avoid the low spot I usually hit in the 160-200km range.

That said, the stretch after that next resupply was unquestionably the hardest of the route for me, with one exception I’ll come to.

It was after that short bathroom break 175km in that the course shifted from a prevailing southerly, then westerly route to a northeasterly one. As mentioned, the Northeast wind wasn’t particularly punishing, but as the course turned it from a tailwind to a headwind, it was certainly noticeable.

My second resupply was incredibly helpful in breaking up some of the monotony of pushing through the wind, which over open farmland rarely saw a windbreak to slow it down, but that resupply was rather quickly in the rearview mirror once I pushed on. Later, from about kilometer 293-303 was easily my least favorite portion of the course, running straight east into the wind while tracking a frontage road next to the roar of Interstate 80.

Between these two extremes, however, sits the jewel of the entire route: the run through Starved Rock State Park. It’s not necessarily the bike-friendliest part of the route, but it’s comfortable enough to ride on, and it’s the only place I’ve been in Illinois where you get to play on switchbacks, however briefly.

Illinois Route 71 is a small, two lane highway that tracks up from the Illinois River to the plateau where Starved Rock sits. I’ve ridden this section before and absolutely loved it, even on a busier day. Saturday afternoon, when I was passing through, was relatively low traffic, and the road spurred me on, up, and over the climbing road, then bombing down through the park itself.

After hours ticking over the kilometers one at a time, this roughly 15km section made me forget about the time I’d already spent on my bike and just enjoy the ride. It was all too short, but a joy-filled section for me.

But, as I said, after this section was another long slog, from roughly kilometer 285, when I completed the climb out of Utica, Illinois, until I finally reached my third resupply stop, at kilometer 336 in Sheridan, Illinois. This was certainly the low point of the ride, not helped by the fact that I was riding it through the hottest part of the afternoon.

At Sheridan, though, I took a couple extra minutes to sit, re-set…and eat a giant bag of chips. Potato chips are a favorite ultra snack of mine, though unfortunately they don’t pack onto the bike well. In fact, most packable snacks tend to be of the sweet variety. Gummy bears. Gels. Bars. Electrolyte drinks. A lot of these things have sodium in them as well, but it’s hard to find things that are truly savory.

I’ve found that taking five or ten minutes to absolutely go to town on a big bag of chips is often time well spent. The potatoes mean you’re getting plenty of carbs, and the salt can do wonders to re-set your body.

And it worked once again. Yes, it was getting cooler and trending towards dusk, but setting out from that resupply, the end of the ride felt clearly in sight. The chips had re-set my stomach, and now gummy candy sounded good again. A slow but steady diet of Haribo Twin Snakes carried me and my rejuvenated legs towards the finish.

Not only that, I had a clear goal to chase. My efforts through the middle section of the ride meant that, even with the slower pace compared to the first 100km of the day, I was close to making the R60 time cutoff after all. I just needed to keep the pace strong, to keep pushing just a little bit all the way to the finish. The margin was thin, but my body felt surprisingly good and so I powered on ahead.

The only thing that slowed me down in those final kilometers, in fact, was a puncture.

With less than five kilometers to the finish, I heard a sound from my bike like a loud freehub. Except that I don’t have a loud freehub. I don’t like loud freehubs.

Sure enough, when I pulled over I could see sealant spitting from a tiny cut, some sort of minuscule bit of rock or glass lodged in the rubber. So, out came the multitool and plugs. I picked the shard out, stuck a bacon strip into the tire, and quickly pumped it back up. (Another shout out, as there was in the Kankakee River Run ride report, for the Silca Gravelero hand pump. Just in a league of its own compared to every other hand pump I’ve ever used.)

Thankfully, the quick repair meant I only lost a couple minutes. I rolled into the finish with nine minutes to spare.

Back to Camp

Of course, as I’ve already mentioned, the finish line wasn’t my finish line. So after re-setting my Wahoo, I turned around and started retracing my steps, following the end of the ACOL route back nearly 10km before diverting off towards the campsite.

It was a bit of a surreal ride. I didn’t attempt to push the pace at all - the main part of the ride was over, the time constrained part. All I had left was to cruise on to my personal finish line.

And yet, my legs felt fresh. Where I’d felt like I had to fight for every kilometer hours earlier, now I felt like I could keep going. Not that I wanted to, particularly, but like I could ride into the night if I needed to. Going back to that Moran 333 ride, I’ve been on my bike longer before. Even if this was a new long distance, at just under 18 hours since I’d left camp that morning, it wasn’t stressing my limits for time yet.

I think I mostly attribute this to an athlete’s high, but it does provide a small window into what some of these ultra-endurance athletes, such as those who were taking on the Unbound XL at the same time I was out on the ACOL route, must be feeling when they’re in hour 25, 30, 35 of an effort. As I wrote a little while ago, it still seems a little crazy…but increasingly it’s something I can wrap my mind around.

Final Thoughts

In the middle of the Aurora City of Lights 400k, the thought of doing a 600km ride in a few weeks seemed unconscionable. At the end…and extra 200km (or 160km, I suppose) still seems like a lot further to go, but perhaps within the realm of possibility.

I suppose that’s part of why I set these goals for the year. They push me. They appeal to me. They make me wonder what I can do.

A new furthest single ride was a success. That means there’s no reason it can’t be surpassed.