Day 39: The Spokes Routine

Lamar, CO to Fowler, CO — 86.3 mi, 1566 ft

Lately it feels like our team has found its balance. The wide spectrum of speed demon to leisurely biker we talked about in our first week has condensed as people make compromises on the days we should focus on reaching our destination fast vs days we can reststopmaxx. Team meetings have become less frequent, the communication between team members becoming implicit and intuitive. After more than a month on the road, we all just know what to do: what it takes to get out of the house in the mornings, the list of team tasks before bed, how long each day’s route will take us and therefore how much dilly-dallying time we have at each rest stop. Everybody has implicitly-assigned tasks they take on, but also everyone quietly picks up slack wherever it’s needed. It feels like the seven of us are some fluid blob of force moving in sync across the country. Of course, there are days where the team splits, where we have wildly different opinions on the team’s next move that warrant an hour of circular discussion that usually concludes right back where we started, but it’s all part of the glorious fact that we are seven college kids spending 24/7 together. So what exactly is this “balance”, this “implicit routine” I speak of?

Today I would like to take you all behind the scenes and walk you through the accurate actual 100000-step daily routine of a Spokes day—-most of which is never notable enough for the blogs. 

THE MORNING (~2h):

1. Wake up and get out of bed within five minutes of Tatiana’s alarm (a novel feeling as a recently reformed 20-minute alarm snoozer on campus)
2. Roll up and pack sleeping bag, sleeping pad, and camping pillow
3. Switch my headphones charging with my bike computer (I only have 1 USB-C charger)
4. Brush teeth, wash face, pee
5. Put a seemingly-ridiculous amount of chamois butter on the entire surface of your butt that touches the bike seat
6. Wear bike bib, jersey, sun sleeves, socks
7. Pack up all our belongings and put personal bags in the car (the faster I get at this the more intensely I feel like a true nomad)
8. Write thank you card for host
9. Do a few of the following communal tasks:
   1. Re-pack the car’s overhead orange bag with the camping sleeping equipment 
   2. Put the team face wash, body wash, shampoo, conditioner, detergent, and extension cords in the toiletries bin and back in the car
   3. Re-pack the cooler with our food and ice that was stored in the host’s fridge overnight
   4. Fill the six team water jugs
   5. Re-organize everyone’s personal bags in the car
   6. Last sweep of the host’s place for forgotten belongings
   7. Close the car trunk and attach the car’s bike rack and mount the driver’s bike 
10. BREAKFAST! Which, when we don’t have a Warmshowers host that kindly cooks something for us, looks a little like shoving random things in your mouth from our “pantry” box: think bars, GoGo squeeZ, CheezIts…
11. Clean and fill personal water bottles
12. Load the day’s route onto the bike computer, which is a little screen mounted onto our handlebars that beeps to alert us where to turn and if a climb is incoming, so we don’t have to constantly check our phone maps to know where to go
13. Sunscreen
14. Wear gloves, earbuds, sunglasses, helmet
15. Say a teary goodbye to the driver for the day (Drew) and pedal off!!

THE BIKING (~5-7h):

1. Clip in and pedal: our bike shoes are literally stuck to our pedals (“clipped in”) to maximize the force transfer from our legs to turning the wheels
2. Constantly rotate your hand position on your handlebars—-on the horns, the corners, the middle, the dropdown bars, or the very cool and sexy no hands flex—-to minimize hand cramping
3. Constantly shift your butt position to minimize butt soreness
4. Draft if windy, where you just stare at the tire of the person in front of you so intently you get tunnel vision
5. Listen to a rotating assortment of:
   1. Music:
      1. Carmen: pop music, especially on big climbs
      2. Caroline: 2010s pop e.g. The Chainsmokers, French pop
      3. Tatiana: listening to Adele recently, lots of EDM, Russian and Spanish playlists (her only two downloaded playlists)
      4. Drew: country and K-pop
      5. Nunu: her daylists, and she loves to share them with the team by doing a spotify JAM, which is a feature where anyone joining the jam can listen to the same synced up music
      6. Nate: country
      7. Me: my all-time favorites and road tripping playlists
   2. Podcasts:
      1. Tatiana: Explained (where they explain to you Time, The World’s Water Crisis, Sugar, and many other topics)
      2. Caroline: stopped listening to podcasts once she got annoyed thinking about how she could also just be sitting and yapping instead
   3. Books:
      1. Drew: Project Hail Mary, The Secret History
      2. Nunu: on the first day of Spokes she started the first Harry Potter book and never listened to it again 
      3. Me Caroline Tatiana and Carmen (soon): The Heroes of Olympus series (I felt like a lunatic re-telling the story of heroes fighting monsters to save a goddess from a giant to convince my 19-to-22-year-old teammates to listen to this with me, but it’s been the best brainless timepass)
   4. Musicals (these are funnest as JAMS too):
      1. Joint Hamilton listening session on July 4th (could feel my chest swelling with patriotic pride)
      2. Joint Book of Mormon listening session (a very funny and absurdist religious satire)
      3. Other notable musicals: Heathers, Dear Evan Hansen, Mamma Mia, High School Musical
   5. Calling friends and family
   6. The voices in our heads
      1. Just Nate

When we’re not doing any of the above, we’re resting. And it’s fair to say that there are days where we spend the same amount of time resting as we do biking…

THE REST STOPS (~5-7h):

1. Unclip and lean your bike against the nearest leanable surface (the car, a pole, a wall, or just on the ground)
2. Find the nearest sittable surface (picnic bench, the curb, or just on the ground) and stuff your face with snacks, just a steady constant stream of eating regardless of the length of time we spend at the rest stop. Make sure that while you eat your current snack you plan the next snack you will reach for
3. Fill your water bottles up to the brim with ice from the cooler (don’t be shy, no matter how dirty your hands are just reach right in; no matter how frozen-into-a-big-block the ice is just keep bashing the bag against the concrete)
4. More sunscreen

The rest stops are planned the night before by Carmen and I, set at every 20-or-so miles, rounding down when the day’s mileage doesn’t evenly split in 20s. The summer started out with churches being the go-to typical rest stop, since they were always available regardless of how rural we were, and always had at least a parking lot we could eat out of, if not a picnic bench outside. Lately we have been experimenting with increasingly absurd(ly lit) rest stops. Today’s were particularly good:

• Valley Grocery at 21.1 mi: We all bought Arizona Iced Teas, shamelessly ate our new snacks from Drew’s amazing Walmart haul (Rice Krispies and Nature Valley strawberry wafer bars and Mr. Beast beef sticks and oranges) in the convenience store that sells snacks, and discussed plans for our big end-of-spokes-summer BBQ/picnic in SF without any concrete resolution. Caroline successfully checked out the first Heroes of Olympus audiobook via Libby, Carmen placed a hold for it, and Tatiana failed to log-in to her Audible Amazon account (pictured below)

• Dairy Queen at 37.2 mi: A mile before pulling up to DQ, Carmen and Caroline stumbled upon Tony’s Fresh Fruit Stand!! Tatiana and I quickly followed suit, of course, and we all bought heaping portions of mango, watermelon, pineapple, and cantaloupe. This genuinely felt like a mini-oasis amidst the fast food joints and Dollar Generals and coffee shops we had been stopping at, the unbeatable refreshing juiciness of fresh fruit that nothing can truly imitate. Carmen and I got ours with chamoy and tajin, the only right way to do it, and the best way to avoid the team tax. We shamelessly ate our fruit at Dairy Queen while only having bought 1 cookie dough blizzard and 1 bizarrely neon lemonade. Nate and Nunu, having reached DQ before us, biked back to the fruit truck to buy a deliciously perfect amount of mangos. A common theme of the summer is the seven of us pulling up to some establishment, loitering around while just a few people order, bringing our own snacks from the team car, talking extremely loudly about freaky things, overstaying our welcome by at least 30 minutes, telling random strangers that we’re dressed in matching outfits because we’re biking across the country, and then leaving. Today for the first time the stranger we were talking to was actually biking across the country too!! He had started around when we had, but had taken a route that dipped below DC and then went back up to Ohio. Yet with all the extra mileage he had reached the same Dairy Queen in Las Animas, Colorado at the same time as us! After retiring, he has done some crazy adventure every summer—like being the 39th person ever to raft the entire coastline of Florida. Very very cool.

• La Junta Swimming Pool at 57.4 mi: When I first put a pool as a rest stop four days ago, I envisioned the team saying something along the lines of “bruh you’re always trying to waste as much time as possible.” To my surprise, everyone thought I actually had a great idea, and so I thought I would repeat it today in order to feel the same high of everyone liking my rest stop. We immediately changed and launched into the pool via the diving board, then made sure to hit both kinds of water slides, then spent a couple minutes debating whether or not we would get yelled at if we tried to chicken fight, then settled for attempting to launch Nunu off of Nate and Drew with some kind of cheerleading lift technique, then threw around our small foam football with a bunch of local kids, before Tatiana and I ended pool time with a front flip off the diving board. But of course, it wouldn’t be a proper rest stop if we didn’t tell at least someone that we are biking across the country. Apparently when Nunu, Nate, and Drew walked in, a lifeguard asked what they were up to dressed in bike bibs and all, and when they said that they were part of a cross-country bike team, all dozen lifeguards (all girls) flocked to them for a group photo. It was like real-life Baywatch. 

• McDonald’s at 58.4 mi and Wendy’s at 60 mi (unplanned): As soon as we left the pool, I suffered yet another flat tire (my fourth one?), which killed all my chances of making it to the next rest stop before the farm market closed at 6 pm. As I grumbled back to the car and as Nate helped me replace my tube, we started to see the signs of a big storm. Sand whirling in the air, crazy wind gusts, thunder… so we biked a mile forward in the craziest headwind I’ve ever experienced to take shelter at McD’s, while Carmen, Tatiana, and Caroline were a mile further at Wendy’s. Driver Drew promptly declared that we needed to wear our big boy pants and he wouldn’t SAG anyone, Nate, Nunu, and I promptly took a mini nap in various locations around the McD’s; and Tatiana ran into her awesome grandparents, Brenda and Tom, who were visiting us for the next couple of days!! The storm passed in thirty minutes and we continued on with a nice tailwind.

• Knapps Farm Market at 69.7 mi: We were chasing sunlight at this point, out of hope that the elusive farm market rest stop would still be open. But as they say, hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all. So with a heart full of hope, I tell Nunu and Nate, the two biggest skeptics on how rewarding this market would be, that we should pull over and check it out anyway. Lo and behold, the woman running the market was still there and was kind enough to let us look around even over an hour past closing! I had noticed that the literal mascot of the town we had just biked into was a melon (The Rocky Ford Meloneers), so with high expectations we bought one of every kind: watermelon, yellow watermelon, cantaloupe, and honeydew. I don’t even think I’m exaggerating when I say this was some of the best melon we’ve had in our lives. We looked like a pack of vultures in matching bike jerseys the way we descended upon and devoured these four tubs of melon. Grandma Brenda and Grandpa Tom even kindly bought us a couple extra tubs for the road!!

I realized recently that biking from east to west means we get to always end the day biking into the sunset. That’s exactly what we did as we pulled into Trinity Lutheran Church, where Pastor Josephson was waiting to greet us.

THE NIGHT:

1. Find some place to park the bikes (a garage if Warmshowers, a room or hallway if in a church, tied to a tree if camping) and grab all your chargeable devices (bike computer, earbuds, portable charger, occasionally headlight) in preparation to spend the rest of your evening running some schedular algorithm to rotate charging everything you own with just 1 USB-C cable
2. DINNER! Our lovely host Pastor Josephson had prepared us a true feast: taco bar, limitless Arizona tea and other yummy drinks, corn on the cob, and chocolate pudding. A huge huge thank you for all the effort it took to prepare and clean this up!!
3. Depending on when we arrive at night, step 2 and 3 get switched
4. Shower line: there’s usually only one or two showers for the seven of us, so getting undressed promptly is key. Today we went to the local high school, where Pastor Josephson’s friend was waiting for us in order to unlock the locker room where we could all shower at once (they’re actually called gang showers)
5. Brush teeth, wash face, pee
6. Unpack sleeping bags/pads/pillows
7. Charge all devices 
8. Carmen and I make the route and route stops for the next day (this took two hours and I slept at 1 AM in order to cut 14 miles from tomorrow’s expected distance)
9. BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG (we hope you appreciate the blogs because many hours of sleep have been lost over them)
10. Sleep.

And then we do it all again the next day. Super awesome….

I hope this blog lifts the veil a bit about the logistics of the trip and what our day to day biking actually looks like!! Comment any lingering questions and I pledge to resolve them diligently next week, my dear readers. 

Sending loooooooooove from coast to coast,

Aarushi