AIDS/LIFECYCLE 2005
Day 0: Registration
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I ride to the Cow Palace for orientation at 8 in the morning the day before the ride. It's not a pretty ride and I'm a little bit apprehensive of making it on time, as D- has told me we're part of the super secret group that gets in to the 9:30 safety video. I'm more excited than I am about most things, and I feel good, but I'm still nervous about some very basic things; not just the basic ones like how my body going to hold up over 550 miles and a lot of hills and believe me, you know nothing of flat until you ride in Holland. Although I trained a lot, it was, nevertheless, half of what is recommended, and I hadn't done more than 85 miles in a calendar day or 240 miles in a week. What was more interesting was---what am I doing here? Somehow I didn't feel qualified to be participating-I hadn't lost enough people to HIV, I wasn't close enough, part of a community. I felt like I needed an "in" to people who suffered, to be in a community of sufferers, not to embrace their suffering, but to see how (or if) they made it to the other side. So I was questioning my dedication, motivation, as I rode up to the Cow Palace. I got lost at the main gate, where the black-suited ushers politely told me I was about to ride into a Jehovah's Witness Session. I enter a large hangar and there's what can best be called controlled confusion. There were 1000 people milling about, and we were supposed to task ourselves towards clearly defined areas such as Bike Parking, Safety Video, Camp Store, Participant Check-In---but there was no order to what I was supposed to do. D-, who, being a great veteran of such events, had told me to ask for the "crew" video as if it was a secret code word, but a woman told me didn't have any of it---she told me I had to first park my bike. And as I'm in line to park my bike, I get a call from D- saying I have to run to the safety video. So, without helmet, I ride to the other side of the hangar, where the first of many small, compassionate events takes place. They were about to close the doors to the video, and, if I had missed it, I would have had to wait an hour for the next video, and I would have been separated from the people I was supposed to tent with. I asked one of the volunteers if I could leave my bike with him, and he graciously told me he would keep it safe. I was slightly worried about my bike-not having even left it out of my sight, but I ran into the screening room-they closed the door behind me, and I made the video.
I knew of at least four people would be doing the ride, but it's at this point that I meet the crazy cast of characters I spent most of my time with. For the next forty-five minutes we listened to various upbeat speeches and watched a video that somehow bluescreened its protagonists in such a way that gave them a sort of foggy blue aura around them. (Maybe someone can tell me what this means).
The crowd, a few hundred strong, was both upbeat and impatient, especially as the video introduced at a six year old level a series of communication tools designed to aid 1600 people from not crashing into each other. In addition to the standard biker calls(on your left, on your right) for passing, they introduced calls like rolling, slowing, stopping, car right, car left, car up and back, clear, and to notate obstacles like hole, gravel, glass, octopus, etc. Also there were hand signals, up to and including left and right turn but also stopping (hand down) which can be modified by making the hand into a fist. All pedagogy backgrounded by 124 beat dance music, which, along with country at the rest stops, would be our prevailed music for the week, even at 5 in the morning.
After the video, we navigated the rest of our checkins. I was impressed with two things; one, that everyone was kind and gracious, and two, that the organizers seemed to deliberately maintain a bit of chaos in the atmosphere---allowing us to fulfill our tasks in the quickest order.
So, as I spoke to DN- and his recently purchased screenplay, we got our tent assignments, our bag of schwag (including our Xbox baseball hat, rainbow colored Subaru socks, and some kind of pain reliever that freezes whatever you put it on), packed up my "incentives"-a windbreaker for raising $1000 in the first month and a jersey for raising $5000, and parked my bike, which stayed at the Cow Palace overnight.
I had one outstanding pledge to turn in, but the line was huge, and there was a woman outside the hangar(one of many)-who
still hadn't met her fund minimum-she had broken her collarbone and was in the hospital, thus not having enough to time to train or fund-raise, though she was still determined to ride. So I gave her my last pledge and went off for Thai Noodles with D- and J-. Still excited, still nervous, with the satisfaction of having fulfilled the administrative part of the day, skeptical that I would be able to go to sleep at 10 to get a full night's sleep. We were due back at the Cow Palace at 5AM the next morning, and tomorrow's ride was 88 miles-three miles longer than I had ever ridden, and certainly hillier than the 85 max out of Den Helder and back. Not knowing was in the air.
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