AIDS/LifeCycle: To ride and dream of riding

Some Saturday morning, fate might find you in Ventura County traveling through lowlands empty and silent except for mingled strings of cyclists who call out "On your left" as they pass each other on the road. These riders will look as weary and depleted as the afterthought of a marine weather layer deposited over their heads or the distant sun behind it, but they'll move with a sure sense of heading. They'll know they are close to the end.

For a couple more hours, these cyclists will still pause at a handful of stops just off the road, each announced one mile ahead on a folding white sign like you'd see on a Hollywood sidewalk. (The AIDS/LifeCycle rest-stop sandwich board is letter A in a private alphabet of pointers and warnings posted on stop signs and exit signs from the San Francisco peninsula to Westwood. You probably wouldn't notice unless you're supposed to.) They'll park their bikes and drink electrolyte drinks, or water, or electrolyte drinks mixed with water. They'll stretch sore necks and upper backs and they'll reapply their sunblock. They'll snack on pretzels, Goldfish crackers, bananas, oranges, ClifBars, cereal bars, granola bars, graham cracker sandwiches, peanuts, sunflower seeds, trail mixes, raisins, fruit snacks and Oreos. They'll take pictures.

They will not, tonight, arrive in a fairgrounds or a park to raise their tents and shower in trucks. They will not swarm mystically to the one working electrical outlet in camp, at the foot of a gazebo, to form a chain of power strips and plug in their cellphones. They will not show their wristband in the dinner line. Non-vegetarians will not try -- in vain -- to sneak vegetarian meals. The head of the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center, Lorri Jean, will not bound onto the stage to warble "HELLO RIDERS!" and then "HELLO ROADIES!" into the microphone during the dinner program. "Glee" cast members will not appear on video in a message of support. The riders will not prepare their headdresses, or regular dresses, or full-size E.T. dolls, for the next day's ride. They will not fall asleep in a blooming midnight garden of eccentric snores.

And tomorrow they will not attack some upward feature of the terrain whose name -- Quadbuster, the Evil Twins -- is always pronounced with sorrow and dread. They will not curse a brutal headwind on a back road between vineyards. They'll spend no more after-lunch hours in a desaturated landscape of California golds: neon-blond carpet flowing under willows and cypress, swarthy fleece blanket over soft-focus hills, pasture in which green tea might just have steeped for 15 seconds, fallow field. They will not dance mid-afternoon in the courtyard of Mission San Miguel. They will not ride past black cattle grazing under a white sun.

Among this pack, pedaling the Ventura road, your thoughts may wander. To a hamburger, normally, or a bed -- but no, this is Day 7, and as you bicycle your thoughts will wander to other sites of bicycling, to favored routes and memorable skies. To 50 hours later, when your stomach has settled and the day is bright and you get on your bike and ride, up past Dodger Stadium and down along the concrete channel of the Los Angeles River to the north side of Griffith Park. The observatory calls. Stroll the flats, wind the curve. Cross the gate, and climb.

-- Michael Owen

Top: Cyclists proceed Saturday from the finish line in Westwood to the closing ceremony. Left: A steep curve in Griffith Park. Credit: Michael Owen

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The undesired day off

Catching up with riders on the AIDS/LifeCycle ride from S.F. to L.A.

A fleet of riders, halfway to L.A.

AIDS/LifeCycle takes off for L.A.

AIDS/LifeCycle: The undesired day off

 

My worst fear in the weeks leading up to AIDS/LifeCycle was that I would get sick, suddenly and severely, just before the ride. I had no particular reason to fear this, but it loomed large in my imagination.

I made it to Day 6.

Coming to sometime last night, I knew the angel of death announced at dinner by the camp's medical director -- a "surge" in gastroenteritis -- had not passed harmlessly by my tent flaps. But it was at 8:30 a.m., 15 miles up a long grade out of Lompoc, when I acknowledged my reckoning, pulled into the first rest stop of the day and stumbled to the medical tent, face pale under my tears.

For days I've been mulling the themes of brokenness and recovery that pervade this ride. Much of the event's monumental back end (500 volunteers beyond the 1,925 cyclists) is devoted to ensuring that no rider is grounded or detained, that we all reach the end. If, as was the case often in the first few days, someone's old wheel gives out, there's another on hand in the Cannondale truck -- or, worst case, a loaner bike. A set of buses, trucks and vans under the aegis of SAG -- support and gear -- ensures that every rider and every bike makes it into camp. Sunburned and disappointed, in some cases, but intact. And a three-armed medical team, including massage and sports medicine personnel, keeps the cyclists themselves whole enough, mostly, to ride on. (I had to stop, but these calm, assured professionals steered my day from disaster.)

Yet even pondering this focus on resilience over pure strength, I hungered for the rawness of the challenge. I rose each day before the sun, left when the course opened and arrived in camp with the first small wave of riders, a little proud that my endless loops and climbs through Griffith Park had put me in the front ranks.

I'm the incorrigible veteran of three catastrophic bike injuries. Humility, I have learned, fills a vacuum. Taking in an IV drip and shuddering under a foil blanket today in a windy Santa Barbara County pass, I thought of what greater reckonings even I have known, how well I had made out this time. As we drove down later, another rider was being loaded into an ambulance -- victim, word had it in camp later on, of a tire blowout. When I wasn't sleeping in the medical tent today, I thought mainly of him.

AIDS/LifeCycle has -- you might say it is -- a broad and elegant apparatus for getting us all along the way. But not every brokenness can be healed; it may be that the day is lost, or worse. Tonight we'll hold a candlelight vigil on the beach for those who've died of AIDS. Whether I'll be able to ride the finish into L.A. tomorrow, I don't know yet. To wake up will be a gracious victory.

--Michael Owen

Above: The walkway to the beach where AIDS/LifeCycle participants hold a candlelight vigil for AIDS victims. Credit: Michael Owen

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A fleet of riders halfway to L.A.

AIDS/LifeCycle takes off for L.A.

AIDS/LifeCycle: A fleet of riders, halfway to L.A.

  
On AIDS/LifeCycle, the word is "rider" -- not cyclist or biker, but rider. "Be safe, rider," goes the send-off each morning. (Wednesday, the ride's fourth day, found us camping in Santa Maria, more than halfway to L.A.) "Full stop, rider, then forward through the intersection," say the motorcycle-mounted volunteers at major crossings. "Welcome to lunch, riders" -- so it goes, through the day.

Aside from being easy to say quickly and at a yell, rider sounds a little gallant, as if this bicycling troupe of 2,000 were patrolling the roads of middle California rooting out thieves. But the gallantry of record here, the actual raising of money to treat people with AIDS and prevent its spread, was all finished by the time we left San Francisco on Sunday morning. Riding down the forearm of California -- like so many athletic endeavors -- is an act of nakedness and ambition, of risk.

The bicycle is an unfinished exoskeleton -- a metal prosthesis fitted (ideally) to the lengths and angles and posture of its owner but offering no added armor, no protection. In fact it only adds vulnerability to this colorful horde ranging from one coastal metropolis to another through strawberry fields in the Central Valley, through sore gusts of wind. For an acute increase in exposure it offers only -- in a trade-off that dawns on every 5-year-old as her parents first let go of the seat -- vaulting, unimaginable speed. (Anyone seeking proof of this description can seek out the descent on California 46 that -- after our fierce climb out of Paso Robles -- delivered us this morning to a day along the sea.) In a crash, a bike is only one in a chaos of hard foreign objects.

But for all its danger, the bike is also an affirmation of freedom, of strength, even of recovery. Over and over this week I've heard stories of coming to this ride that combine a loss -- often the AIDS-caused death of someone loved -- with a decision to reverse one's own physical decline, however mild (or potentially severe -- the Positive Pedalers, a group of HIV-positive cyclists, have a highly visible presence on the ride). For many people, the ride is no mere demonstration of commitment to "fighting AIDS." It's a lever, flipping the sentiments that accompany loss and failure into a tangible dividend for the suffering. Just as the bicycle lends a new scale to our physical movement, the ride multiplies our hope.

At day's end Wednesday, we had 200 miles ahead of us. The persistent doubts that accompanied the first half of the ride for a first-timer are gone, washed away in success and exhaustion. Tomorrow many of the riders will don red dresses, and we'll speed on to Lompoc.

-- Michael Owen

Above: AIDS/LifeCycle participants at an overlook on California 46 pose for "Halfway to L.A." photos. Left: A sea of tents in camp at the fairgrounds in Paso Robles. Credit: Michael Owen

AIDS/LifeCycle takes off for L.A.

 
It felt like someone was about to launch a spaceship this morning before dawn in Daly City, just south of San Francisco, where 2,000 or so cyclists -- participants in AIDS/LifeCycle, a 545-mile fundraising ride -- were massing for the start of a journey to Los Angeles. A long line of rented trucks sat in the dark, red running lights aglow as their holds swallowed suitcases and sleeping bags up corrugated metal ramps. (Ubiquitous roadies man these machines; their volunteer labor powers the event.)

 
People in neon vests efficiently directed arriving taxis with glow sticks, as if they were on a tarmac, and cowbells, as if they were outside a rodeo venue. (In fact they were the latter, though the Cow Palace is also host to religious conventions and -- in the coming weeks -- a Slayer concert.) Inside, their bikes lined up in place of livestock, riders filled bottles with water and tires with air.

By 7:15 we were on the road. Cycling is always either a quest or a proxy for flight, in its love of aerospace composites, its wars with wind and gravity, its steady, often solitary pairing of rider and sky. Ragged astronauts, we thrusted from the San Francisco peninsula into the blind and prospectively frightening gap of seven days on the road -- nothing but solar iPhone chargers to feed our links to Earth.

Still, in space people don't line the roads to cheer you. AIDS/LifeCycle is a fundraising vehicle -- it pays for HIV and AIDS treatment and prevention -- and it's meant to draw participants from beyond the rosters of double centuries. So the rest stops are frequent, and lavishly stocked by sponsoring makers of snacks and sports drinks. The roadside cheering is giddily abundant. And the weather today blessed our cause: The tailwind into Santa Cruz nearly howled, and more than elsewhere on the day's course it had us flying.

--Michael Owen

Photos: Top, a stretch of California 92. Bottom, riders leaving the Cow Palace at the start. Credit: Michael Owen