After last riding TOSRV in 2022, I had mixed feelings about returning again. While my 21st TOSRV had good weather, and I had no trouble riding the back-to-back centuries, the experience was just not the same. With less than 300 riders, and only half that number doing the classic 2-day format, so many of the elements of my prior participation were missing. There was no group energy, and much of the ride had felt like a solo time trial. That was not the way I wanted to remember an event that had been a focus of my cycling for so many years.
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| My First Revolution - 1979 |
I had left TOSRV as a tentative ride in my 2024 schedule through the summer. I had a local gravel race the same weekend. Even when the “One Last Revolution” announcement came up on, stating this would be the last TOSRV of the classic format, I was still undecided. It wasn’t until Steve Leiby, my long-time riding friend from Michigan, called and suggested we sign up. And when Steve said he was open to my suggestion to ride my tandem, I decided I was in. It was going to make a pretty busy schedule for my late summer riding, but my newly retired status meant I had the time. TOSRV’s last revolution would be my 22nd, 45 years after my first.
Personally, TOSRV has always been 1/2 athletic challenge and 1/2 social event. For most of its 60+ year history, it was on Mother’s Day weekend, so getting ready for TOSRV’s 210 miles was a great early foundation for the riding season. And socially, I was either traveling to TOSRV with friends and family, or meeting them on the ride. To get to my 21, I had ridden it in every decade since my first: ’70’s once, ’80’s 5 times, ’90’s once, 2000’s 5 times, ’10’s 8 times, and now ’20’s twice. My longest break was 15 years (we lived west of the Mississippi 12 of those), so that is not too bad a record.
By the numbers, my prior 21 TOSRV rides times resulted in 42, 100-mile-plus days (also known as a century ride), for a total of almost 4,500 miles. Century rides are like ballparks, each a little different, and the sum of my TOSRV rides averages out to 107 miles per day. The original brochures stated it was a total of 210 miles, and you still had to ride from the official finish to one of the many different overnight venues in Portsmouth. And multiple years had 10 to 15 extra miles due to construction detours on the route.
In the process of training for each of those spring events, I tried to ride at least 1,000 road miles with at least 1 century, so that is another 20,000 plus miles focused on TOSRV, and another 20 centuries. That comes to 25,000 miles, or a little over 2,000 hours of riding time. Along with the riding, there was the time spent planning, packing, and then driving to Columbus (200 miles, give or take) and home. And while I occasionally drove to Columbus after work (my first time not by plan!), there are probably at least a dozen day-off requests coordinated with different employers. So all told, TOSRV was a focus for 2 or 3 months of those 21 repeat years.
My first TOSRV, with over 5,000 riders, was the largest bike event I had ever attended, by a factor of 10. From the moment you dropped your overnight baggage in one of a dozen U-Hauls parked along High Street in downtown Columbus and started riding south, you were never alone on the road, or as you waited in line for 30 minutes at the 50-mile lunch stop. Once you were on the rural roads 10 miles south of Columbus, you would find yourself riding in the middle of a 30-rider pace line while another endless line of drafting riders was streaming past on your left, and sometimes your line was in the middle of lines of faster and slower riders.
With regard to TOSRV weather, I can say that I have experienced all save one: snow. I have had fog, mist, light rain, scattered rain, hard rain, horizontal rain, and road flooding downpours. The same can be said for winds, coming from every point of the compass, and from calm to blustery. You may think riding 40 miles into a 20 mph headwind is tough, until you’ve had to ride 40 miles with a 20 mph CROSS wind. My own way of dealing with the weather was breaking it down to a percentage. This meant “50% rain” was only 100 miles for the weekend, which makes a century in rain not seem so bad. And for me, that full century in the rain only happened once, on a Sunday; and of course, I drove home afterward under sunny skies.
I have ridden TOSRV on 3 different road bikes and 3 different tandems (including #22). TOSRV #1 was on my first chrome-moly frame, alloy-component road bike, a Sekine CH-270. That was followed by twice on a Santana Classic tandem, and 7 times on a Santana Sovereign. Since then, it has been 3 times on a modern Motobecane Sprint (bonded aluminum with carbon fork), and since 2013 on my current Trek Domane 2.3 (endurance geometry, carbon fork, formed aluminum, and elastomer frame dampening).
Those bikes cover almost 80 years of bicycle technology. In the late `70s, our bikes were all friction shifting; you controlled shifts by touch, sound, and most of all experience and practice. This shifting tech was the standard on racing bikes going back to before World War II. Friction shifting was something that took at least a season or two to learn and master. Index shifting was something still on the drawing boards and wouldn’t be on my TOSRV bikes until the 2000s. The steel frames we rode were technology going back even farther. It was during the `80s and `90s that all the stuff that is standard today began to appear in an explosion of revolutionary and evolutionary technology: indexed shifting, 8-9-10+ cog cassettes, clip-less pedal systems like Look and SPD, better tires, and new frame materials and construction techniques.
My cycling apparel followed a similar technology curve. I was wearing a hard shell Bell Biker helmet by 1979 and had a few pairs of wool shorts with chamois leather lining (we did not think of it as padding), topped with some wool and wool blend jerseys. My cycling shoes had cleats I had nailed on myself; they were held on the pedal by toe straps (and you had to remember to loosen those straps for stops). My early rain gear was a mix of capes, ponchos, trash bags with arm and neck holes, and the aforementioned wool. My last hard shell helmet was probably `87 or `88, as helmets became lighter and cooler. Lycra and other synthetics replaced wool by the late `80s. Rain gear evolved as well, with GoreTex and other fabrics making rain riding, if not comfortable, at least endurable.
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| Riding into the Portsmouth mural - 2016 |
Needless to say, my 1979 bike had no electronics; your mileage was based on what the ride director and map said it was, along with dead reckoning, and maybe a mechanical cyclometer. I did start riding with Cateye “cycle-computers” as they came available in the `80s. And all through those first dozen years, on Sunday I looked for a pay phone to wish my Mom a happy Mother’s Day. If you had told me in 1979 I would someday be riding with satellite navigation, while recording my route, speed, cadence, elevation, and heart rate, along with overtaking vehicle radar alerts, and had a mobile phone, computer/camera in my jersey pocket, I would have been more than a little skeptical.
After my first TOSRV, my next nine were on a tandem. The first five were with a guest stoker, four different riding friends (1 a repeat), and while each was a tandem captain themselves, it worked out I was the captain. (Despite multiple tandem centuries, my wife decided early on that TOSRV was my ride.) Sometimes we had training rides prior, and sometimes we met the night before. A tandem was my favorite way to ride TOSRV, both with other cycling friends and later with my oldest son. At one time, TOSRV was thought to be one of the largest gatherings of tandems for a non-tandem-specific event, with upwards of 150 tandems participating. Strong tandems were always appreciated by other cyclists on long rides, especially when for their steady draft on a windy afternoon.
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| My son Tyler and I at the Capitol Start - 2005 |
During the 2000s, Tyler, my oldest son, and I rode our tandem on 4 successive TOSRVs. We started our run when he was just 12, and it was a great experience for us both. The last 3 years we rode, we started a Saturday night movie tradition, catching the May openings of the early Marvel action movies. One year, we even dealt with some pre-season drama when Tyler suffered a hairline fracture of his arm (goofing off with friends), the February before the ride. We waited 6 weeks for the all-clear, and after a shortened training season together, we still made the event in May. Those hours of training and participation with my son are priceless memories.
When I returned to TOSRV in 2005, the ride already had lower attendance than during the `90’s, with fewer riders each year after. It was after 2010 that the sense of change accelerated. The riding groups were smaller and farther between. You saw the change in logistics, with fewer baggage trucks, no lines at lunch, and fewer overnight venues. The finishing crowds were smaller, especially with the time spread between younger, faster riders and the older riders. At the same time, the roads certainly felt busier, especially on the final run on the sole highway into Portsmouth.
2016 was my 18th TOSRV, and probably the last one that maintained all the “feel” of the prior 17. After riding the first day, I wrote a blog (another tech change; I usually bike travel with an iPad now) explaining why I have kept coming back. Read the whole blog “2016:Riding Through my Field of Dreams" for the full context, but here is the gist of what I wrote that night in Portsmouth:
As I rode the first half of my 18th TOSRV today, there was a downpour of memories, something from every one of those prior rides. With each mile came a flash of recollection, taking me back to rides 5, 10, or even 35 years ago. Each memory brought back a smile, and each smile made the mile of pedaling that much easier.
For a time, it was as if my legs were ageless, moving the pedals with the strength of my early 20s, and yet with the fluidity of 40 years of riding.
All things have their time, and 63 years is a very good run for any event, especially one made possible by volunteers and for a narrow interest group relative to the population at large. And after the Last Revolution, there remains a legacy of the other events that TOSRV inspired and will continue, and of course, for Bikecentennial ‘76, which became Adventure Cycling. That is an amazing contribution to cycling in and of itself.
But in the end, TOSRV’s final last legacy, for years to come, will be found in scrapbooks on bookshelves, or in forgotten boxes in closets and attics. There might be a patch, a fanny flag, a faded T-shirt, a few pictures, or maybe just a certificate with a gold seal. And when a child or grandchild comes across those bits of memorabilia, maybe, if they are lucky, they will be able to hear a story or two about a weekend of riding a bicycle 200 miles in Ohio.
