Three days before the first Belgian Waffle Ride, my front wheel came off and I went face-first into the pavement, knocking myself unconscious. Victor Sheldon and I were doing one final reconnaissance of the 118-mile course we’d spent almost a year dreaming up. It was April 5, 2012. We were coming through Lake Hodges along Sunset, nearly home, when my front wheel separated from the forks and I went straight over the handlebars into the asphalt. The next thing I remember was waking up in the hospital with quite a headache and my face and neck torn apart.
My wife, Christine, was no stranger to hospital visits involving me and bicycles, nor to arriving somewhere to extract whatever remained of me after one of these episodes. She surveyed the latest evidence and announced that this was it. No more bike riding.
Given the circumstances, hers was not an unreasonable position. There was, however, a small complication. We were supposed to put on a bicycle race three days later. Not just any bicycle race, either. We had invited more than 100 people to ride road bikes with skinny tires across North County San Diego, deliberately sending them over dirt roads, trails, sand, steep climbs, creek crossings and pieces of geography most road racers had spent years pretending weren’t there.
We were going to feed them Belgian waffles before the start; give them purple cards bearing an image of Eddy Merckx with which they could publicly shame wheel-suckers; send them into this ridiculous thing; then bring them back for Belgian ale and stories afterward. We had even scheduled it the same Sunday as Paris–Roubaix.
Now I was in the hospital.
We postponed the race a week, but whether I would ride it was another question. I couldn’t imagine missing the first edition of the thing I’d help create. Christine could. Eventually, some friends staged what amounted to an intervention with her on my behalf. Not to get me off the bike, which would have been the conventional direction for an intervention involving me, but to persuade her to allow me this one last ride. We’d worked too hard to get here, they argued. Let him do this one.
Reluctantly, she agreed.
Paris–Roubaix went ahead without us on April 8. A week later, sufficiently stitched together and operating under what I understood to be my final dispensation as a cyclist, I lined up with 136 riders to find out whether the Belgian Waffle Ride would survive contact with reality.
To understand why I was so desperate to ride this ridiculous thing, you have to go back 36 years, to another road bike being ridden somewhere it supposedly didn’t belong. I was 12. I’d already become fairly possessed by endurance sport. My father was partly responsible. So was Steve Prefontaine. So was asthma, which made breathing something I had to think about rather than something that simply happened.
My dad’s solution was uncomplicated: run or ride.
Eventually race professionally, run more marathons than was probably advisable, compete at triathlon, mountain biking, paddleboarding and cyclocross, and spend an unreasonable percentage of my life discovering different ways to test myself.
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