Learning to Say No

Some lessons are harder to learn than others. With randonneuring, this is especially true. Giving up on a ride seems to conjure a special feeling of failure. It’s an endurance activity after all. “This too will pass,” we tell ourselves to make it through the especially dark times. With age and experience, though, I've learned that there are two pretty good reasons to quit: safety and family. The trouble is that both require making decisions that are seldom black and white; there is always considerable grey involved.

Since randonneurs throw care to the wind simply to participate in this crazy sport, we are generally a group of people with our priorities a bit out of whack. Suffering is a necessary feature of the activity as is a certain amount of risk and personal sacrifice. Cycling at night, cycling in all sorts of weather, cycling with precious little sleep, the list goes on and on. Seasoned (and wise) riders learn to separate the safety risks worth taking from those that are not. Since endurance cycling also generally involves countless hours away from family, randonneurs also risk alienating those closest to them while pursuing their passion. 

This week I learned this lesson again as I decided to end my sixth attempt at the Festive 500 Challenge. The challenge, sponsored annually since 2010 by the British cycling apparel company Rapha, draws thousands of riders from around the world with a premise that is really quite simple: log a minimum of 500 kilometers between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve ~ no matter what. Riders who complete the challenge successfully get a patch as well as a feeling of satisfaction and perhaps even some bragging rights.

I first completed the Festive 500 in 2011 as I was recovering from a serious crash and logging monthly 200K rides in search of my first R-12 award. The timing seemed perfect. With school on break and a new year on the horizon, what better way to launch the training season ahead? Armed with this goal, I completed the Challenge five times in as many years and even found myself one of ten finalists in a grand prize competition that awarded a Trek Madone to the rider with the best story of the endeavor that first year. Despite not winning the bike, I was hooked and the Festive 500 has become a part of my annual riding plan ever since.

This year I mapped out a path to success that carefully considered the long-range weather forecast as well as a complex schedule of holiday gatherings, but despite my careful planning, I simply could not see sacrificing the 20+ hours with family needed to complete the 310 miles. With my daughter home for just a few weeks as she prepares for a semester in Southern Africa and my son recently accepted into his dream college in Minnesota, I'm starting to realize (with an empty nest on the horizon) how important it is to savor the nest while it's full. A challenge that once served as a chance to reconnect with the self amidst a swirl of work and family demands, now seemed like a terribly selfish activity at a time of increasingly rare family proximity.

There is still plenty of time to jump-start my training for 2017. But the clock is ticking on this all-too-short time we have together as a family. While I’m disappointed that I’ll not be adding a sixth patch to my collection, I’ve already built some memories that I would have missed out on if I had chosen to spend the day pedaling through the cold winds of winter. So while I could certainly have shoehorned the training hours into the week, the risk was too great that I would miss out on something more meaningful and fleeting. I don’t regret my decision one bit.