THE MS150 CHRONICLES 2013 - BEFORE THE RIDE

As the regular contributors to my MS150 campaign know, every year I inflict my innermost thoughts about life on the MS150 bike ride from Houston to Austin on everybody I know.  This year will be no different.  Full Disclosure: The names Nancy Pelosi and Sandra Fluke will not get worked into the narrative, however great the temptation may be.

Registration was a breeze as it has been four years in a row now.  Registration was in years past a constant thread and source of annoyance in my MS150 write-ups, seeing as how my very common name – Pete Smith – was so prone to be absorbed, processed and regurgitated by the MS Society’s vintage IBM System 360 mainframe as something other than my name, or as somebody other than me.  Sometimes I didn’t exist.  Sometimes my name was in the system, but I, my phone number and e-mail address were distributed amongst other riders whose last name was Smith.  Sometimes they had me logged as an inanimate object under “LaGrange Infrastructure”.   This year my identity was not challenged except at the very end of the weekend, and then only for a moment, and then with a most charming conclusion.  More about that later.

Suffice to say that the initial registration went through and packet pickup was a breeze.  Plus, they served burritos.  My first sign of any trouble that beset me – other than an uncooperative left knee and hip - came in a helpful e-mail from The Mattress Firm ride coordinator, reminding our Team of the various things we needed to do prior to the Ride itself.  One of those was to get a bike safety check done by any one of a number of bike retailers in the area.  I picked one of those affiliated with my team, and gave them a call.  I won’t say who the company was, but their name rhymes with Dike Darn.

The phone conversation I had with them should have been my first clue: “I want to bring my bike in for an inspection for the MS ride; got any openings today?”  “Sure; we’ll do a complete inspection, and most typically, we don’t find anything more than Tire Rot.”  Almost at once, my Spidey sense was tingling.  Why did he volunteer that comment about tire rot?  Why was I suspicious?  Where had I heard this before?  It only hit me later.

As I waited my turn to turn my bike over to a mechanic, one of the other employees was urging me to buy a new helmet because “helmets are only good for 3 to 4 years you know.”  Seriously?  Styrofoam and plastic have a half life?  Who knew?  What has become of the structural integrity of my now 15 year old helmet?  I finally begged off by telling the guy “you don’t have my color”, and sure enough, they didn’t.  All of the helmets in the entire store looked like various tubes of paint had exploded on them more or less randomly, and that was the least offensive thing about them.  I noticed that the structure of the helmets themselves had been blown out in various directions, with a most dramatic swooshing flair at the back end made to give an impression of speed. 

This would prove to be a source of mild but consistent amusement for the entire weekend of the ride.

A few minutes later, sure enough, the mechanic found tire rot, and recommended replacing them with Kevlar coated tires.  Now, I was going to cross examine him on this: after all, I had just been hustled about a helmet on a similarly flimsy premise, and had blown the Helmet Huckster off.  On the tires, though, I was smitten.  What red-blooded American male could resist the opportunity to own something covered in Kevlar?  In a day and age when public officials and even your nattering friends are making you feel guilty about owning a 30 round rifle clip (much less ten of them), Kevlar tires were the  politically correct way to invest your bike with just a smidge of the lethality we associate with any substance that can stop a bullet.  I will grant you that I didn’t know if my Kevlar tires could stop a bullet, but I didn’t know that they couldn’t.  Hey, if the other guy had told me his helmets had Kevlar in them, the deal would have been done.

My new Kevlar tires would become important about the midpoint of Day One, though.

As I left the shop and was loading my bike in my car, it finally hit me why the promise to get me out the door on a routine inspection without finding “anything more than Tire Rot” was so familiar: it reminded me of AAMCO’s (“Double A ‘Beep Beep’ MCO”) radio and TV ads for the past twenty five years proclaiming that “only one half of our customers are in need of serious transmission repairs!”  The first time I heard that in the early 90s, I laughed at the sheer, utter audacity of AAMCO.  Here they were literally promising their customers that if they brought their car in – for any reason – there was a 50/50 chance that they were going to “find” major damage and milk them for thousands of dollars.  And not only were they proud of that fact, but they felt that their customers should be proud of them too.

That slogan gave the concept of Truth-In-Advertising a whole new aspect, and me a whole ‘nother level of respect for AAMCO.   

Everything else about preparations went pretty much according to plan, with one important distinction: I was going into this year’s MS150 determined not to fret a single detail that had occupied so much of my time and energy on dozens of prior long distance rides.  No fretting about packing sunscreen, spare tires, tire pump, tools, Tums, Butt’r, energy supplements, DMSO or the fifty other things I used to pack.  This year, the MS society was going to tend to my needs, and boy, did they come through. 

This year, it was going to be a Man and his Bike; and his Kickstand.