Ride report, of sorts: The Prouty

[Tom]

I got to ride 100 miles with my brother Theo and his wife Andi and my other brother Victor started the 50 with us. It was great. The whole thing raised over a million bucks for the Norris Cotton cancer center at Dartmouth Medical School. Not bad, considering this was the 25th and numbers 1-23 totalled a million dollars! I've done charity centuries before but this is the first time I've done one with a personal connection, being a survivor and with two other brothers survivors. My brother Pat just went through Norris Cotton, finishing up with an autologous bone marrow transplant. Now I see why you guys like to do the Pan-Mass so much, it was this huge rolling celebration of being alive. That sounds pretty frigging Hallmark Cards cliche but it really was like that.

Our group was "Team Gene Gnome", sort of associated with Victor's lab at DMT. The group raised more than its goal, in part because relatives and spouses would look at the numbers and get all competitive about who had more pledges!

The route was beautiful, we even saw a loon in a big pond at one point. We rode very slowly and looked around. I hate to admit it was hard to let fast groups go by without tacking on but that wasn't the point of the day. At one point the three of us did pull a group of about 15 others, we three rotated pulls at the front and that was a lot of fun.

Central New Hampshire and the upper Connecticut River valley are really beautiful. It stopped raining this week so haying season has started and it smelled wonderful.

We spent a lot of time stopped at aid stations getting water, it heated up pretty good since I showed up late (slept late and then the local gendarme in North Haverhill flashed his rollers at me as I bombed through town - the fear of somebody actually enforcing the law kept me near the speed limit the rest of the way to Hanover...) and we started later than we ought to have. My Dad, Karen and a couple of my sisters made a day of wandering around together, meeting us on the road and stopping here and there to shop or whatever. It was cool seeing my Dad at the top of hills here and there, he works too much.

Our good luck held to the finish, my brother's front axle starting making the most amazing noises with about 20 miles to go. We figured the bearings on the right side had chewed themselves to bits because if he put his weight on the left side it went quiet. When we finished, he lifted his bike and gave the front wheel a spin. It went around about twice and stopped. Yow.

Anybody else around here ride the thing? I'm definitely going back next year.