A ride down memory lane.
By Becky Furuta
“There’s a kind of camaraderie that only exists in the darkest hours when people come together and help one another, and I sometimes wonder if all the dynamics of racing itself – the need to read a situation, to react calmly and quickly, to see the light at the end of the tunnel – made it possible for us to get home that morning. More than anything, it reminded me of why I am lucky to do what I do with the best people I could hope to know. The culture of bike racing in Colorado is all about the people you meet along the way, and the experiences you share in the process of living the dream.”
I like to have plans. I am a terrible planner.
If you know anything about elite-level bike racing, you know it is about micromanaging every detail from when and how long you sleep to how fast your heart beats during the warm up and exactly how long you wear those stupid compression socks to recover. For nearly a decade, I have been gifted a team of talented, organized, efficient superhumans who have planned on my behalf. On race days, they make sure I know exactly what I am doing and when I will be doing it, how it will be done and what I am supposed to do afterward….and all the minor details in between. (Thanks, guys. Really.) But sometimes, even they can’t keep me from breaking loose. And that’s when things happen.
Chicago, Illinois. I was headed home with my Colorado teammate, Clark Eckel, after four days of racing Intelligentsia Cup. We’d spent nearly a week dressed in the tightest white mesh skinsuits, in pouring rain and racing on pavement so hot tires were exploding on the tarmac, riding bicycles and trying not to crash. We failed. Others took the glory, and we took home the road rash and a pile of Tegaderm, thanks to a BOGO at the local CVS. Between the two of us, we had enough oozing wounds to make small children point and yell, “What happened to those guys, Daddy???”
Needless to say, we were ready to be home.
Frontier flight 429 was supposed to depart Chicago Midway at 6:40pm. We crossed the finish line of our last respective races, grabbed a quick shower at the host house, threw our bikes in boxes and drove like idiots to the rental car return so we wouldn’t miss the plane. As it turned out, we had plenty of time.
Walking toward the gate, Clark and I spotted a trio of Colorado bike racers. Standing near the screens behind an angry-looking airline representative were Clark’s buddy, Seth Minks, and our friends, Mike and Gwen Inglis. They were intermittently shifting their weight, staring at their boarding passes and then again at the screen, and sighing. The flight was delayed two hours.
If you travel at all, and especially if you fly cheap airlines, you know that the “two-hour delay” is really code for “we don’t have a crew, and we are frantically trying to find some halfway sober person with two hands, a coordinated foot or a useful nub to fly this plane. You could probably climb up the side of this building with a corpse tied to your leg in less time than it’s going to take us to get these boarding doors closed with you on the other side of them.” Two hours was probably just the beginning. We had no idea.
The five of us sat there, doing the inevitable post-mortem assessment of the prior days’ racing: the teachable moments where some dude dashed up to the end of the lead-out train, taking out ten wheels in the process and doing thousands of dollars in damage….trying to go fast enough that at least the big wrecks all happened behind us…the race where we managed to find the escape route in just enough time to watch all the other people to the right or left hit the deck….and how we were all the fastest dudes out there except for all the dudes faster than us. We were mid-retelling when the illuminated sign behind the angry agent flashed a new expected hour of departure: Midnight.
The five of us were tired and hungry. Clark and I had spent a week sleeping on mattresses on the floor in a host house with two riders from Australia, six guys and three women from Columbia, a rider from Mexico and four cats. We were now seated in a cramped gate with a thousand other angry travelers. Neither of us had slept well in days. We had been walking around like members of some kind of insomnia coalition, with an agenda that involved a lot of lattes and staring at television screen test patterns. Did you know that if you stay up late enough, they play the Tonight Show over again and it still isn’t funny? All we wanted was to forgo the strange, pseudo-vampire lifestyle and fall into our own beds in our own homes.
We watched as Midway employees rolled out cots and itchy wool blankets for stranded travelers. Seth, Mike and Gwen were scouring the terminal, looking for any place that might still be serving food or a beer on a Sunday night. Everything was closing. The only remaining option for dinner was a small kiosk selling some sort of meat on a stick that looked like a mixture of horse and retired circus animal, with a charming buck-toothed man sampling the mysterious blob on the ends of toothpicks. I looked at Clark. Clark looked homicidal.
Outside the USO
This is when Mike uttered the words that would change everything: “Hey! I know this place called the USO. We can go there. It’s for service members and their families. They’ll have food, TV, coffee, a quiet place to sleep…” This was all sounding very promising. As grateful as I have been in the past for Mike’s service to his country, my gratitude in that moment was immeasurable.
We walked triumphantly through the terminal, past people trying to sleep standing up, away from the huddled masses and through the TSA lane. That was when we all turned to one another and realized what we had done: We had exited the secured area of the airport. Our flight was due to depart at midnight. We looked at a woman in a TSA uniform, packing up her remaining belongings as she was getting ready to leave for the night. TSA was closed. We were stuck on the opposite side of security, which would not reopen until five in the morning….long after our plane home had pulled away from the gate. We were totally screwed.
In this situation, some people panic. I shrugged, and decided that I would problem solve better after I had helped myself to the buffet of Girl Scout Cookies lining the walls at the USO. And a few packages of ramen noodles. And a granola bar or two, and a handful of fruit snacks and maybe another cup of coffee. In fact, I ate like a hungry seven-year-old after two hits from a bong. Clark leered at me. “Are you just going to keep eating, or are we going to figure out what to do? I need to get home.”
I shrugged. On some level, I felt he should admire my dedication to the sport of consumption.
“Fine. Ok. There has to be a rebooking option. I mean, there’s no way that this is the ONLY flight from Chicago to Denver, right?” Everyone nodded. “I’m just going to call the airline, and see if I can get seats on another flight tonight. We may have to change carriers or go to O’Hare, but that shouldn’t be a problem.”
Minks looked optimistic. I glanced down at his ankles, which were now more swollen than mine when I was eight months pregnant. The pacing, the standing, the walking from gate-to-gate had left him with cankles like an elephant. This, at 11pm, was cause for another twenty minutes of pure hysteria as I attempted to reach Frontier’s rebooking line.
The five of us were now huddled in the freezing corridor outside the USO. The airport Muzak was playing Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, which really encompassed the mood of five stranded travelers at 11pm after performing feats of athletic prowess although, in fairness, Kenny G might have seemed hardcore under the circumstances. I paced anxiously, listening to the agent rattle off a series of flights. Not one of them was set to depart before 5am. “Your earliest alternative,” she said contentedly, “is another flight from Midway tomorrow. We can get all of you on a plane at 4:45pm. Will that work?” I imagined myself sleeping on the airport floor on a cot the size of a Tupperware container while a closet case to my right sharpened knives and watched me sleep, and some guy to the left who looked like Chewbacca’s considerably less attractive estranged midget cousin tried to make conversation, with only ramen and cookies for food, and with nothing to keep the five of us entertained for another entire day. I was not going to accept defeat.
“There has to be another flight to Denver tonight. I don’t believe this is the only option.”
There was a long pause as the agent made one final attempt to get us home. Finally, she said, “Well, there’s one flight from Milwaukee to Denver early in the morning, around 4am. Could you get to Wisconsin tonight?”
I seized on the opportunity. “Yes! Book us on the flight from Milwaukee!”
My four companions exchanged concerned looks, followed by the clear expectation that I knew what the hell I was doing, and had already figured out how we were going to get from Chicago to Milwaukee. In fact, I was contemplating another Tagalong from the USO buffet. They took turns passing around my cell phone, getting booked on the Milwaukee flight. It was Mike who finally turned to me and asked, “So, how are we getting to Milwaukee?”
“One problem at a time, Mike,” I said between bites of shortbread.
This gave way to a collective sense of panic, followed by a frantic brain-storming session. Mike called car rental companies, to no avail. The cheapest rental would be $500, and we would have to take a cab miles to get to the rental facility.
“Uber,” I said. “How much is Uber?” With skeptical looks, I plugged it into my phone. An Uber for five people at midnight from Milwaukee to Chicago was about $165. It was a bargain.
And so, sometime after midnight, five exhausted bike racers piled into an Uber, and promptly fell asleep. Our driver could have been a total nutcase, murdered us all for our possessions, and left our lifeless remains on the periphery of Wisconsin. He was undeniably skeptical when we told him we were all headed to another airport two hours away, but he didn’t seem too interested in the details.
We approached the gate in Milwaukee feeling both exhausted and triumphant. We would be home, in our beds by 8:30am. Then, we heard the announcement: “Well folks…” The voice trailed off. Nothing good ever begins with ‘Well, folks.’ If you are ever on a plane and hear a sentence begin with, “Well, folks,” it is probably going to be followed by something like, “we might make it to the mainland if we dump enough fuel and try to glide really carefully between the palm trees.”
Another delay, and this one due to lightening. At first, I had just wanted to get home but, after trying to sleep on the coldest, hardest patch of carpet on planet earth, I started to root for the lightening. There were two women talking next to me, with a seat between them but, at the decibel they had chosen, one of them might as well have been in Cleveland. Their witty repartee about one of the women’s recent root canals was about to be my final straw.
The five of us got up. We got coffee. We cracked. We talked and laughed and found the humor in the whole giant mess.
Sometime after 6am, we were strapped in our seats, no way to escape, headed to Colorado. To be honest, I don’t remember a second of that flight. We slept the whole way through.
Even with a team of people doing the planning, sometimes things go horribly wrong. Or right. I can’t tell you what my results were from that weekend of racing, but I remember every second of the debacle in Midway. The five of us often laugh about that night, and remember it fondly as part of the adventure that is the sport of bike racing.
There’s a kind of camaraderie that only exists in the darkest hours when people come together and help one another, and I sometimes wonder if all the dynamics of racing itself – the need to read a situation, to react calmly and quickly, to see the light at the end of the tunnel – made it possible for us to get home that morning. More than anything, it reminded me of why I am lucky to do what I do with the best people I could hope to know. The culture of bike racing in Colorado is all about the people you meet along the way, and the experiences you share in the process of living the dream.
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