Friday, September 11, 2009
TransAmerica triumph
Roanoke native Charley Nottingham spent much of his summer break riding his bike across the country.
Mark Taylor
Mark Taylor's Outdoors column and notebook appears regularly in The Roanoke Times.
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The life of a medical student can be pretty hectic.
So Charley Nottingham could have been forgiven for wanting to just chill out over the summer before starting his second year at the Medical College of Virginia.
Nottingham had other ideas.
On June 1, the just-turned-25 native of Roanoke started pedaling his bike across the country.
The trip took 47 days, 42 of them in the saddle, and covered 4,001 miles.
Along the way the Nottingham and his riding partner encountered beautiful scenery, difficult riding conditions, blazing heat, freezing cold and unique people.
And they ate.
A lot.
For Nottingham, the hardest part actually came before the ride even started.
As he sat on the plane on his way to Portland, Ore., Nottingham was thinking about Larry Bickford, a 50-year-old chemical engineer from Pennsylvania who would be his riding partner for the trip.
The two had connected through the Internet, and had never met face-to-face.
"That was probably the scariest part of the trip," said Nottingham, who had been unsuccessful in his efforts to recruit a companion from among his friends. "Getting someone to commit to the entire summer was tough."
Had Bickford and Nottingham clashed, the already stressful trip could have become unbearable.
But it was never a problem.
"It's kind of amazing we that we got along so well," said Bickford, who lives in Stewartstown, Pa., and works for the Department of Defense. "He's a guy of very high integrity. He's very humble, very smart and very down-to-earth."
Nottingham said it helped that the two had similar personalities.
"He and I are both pretty laid back individuals, pretty easy going," Nottingham said. "We both don't really get crazy ideas in our heads.
"Except to ride across the country."
Nottingham got the idea from Jack Haar, a professor at MCV who did the cross country ride in 2008. Haar gave a presentation on the journey at a lecture series.
"The topics are usually basic science research," said Nottingham, who has been an cycling enthusiast for years. "But they made an exception for him."
Nottingham decided quickly that he wanted to make the trip. And, like Haar, he would use the opportunity to help raise money for a medical research scholarship named after Jim Popp, a physician friend of Harr's who died of cancer in 2007.
Nottingham, who was already in decent shape, started training in earnest last December. He tried to work out five to six days a week, combining strength training with cardiovascular exercise.
By February he started embarking on long training rides, balancing the training with the demands of med school.
He also started seeking riding partners, and eventually connected with Bickford through the Adventurecycling.org Web site.
On June 1 they dipped their tires in the Columbia River at the coastal town of Astoria, then started pedaling east, each towing a BOB bike trailer loaded with about 50 pounds of supplies.
Because both men had to keep the trip as short as possible, Bickford had planned an ambitious itinerary.
Nottingham helped by devising a few shortcuts that veered temporarily from the TransAmerica bike route, which was devised in 1976 (as the Bikecentennial route) more with scenery than distance in mind.
It didn't take long for the pair to encounter difficult conditions. As they rode through the Columbia River gorge they battled a vicious headwind, the first of many they would encounter over their more than five weeks of riding.
When wind conditions were tough the pair would struggle to maintain a speed of 12 miles per hour.
There was also the matter of mountains, which were common as the pair made their way through Idaho, Montana and Wyoming.
While the uphills were challenging, the downhills weren't always a picnic either.
The two worst weather days came on days when the riders had to make long descents, with Nottingham saying he had to ride for hours with numb hands and feet.
They averaged 95 miles on the road per day, with the longest day a 138-mile marathon over flat roads in the Midwest.
Staying in cheap motels and sharing a room helped keep costs down.
The whole trip cost Nottingham about $4,000. Most was on lodging and food, but some was for gear such as replacement tires.
Nottingham, whose fundraising efforts put more than $15,000 in the scholarship fund, covered the costs himself.
As would be expected for a trip of that length, the cyclists met some interesting characters.
On one road they encountered a man known as Lee the Horselogger, who was using three draft horses to pull a huge wagon. Lee said he had been traveling the country working odd logging jobs.
At one small restaurant, Nottingham spent an hour politely listening to the incoherent rambling of a woman he assumed was the owner because she was serving food and, well, acting like she owned the place. Eventually another woman spoke up.
"She said, 'That's just Crazy Nancy. We let her do what she wants,' " Nottingham recalled.
Bickford and Nottingham spent quite a bit of time in restaurants, a necessity when you're burning roughly 8,000 calories per day.
Large sections of the subtly witty blog entries Nottingham filed -- many with his iPhone -- at rideforjim.org focus on food.
Highlights included almost daily doses of ice cream, as well as the Macho Platter, a hubcap-sized plate of Mexican food Bickford devoured at a restaurant in Idaho.
Nottingham said he became a huge fan of Pop Tarts during journey.
Getting to eat anything he wanted was kind of fun at first, Nottingham said, but eventually the novelty wore off.
Bickford agreed.
"It got to be a chore," he said. "I didn't want to eat so much but I had to because I was starving."
The two reached Roanoke on July 11, and continued on to Richmond after a one-day break.
While Bickford rode on to Yorktown, Nottingham took a longer break so his final ride could coincide with a block party in Richmond, as well as more fundraising.
Along with about 50 riding friends, he finished the trip on a warm day in late August.
As Nottingham eyed the final few yards he decided to try to ride his bike all the way into the York River.
"But as soon as I hit the sand my tires sunk and I tipped over," said Nottingham, who somewhat miraculously had managed to get that far without a single crash.
So he had to walk his bike the final 20 yards to the water.
After 4,001 miles, that can be forgiven.
