The 16th Floyd Tour de Dirt in Floyd County, Virginia, began at 8:30 am on October 22, the sky so crisp and perfect as to be kind of creepy, like a taxidermied bluebird.
It started with what Paul, the ride’s organizer and sultan of stoke, called “The Prologue.” We climbed from gravel onto a singletrack loop, wooded and flowy, at an easy (and slightly awkward) hoot & holler pace.
I was there. You could see my breath in those cold woods. You could see all the many people’s breaths.
A couple of miles of single file through the woods and then we were on that pale and varying Floyd gravel, sun- and shadow-drenched. The sun felt huge and maybe too polite, as if it was eating everything too slowly.
Curves and hay bales and fences. And roads, so many: Cannaday Gap, Stagecoach, Boothe, etc. Was this even real? Fields, woods, sheds, houses, barns. Was this happening? Now pigs, now a hawk, now chickens, cows, a guinea hen’s squeaky hinge of an alarm. Were we in a painting? Claymation? I couldn’t stop being amazed.
My body was waking up, mind settling in to the feel of the flow, the read of the wheel and the grade and the surface ahead, below, behind, within. Like many others, I was pleasuring on glimpses of rigs, from the 80’s 26ers (which recalled teenage romps on my Ross Mt. Hood, bullhorn bars and all), to the shiny Ti runway models, to the molded and the lugged, the sleek and hearty.
How not to be content? Even if something changed, a mechanical or an injury, I was on my bike now with Floyd-roasted Red Rooster Coffee, locally made cinnamon buns, pretty bikes, decent folks, and other varieties of stoke all up in my cadence. Now was stretching wonderfully into the next now and then the next. It was good.
I’d driven at dawn up Bent Mountain onto the plateau from my home in Roanoke County. I was back because the last time I officially rode the TDD it was 48 degrees and raining all day, and it was a blast. I was back, too, because the Floyd locals, Paul, Tony, Joe, and many others, know how to put on a ride. They are intimate with the landscape and the roads, all the lines, grades, curves, and contours. They love the changing surfaces, the undulant if not wrinkly terrain, and spin a hell of a yarn of a route, different iterations each year.
After some alone time, now I was amongst a small pack. A guy came alongside, maybe in his 50’s like me and also stout, Clydesdale-sized, and said, That’s a beautiful Gunnar.
Thank you, I said.
Rock Hound? he asked.
Yes, I said. He was on a Vassago. It was beautiful, too, and I said so.
Hell, he said. Everything’s beautiful now.
Hell yes, I said, and we cruised on, leaf surfed, mashed, spun. We breathed. We felt that old freedom again.
The open road, the lubed chain, wheels true enough, tires holding air.
If you didn’t like that climb, somebody shouted near the top of another punchy one, Wait five minutes for the next!
There were saddlebags. There were framebags. There were no bags. There was Lycra, down, flannel, wool, nylon. There were odors, scents being worn and scents being made.
It was past peak foliage, the color mellowing, many trees more limb than leaf now. Frost still in some hollows around Noon, while at other vectors of the route then, sometimes within a mile or just around the bend, it was high 50’s and mad suntan factor.
At some point, I cruised along with Paul, who along with his wife Martha and their partnership with Plenty make this event happen. (Plenty is an organization that nourishes community and feeds hungry neighbors by growing and sharing food in Floyd County, Virginia, and to whom Tour de Dirt registration fees go to support.)
Paul’s good spirits were infectious, as always. He was on his old Ti Waltworks. Since I’d last rode with him, a group recon ride of last year’s full pull route, he’d fashioned it in a monster cross build, drop bars, maybe a dropper post, too. Our chat meandered, and before long he wished me well and moved on down the road.
Miles blurred. I was alone and with others. We turned our cranks. We fixed flats and stopped to snap pics and pee and shed layers and wipe gunk from our noses and lips.
We were even less I now than a few miles ago or was it an hour. Maybe we were the bike and its rider. But we were all the bikes, all the riders, every I all at once a we, in some time and place out of time and place.
At the aid stations, we burped our Cokes and glimpsed our chain rings and brakes, and felt many things, not excluding a sense of being hugged and hugged and hugged.
You could hear it in the people’s talk and in their quiet. This was sanctuary and suffering all at once.
There was matching kit and clashing non-kit. There were Vans and clipless. There were big and little bodies of various shades, ages, and persuasions.
It was the ride that rode and not the riders, and if yon’t believe me, come out next year and see.
We tucked and mashed, stood and sat, coasted and cranked, glancing our compadres in the journey, and all of it was so much frost burning off.
Sweat droplets, gravel dust, leaves rattling in the varying breeze. Lives were being lived, work weeks digested, futures imagined, the present’s presences filtering it all.
We were all kinds out there, as many different experiences and viewpoints as tire sizes.
We rode for ourselves and for those who couldn’t be with us, as if they were perched on our handlebars, lubing our joints, tuning our cadences.
The locals in their vehicles were chill with us; Floyd’s mostly like that, and we rode for them, too.
Now you could sense by the sky through the trees the escarpment approaching. Soon, it was there, the drop off the plateau. Switchback after switchback, we descended a few miles from the headwaters to the confluences.
Layers came off. Snacks were munched. We started the climb back up onto the plateau. It was a good climb.
I missed a turn somewhere in there, riding alone. The sign marking the turn was gone, I’d learn later, stolen by locals. Like a ninny, I hadn’t downloaded the route nor grabbed a cue sheet.
After a few miles of easy climbing along a plunging, leaf-golden creek, I realized that I was off route and decided, with pleasurable vexation, to see if I could sniff my way back on to the route somehow, without doubling back.
I’d never been on this road, a paved one, nor along this lovely trout stream, but had noted it on maps and had wanted to explore it for years, Anyway, it was going the right direction, up, up, up, and would link, I hoped, to the course somehow before long.
I got lucky and it did. Maybe I wasn’t lucky; immediately, a fella rode up alongside me. He seemed kind of on edge, like this was a race or something. How’s your day going? I asked.
That climb sucked, he said.
Oh, I said.
How’d you like the climb? he asked.
I told him I’d missed the turn and had climbed a different, easier way with an amazing creek, lots of little waterfalls.
This perturbed him. He gave me grief, spoke as if I’d offended some bicycling gods, and then zoomed off on his carbon rocket.
I had some alone time then. This was Goose Creek Rd. I love Goose Creek Rd. Everybody loves Goose Creek Rd.
The body was feeling good. There were miles to go. It was getting hot. I stripped off another layer. I saw my pal Scott. I met a fella named Gabe, met a lot of good people and a lot of good roads.
75 miles and ~8800 ft of elevation change after starting, I rolled, the morning layers cinched to my waist, back into the campground. After changing clothes, I checked in, ate some good chili and cornbread and sat for a while in the sun, checking out bikes and their people, chatting with a few.
It’s the day after the ride now. My body is pulp. I know nothing except that it happened, the 16th Tour de Dirt, and I’m writing this to say thanks to Paul, Martha, and the sponsors and volunteers who made it possible, because it was bliss, and even now it is a kind of bliss.
