Summary
On this Solo Baecae, I traveled to the Tucson area to ride 24 Hours in the Old Pueblo (https://epicrides.com/events/24-hours-in-the-old-pueblo/event-guide/) mountain bike race as part of a 4-man relay team. Don’t worry, we didn’t ride continuously for 24 hours. That would be dumb. SS Tim made us all ride single speeds, which not gonna lie, was kind of fun. Just call me “SS curious”.
As a wise 34 year old, I can tell you that the extent to which one enjoys an activity is 15% dependent on the activity itself and 85% dependent on the people you do the activity with. That was very much true for this trip. I had the extreme fortune to spend the entire week with a very close friend of mine, GMac (you might remember him from Scotland trip), and we got to see so many of our other friends. Enjoy the present, folks, because the future is not guaranteed, and also it sucks. Fuck “AI”.
You can find the summary video of the trip below, but read on for more context, or if you somehow like my writing.
Day 1 – Travel Day (BWI to Las Cruces)
Flying. What a fucking racket. We pay all this money, surrender most of our rights, and are lucky to end up where we want to go when we want to get there. We get shoehorned into selecting silly AF departure times and extremely tight connections by price models that don’t make sense, and then hold our breath while the planes sit on the tarmac. I guess when labor is your only capital, time is all of a sudden extremely valuable, and you’ll put up with all of this nonsense. I’ll try not to rant too hard about airlines, but I really can’t help myself. It will keep me out of prison, unlike my communist/anarchist diatribes that exist on the social media of the oligarchs. Good thing I’ve since deleted those.
The funniest thing that happened on my flight out was that we left pretty late, but made up a ton of time in the air such that we arrived basically on time. Why did we leave late? Well, among normal airline taxi BS, we had to wait for some dumb woman boarding in the final Zone to find a place for her violin. Also, like every other person boarding was traveling with some gigantic starbucks drink in their hand that they had to (surprisingly to them) put somewhere when they had to lift their bag up.
But the funny part of being on time after leaving late was that people were still SO ANXIOUS to get off the plane in Atlanta to make their connection. People kept pushing up the aisle trying to get off ASAP. I let one dude go by in front of me. However, when the dude tapped the next guy up asking if we could advance, the dude just turned, looked, and said, “no, you aren’t going anywhere”. Epic.
Anyway, I digress. GMac picked me up in his dope AF right-side drive Subaru:
Obviously we immediately went and ate Whataburger.. Yes, it’s better than In N Out. Get used to it.
While GMac was finishing up his work day, I went and bought some sunscreen and gatorade since the desert is still kinda hot in February. That’s not even Al Gore’s fault. Because I was unfamiliar with riding a single speed bike, we went on a nice evening ride to get me used to the bike I’d be riding a bunch for the race:
https://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/18271203398
We closed off the evening with Habaneros and watched the Batman with Val Kilmer and the Riddler. This one is way better than Christopher Nolan Batmans.
Day 2 – Travel Day (Las Cruces to 24 hours in Old Pueblo)
Unfortunately, given that I am writing about this vacation like 5 months after the trip, I don’t remember a ton of what happened on this day. I do know that we stopped at a Popeyes on the way to the race course, which was about an hour north of Tucson. I do remember showing up to the race course and being completely overwhelmed. It was just a total free-for-all park/camp session, which trucks and trailers just strewn all over the desert. That race kind of just destroys the landscape. Not ideal.
FORTUNATELY, SS Tim and C showed up the night before, and got us a great campsite. UNFORTUNATELY, it took us a while to navigate the clusterfuck to find them. Also, some drunk idiots who were apparently “organizing” this thing were somehow not OK with us driving around trying to navigate the disaster (“SLOW DOWN”, as we drove 4 mph). We really should have issued the whisky dirt biker a citation.
Anyway, SS Tim and C had secured THE BEST camping spot! We were way up above everyone else, and had so much room. Most people farther down were just packed together. Some tents were even set up in spots that could have been run over — both by bikes and cars. So stupid. White people. So dumb.
We hung out a bit, watched the sunset, and went to sleep to prepare for the day when we would make sport!
Day 3 – WE RIDE
Race day had arrived! However, this wasn’t a “get up and ride” situation. For whatever reason, this race starts at like 1pm. Or maybe it was noon. Or maybe it was 1100. It wasn’t before 1100. Anyway, we sort of just sat around and chilled until it was race time. This ended up being really dope because JK and Big Sean had shown up late the night before, and we could catch up with them while we were waiting to race! It was really cool of them to come hang out.
In general, people do this race in teams, although some dummies go ahead and ride it solo. The goal is to ride as many laps as you can on this 16 mile race course. The team that does the most laps, wins. They have various divisions, as you can imagine. We were supposed to be in the single speed men’s 4-man division (SS Time, GMac Forrest, and me). Yes, “single speed” means your bike has no gears. No, I don’t generally like riding this way, although it did add an extra fun element to the race course, as I had to pay a bit more attention to how I was riding. Without gears, there is a lot of value to memorizing parts of the course.
For some dumb fucking reason, instead of just doing some sort of staggered start, they decided to do a “le mans” start. Basically, everyone puts their bikes a quarter mile down the race course and runs to it before starting their first lap. You can see the following part of the summary video to see what this looks like (thanks to Forrest for recording):
https://youtu.be/3mniSPVbRPE?si=ur6ixkkQt6y6O_AS&t=79
Thankfully, GMac went first. I probably would have twisted an ankle trying to be the fastest runner in my bike shoes. I sort of get why they did it this way, but when you have that many thousands of people, there really isn’t any value to turning a bike start clusterfuck into a run start clusterfuck.
Anyway, GMac did a lap. While he was working on his lap, I went and got my bike and waited for him in the exchange tent. They had this giant tent set up that the riders would come through and pass the “baton” (a tiny piece of wood) to the next rider, and away you would go. There was apparently some sort of fine if you lost the baton, as if dropping a tiny piece of wood in the desert was worse than trucks parking on cacti.
The course was a fun one, especially (dare I say…) on a single speed! Below is the Garmin for one of my laps.
https://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/18287035162
Because I was so eager to get started, I crashed pretty hard in the first 0.25 miles, having to lay the bike down after hitting a small hill at like 25 mph. Thankfully, C was able to patch me up very quickly when I got back to base camp.
Each of us did two laps, then we decided, “ya know what? Let’s just go to sleep and maybe do more if we feel like it when we wake up”. This ended up being a great idea for several reasons:
- I like to sleep.
- We were inadvertently entered into the non-SS competitive category, but we were all riding SS bicycles. So we were doing things on hard mode for no reason.
- There were literal pros in our division, so we were never going to win or get close to winning, even though we did all ride very fast.
- A lot of our friends were there hanging out, so it was a lot more fun to just hang out instead of riding throughout the night.
- I didn’t need to do multiple laps in the dark.
- I like to get my sleep.
After a fantastic evening of just goofing off, we went to sleep, having each done 2 laps! SS Tim made us some delicious elk stew, too. I think it was elk, anyway.
Day 4 – WE RIDE AGAIN…sort of
The next day I woke up and decided I would go to another lap. I came all this way from Maryland, so I may as well go for another ride. I ate some breakfast and started to get ready. As I was about to leave, SS Tim woke up and we chatted for a bit. He told me that he probably wasn’t going to do another lap, so that I should just leave the baton down there when I finished.
I had a nice lap. When I returned, SS Tim was all dressed up to ride. Apparently he had had several beers for breakfast and decided it was time to SHRED. However, he wasn’t going to ride a single speed bike. He busted out his bike with gears and just went after it. If you knew the entire situation better, the fact that SS Tim was the only person to ride a non-SS bike was just absolutely pure poetry.
Anyway, the following link should take you to the results for our team:
And then I think we can still view the photos that were taken of us:
https://www.sportograf.com/en/event/14790/search/489
Unfortunately, I guess I didn’t run my GoPro during any of the laps. Apparently I was pretty focussed and in it to win it! Also, I had to replace my GoPro with a light for all but my first lap, so I guess that also made it difficult.
Now, for some hilarious reason, the only way to not receive a “DNF” for this ride was to have a rider on course after 1pm. Well, that pretty much guarantees that everyone tries to leave at the same time. Yeah, no way were we going to attempt that. So we happily bailed around 11am.
The fun wasn’t done for GMac and me. We traveled to Tucson to meet up with our old grad school friend, CJV, a.k.a., Professor Bigshot. We had a chill evening, spending our time dominating some tacos, playing Ticket to Ride, and watching some white dude dig holes in the snow in Alaska on YouTube.
Day 5 – Day with Professor Bigshot
CJV had to do some work in the morning (he’s launching a telescope into space), so GMac and I spent the morning going on a bike ride, of course. We followed this really nice path along the “river”, shown below:
https://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/18303364784
After that fun, we went to CJV’s favorite dive bar, The Shelter. Then CJV took us to our first ever escape room, which was actually pretty fun. We did some 70s-themed room where we had to solve various word puzzles to unlock combinations locks and escape!
The best part about this, day, though, was the Lyft ride from the Shelter to the escape room. CJV pulls out his Lyft app and gets matched, or whatever. “Ah fuck, we got some 45 year old white Reagan Republican dude. He’s gonna be annoying”. Somehow CJV got this from just the name and the photo. Well, turns out he hit the nail on the head. First of all, the dude’s car smelled like vomit, probably because he occasionally has his kids on the weekend and doesn’t know what they eat. Second, he went on various rants, my favorite of which being that his ex-favorite band, Green Day, is apparently “all political” now. I think they had just said something at a concert recently, or something. When you are at the mercy of someone else driving, you kind of just smile and nod, but like, does this dude know Green Day has an album entitled “American Idiot”?
Anyway, that was fortunately the only Lyft ride we had to take, because CJV’s wife was nice enough to spend her time taking us to The Shelter and picking us up from the escape room. We of course played some Ticket to Ride before sleep.
Day 6 – 7 Return to Cruces, Visit Some friends, and Breakfast with BioDave
The final days were relatively uneventful to write specifics about, but were huge for me as I got to visit a few close friends (and family!) whom I hadn’t seen in a bit. Upon returning to Cruces, of course I had to first see my main man Dark Robert. Then I went and saw SIL in her very own private practice business office! Very exciting! It was great to see these people. GMac and I then had a tasty dinner and watched Cable Guy.
On my way to the airport, GMac and I ate breakfast with our friend BioDave. It was a great way to end a fantastic trip. BioDave planted the idea in my head of coming back in January some time to do the Las Cruces marathon, so maybe I will indeed do that!
1 Comment
GMacD · July 6, 2025 at 3:52 pm
Perhaps American Idiot was specifically about the Lyft driver.