Seeds of the journey

My road to PBP 2015 – Prologue

What is the PBP?  It is the Paris-Brest-Paris 1200k "randonee" which happens every 4 years.  1200k is 745 miles, and to succeed, you ride it on a bicycle in no more than 90 hours.  And that 90 hours is start to finish including riding, eating, sleeping, and everything else.   In 2011 6000 people registered and they are aiming this year to raise that to 6500 riders in 2015.

How it all started:

Back in 2001, I was working in downtown Seattle and living 10 miles east in Bellevue.  I was taking the bus to and from downtown.  One of my co-workers, Zach, who lived north of downtown, started commuting by bicycle.  Well, I had ridden my bike all OVER Eugene Oregon when I went to school there in the 70's, and had put the bike away when I moved to Seattle in '82.  I heard there was a bike trail between Bellevue and Seattle, so one summer day I got the bike out, pumped up the tires, left a little early, found the trail and rode to Seattle.  Except for a couple of hills, it was a great ride, and I decided to do this more often. 

At first I rode to Seattle and took the bus home, or took the bus in and rode home – I wasn't really in shape to ride 10 miles each way on the same day. In fact, I was only doing this three days a week.  But over time, as I got more used to the ride, I added days, added trips home, until after a few months, I was commuting full time by bike both ways.  I traded my old Eugene bike for a more modern Schwinn from the Goodwill that I passed every day, and eventually traded that one for a better 12 speed from Goodwill.  Those all lasted me until I bought a new Fuji Touring bike with 27 speeds, steel frame and rear rack in the fall of 2002.  I have that bike to this day, and expect to ride in on the PBP.

So now that I'm riding a bike, I start reading about bikes, and discover the Bicycling.com forums where people discuss all kinds of different things related to bikes.  One of these things is Long Distance Cycling, and I read about people riding 1000k and 1200k rides which is just a fantastic thing.  I rode my first century ride (100 miles) in September 2002, and the stories these folks would tell got right into my soul.

One story in particular was by a fellow who went by the moniker "Dr. Codfish".  He was actually from the Pacific Northwest, living just a bit south of Seattle. He related the harrowing PBP he rode in 2007. That year it rained – and rained – and rained.  It was quite discouraging to the riders, of course, to be wet all the time.   And I found the most inspiring part (believe it or not) of his story was where they were on the last part of the trip, everyone down in the dumps, and he told his riding companions "Hey, buck up guys!  Think of this as just another crappy rainy ride, and believe me, it will be epic in the telling later on."  Why would I think that riding 745 miles in the rain was a great idea? Yeah, I don't know, perhaps because it WOULD be epic in the retelling.

I read that in 2007, and it germinated for 6 years, until I started thinking about it again in early 2014.  I looked up PBP online and discovered that the next one was in August 2015.  I also discovered that registration priority was given to people according to the longest ride they did the year before – so 2014 was going to be my "warm up year", and the beginning of my Road to Paris-Brest-Paris 2015.