On The Road
by: Bill Oetinger 12/1/2004
A day in the sag wagon
I drove a sag wagon on a century last summer.
That may not seem like such a noteworthy accomplishment to some of you, but it was a first for me. I have volunteered on club events of one sort or another for many years, from centuries to tours to doubles to crits. I have marked courses, sliced fruit, cooked lunches, delivered supplies, cleaned bathrooms, written flier copy, drawn maps and t-shirt graphics. I was, for over ten years, the Chair of the Terrible Two Double Century. At one time or another, I have tried my hand at just about every task that falls in the path of a club volunteer.
But I had never driven a sag. I guess I've always discharged my volunteer obligations in some other way. Although our club sag coordinator is forever pleading for more sags leading up to the event(s), I've never answered the call...even though I have been sag coordinator myself on some events and know how much they are needed. What makes this particular tour of duty more noteworthy for me is that I ventured outside my own club to do it. Heretofore, all my support tasks had been within the Santa Rosa Cycling Club, but for this sag session, I went south to help the Marin Cyclists with their Marin Century and the first ever Mount Tam Double Century (running concurrently).
Before venturing further into the realm of sagging, I want to put in a good word for this new double. It has to be one of the best routes for a double in California. It incorporates all the good stuff that the Marin Century is known for--Lucas Valley, the Marshall Wall, Tomales Bay, Chileno Valley--and adds another hundred miles of even better stuff: Fairfax-Bolinas Road, Ridgecrest up to the summit of Mount Tam, Pan Toll and Panoramic, Hwy 1 along the ocean, Bay Hill, Coleman Valley...on and on. Epic!
Not only is it extremely scenic, with hardly a dull mile throughout, it's also seriously challenging, offering up 14,500' of climbing, some of it quite steep. Some folks who did the ride this year seemed to think it was the equal of the Terrible Two in toughness. Making that tough challenge more manageable is good support from the Marin Cyclists, who appeared to be doing a pretty good job, from what I could see as I made my rounds in my sag wagon.
One more aside about doubles in general... Have you noticed that there are now four doubles in an almost continuous arc across the counties north of San Francisco Bay? The Mount Tam double comes within a mile of the Terrible Two course near the town of Occidental. The TT and Knoxville just touch along Silverado Trail in Napa County. And Knoxville and Davis share a few miles of roads over in the Pope Valley region. That means there are CTC doubles courses in one (almost) unbroken arc all the way from Muir Beach to Davis. Add in the Devil Mountain Double in the East Bay, and you have over a thousand miles of doubles right in the Bay Area. I think that's kind of cool.
2005 is going to be a banner year for California Triple Crown doubles. Not only do we have the five excellent rides in the Bay Area, there are new and old events on the calendar all over the state, including an exciting new double up in the Sierra foothills near Bass Lake put on by the very well organized Fresno Cyling Club. If you ever thought about getting into the world of doubles, 2005 would be a good time to start.
Anyway, back to my day of sagging. I was so excited about the epic route of the new Mount Tam double, I had hoped to ride it. But after just about destroying myself completing the Terrible Two earlier in the summer, I had to rethink that premise. I just didn't think I had another double in my system this year. Instead, I offered to drive a sag on the course. I figured I'd be doing a good deed for the neighboring club, plus I'd get to see a lot of my far flung family of doubles buddies and share a little of their excitement in this new, snazzy course. As it turns out though, because of the timing of my shift, I ended up sagging more for the riders on the century than the double. It wasn't quite what I envisioned when I signed on, but it was where they needed me to be.
I drove out around mid-morning to a rest stop in Valley Ford, a sleepy little village on Hwy 1 near the Marin-Sonoma border. I got my first sag customer almost before I checked in at the rest stop. As I was driving to the stop, I saw a cyclist off his bike and kind of staggering around in a cow pasture. It struck me as a little odd that he should be in the pasture, on the wrong side of the fence. Well, no sooner had I introduced myself to the fellow in charge at the rest stop than a cyclist rolls up and says there's a rider back up the road who just went over a fence into a pasture. Aha! That must be my guy. I hopped in the car and scooted back up the road and found him, still staggering around while calling his wife on his cell. Turns out he had seriously overcooked it in a downhill corner and had processed himself, vegematic-style, right through a barbed wire fence. Boy, was he was a mess! Deep lacerations all over his front...arms, legs, torso. I took him and his bike back to the rest stop--just a block away--and the paramedics on duty there spent half an hour swabbing his wounds and wrapping him in gauze to the point where he looked more like a mummy than a cyclist.
But all of that was just a temporary fix...quite literally just a bandaid. He needed to be taken to the hospital for extensive suturing, so off we went--me, the mummy, and his bike--south to central Marin. In spite of looking like one of Freddy Krueger's victims, the guy was in good spirits, and we had a fine time on the half-hour drive, chatting about all sorts of things. I handed him over to his wife, who met us at the ride headquarters, and then I turned around and headed back north.
When I got back to Valley Ford, the century riders were moving through the rest stop in wholesale job lots. It was pig-in-a-python time. Several other sags were there as well, and we all filled our vehicles to capacity in short order. There were numerous people who had had enough of riding on bikes and now wanted to ride in cars.
This is probably a gross over-simplification, but it strikes me there are more calls for sags on a century than on a double, in spite of the double being at least twice as hard. Obviously, there are more riders on the typical century, so that's part of it. But it's more than that. Your average doubles rider is a little more self-reliant and a lot more motivated to finish what he starts. Your average century rider is less experienced, less fit, less determined, and generally less invested in the issue of finishing, come hell or high water. Century riders will find all sorts of reasons for bagging it and climbing in a sag. It almost seems as if some of them see a sag not as an emergency recourse of last resort, but as a convenient taxi, rather the way skiers think of ski lifts. Ride 'til you're bored or fed up or tired, then flag down a ride home. Hey, isn't that part of what you paid for with your entry fee?
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Relaxing by the Sag Wagon Photo credit: Carol Nussbaum |
I had someone who took a wrong turn and ended up on the century course instead of the the 100-K course. I had folks with minor mechanicals. I had a guy who said he had a plane to catch and had run out of time. I had a guy whose back was acting up. I had two ladies who simply wanted to be chauffered to the top of the next hill. Not a single one of my “fares” all day looked even remotely trashed...the way the typical sagged out rider looks at the Terrible Two. No one had that Bataan Death March look...the sunken eyes and salt-caked lips...the dazed, haunted, looking-into-the-abyss stare. They just looked mildly flushed, as if they'd just mowed the lawn and were now ready to relax with a tall glass of lemonade.
I'm not putting these folks down. I'm well aware that only a few people really enjoy punishing themselves the way riders often do on doubles. I understand that for many people, 100 miles in one day is a huge chunk to bite off. (I can still vividly recall my own first century, and how utterly, totally wasted I was near the end.) I have also made use of sags myself on at least four rides (all doubles), and I really appreciate how nice it is to get that supportive treatment when one's personal wheels have come off. It was just a bit weird for me to go out expecting to be supporting fairly advanced doubles riders, but then to end up running a shuttle service back and forth, back and forth, for car load after car load of bright, chipper riders who didn't appear to have even broken a sweat before calling it a day.
Some folks got just a teeny bit cranky when I said I needed to wait until my car was full to drive them down to the ride start. They were ready to go and they wanted to go...now. Then, when I had a full car, other folks got testy because there wasn't room for them too. They didn't want to wait 15 minutes for the next sag. So we'd all squeeze a little and fit in one more. I was packing them in like commuters on the Tokyo subway.
Finally, after my umpteenth run down to Marin--sagging in riders heading south and schlepping supplies to rest stops heading north--I began to cross paths with the doubles riders. (They did their extra hundred miles near the start, so they got onto my part of the century course after all but the slowest of the century riders had moved it on down the line.) I saw several of my old friends, including CTC coordinator Chuck Bramwell. That was fun. I helped a woman who had managed to jam her chain in her derailleur. I dusted off a guy who had laid it down in a patch of gravel. (He got right back on the bike and kept on hammering, looking just a wee bit scuffed and battered.) Mostly though, I just watched the plucky warriors as they doggedly ground out the miles. Not too many of the long-distance riders seemed to need my services.
After working from mid-morning until around dinner time, my shift was over and I headed home. I know, from coordinating the sags on the Terrible Two, that some sag drivers show up at 5:00 am and work until midnight. But the usual stint is a few hours, and that's what I did. I used up a tank of gas, which I may or may not have billed to the Marin club. I meant to, but probably forgot, and in the end, it didn't really matter, one way or the other. I know about half of my sag drivers on the TT don't turn in gas receipts, even though we tell them we'll pay them back. I guess folks are just pitching in, not only with their time and tools and energy, but with a tank of gas too...just a way of helping to make the event happen.
Which is, I suppose, the point of this column. In some ways, I had a dandy time giving up a day to be a sag. In other ways, it was sort of tedious and tiresome. But tiresome or fun, it needed to be done...if not by me, then by some other volunteer. Only a very few bike events have paid staff, and even those supplement their paid positions with loads of unpaid workers. At the price points of most paid rides, there just isn't enough revenue floating around to pay all the “employees” who work on the project.
Whether you ride centuries or doubles or race on the crit circuit or on single track--but have never worked on any of them--ask yourself: how many of those events would happen without volunteers? Answer: none.
As we roll up to the holidays, take a little of the giving spirit of the season and carry it over into a New Year's resolution to give a little back to the cycling community in 2005. Find a day or two somewhere in the year where you leave your bike home and instead drive a sag or work a rest stop or haul hay bales on a race course. Every minute of your work shift may not be big fun, but you'll probably go home at the end of the day feeling pretty good about life and your place in the grand scheme of things. And later, when you're back on your bike and participating in another century or double or race, you'll have a new appreciation for all those worker bees in the STAFF t-shirts around the course.
Bill can be reached at srccride@sonic.net