Bicycle touring solo

It’s safer to tour by bicycle with a partner or group than to head out into the great unknown alone.

So ride with a group if you can. If you’ve got deep pockets, you can join a guided expedition. You also may be able to find a like-minded partner or a group on a touring website, such as this one: https://www.adventurecycling.org/adventure-cyclist/companions-wanted/.

But if those approaches don’t work for you, don’t let the fear of traveling solo derail your touring ambitions, or you may never get out there. 

I did my first multi-day tour in 2011 (of the 335-mile Great Allegheny Passage/C&O Canal trail linkup between Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C.) with a friend, and I had a great time and enjoyed my friend’s company.

Though I was bitten by the touring bug and was eager to do additional tours, I found that I was unable to recruit companions for many of my subsequent efforts, and my fear of soloing discouraged me from touring for the next five years.

In 2016, a three-month window of opportunity opened for me to attempt a coast-to-coast tour. Again, none of my friends or acquaintances had the time or the desire to accompany me. Despite some uneasiness, I headed out on my bicycle alone, and discovered that many of my anxieties about soloing had been unwarranted.

In fact, over time I have found that I prefer some aspects of soloing, especially the flexibility that it offers. While soloing, I have complete authority to make all decisions, including over how fast and far to ride each day, where to stay and when to take a rest day.

When I ride at my own pace, I can ride comfortably all day and I enjoy the touring experience. When I try to keep up with more competitive individuals who may be faster and stronger than I am, I burn out quickly and can lose appetite for the tour. To me, adding competition to the touring mix—riding with individuals focused on proving who is the stronger rider—is a recipe for negativity, exhaustion, injury and other disaster. I’d prefer to be able to stop to smell the roses whenever I want to.

I have also discovered that as long as I stick to established touring routes, I have been able to meet and team up with other like-minded adventurers much of the time. Many of the companions I have met on tour have preferred to ride at their own pace alone during the day but meet at day’s end for dinner in town or at a shared campsite.

If you tour alone, it’s especially important to heed your inner voice.

I have passed on a few of the many free campsites available along touring routes while soloing, if and when it appeared that other campers at the site might be a problem. 

I have never been robbed or physically assaulted on tour. But on the handful of occasions I’ve ignored my inner voice and camped in places that my intuition urged me to avoid, I have sometimes been harassed or otherwise gotten more sleepless adventure than I would prefer.

While soloing, I usually carry some form of pepper spray for security against unleashed dogs, two-legged snakes, and other potential predators.  As of this writing, I have yet to actually deploy the spray but have occasionally pointed the can in a pursuing dog’s direction. Still, it makes me feel better to know I have the spray.

Some touring venues are riskier to solo than others. 

The Adventure Cycling Association, for instance, recommends that the 2,700-mile Great Divide Mountain Bike Route, which travels mostly over remote gravel roads between Canada and Mexico, be ridden in groups with at least three riders.

“If a rider is debilitated in the backcountry, you will want to have at least one person to stay with the injured/sick rider, and another to go for help,” ACA says.

If you nonetheless opt to ride the GDMBR or other remote trails on your own, you should consider carrying a personal locater beacon, such as a SPOT or Garmin inReach.

These devices use satellite technology to track your location and allow you to summon assistance during emergencies. They are not reliant on the availability of cellular phone signals.

If you can’t recruit companions, you don’t have to let your fear of soloing prevent you from touring altogether. But if you go alone, pay attention to your intuition and carry the appropriate technology for your protection.

Planning a bicycle tour

Adventure Cycling Association map

The fun part about bike touring is the riding.

Planning is less jolly.

But figuring out where to go, how to get from point A to B, where to sleep and get water and other supplies is critical to the success of any touring adventure.

The easiest but most expensive solution is to book a guided tour and leave the planning to others.

To take charge of your own trip, you will have have to do at least some research, whether carrying all of your own gear on your bike or using a support vehicle to transport cargo.

A great place to start is the Adventure Cycling Association, because the Missoula, MT-based organization has done a lot of the requisite research for the 48,608 miles of bike-friendly routes it has mapped in North America.

The ACA maps identify a route’s campgrounds, motels, grocery stores, bicycle shops, post offices and elevation profiles. The post office information is useful for mailing resupply packages. Elevation is good to know when estimating how far to try to ride on a particular day.

The maps also provide turn-by-turn directions for the routes. Since the turns on ACA paper maps are marked by mileage, cyclists need accurately calibrated cyclometers to stay on track with them.

When using ACA’s paper maps, call ahead to make sure that any businesses you are relying on are still in operation, and check the association’s web site for updates and corrections. 

The association also sells digital versions of its maps as GPX data that work on a user’s GPS device or smartphone. Digital map information can also be acquired through an ACA smartphone app.

During a weeklong tour of a section of the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route earlier this year, I used all three technologies, but found that I relied mostly on the turn-by-turn cue sheets included in the ACA paper maps and GPX data that I downloaded to my Garmin eTrex 20x.

I used the GPX track for the Tour Divide bike race on the eTrex. The Tour Divide, an annual endurance bike contest, mostly follows the GDMBR from Banff, Canada, to Antelope Wells, N.M. The Tour Divide GPX track is available free at topofusion.com.

I thought both the eTrex GPX and the ACA smartphone app tracks were extremely helpful and made navigating and staying on route easy. But the eTrex ran for several days on two replaceable AA batteries while the ACA app drained my iPhone battery within five or six hours.

The eTrex has also proved to be less susceptible to the cold than my smartphone. My smartphone literally freezes and stops working whenever it gets chilly. My eTrex has yet to fail for weather-related reasons.  But the vulnerabilities of the smartphone underscore why it’s a good idea to carry a paper map and compass to back up the electronic navigational devices.

When searching for bike-friendly routes over paved roads, I’ve had fairly good luck using the cycling option on the Google Maps smartphone app.

If you are planning to ship your bike at the beginning and/or end of your tour, a great resource is bikeflights.com. The company specializes in arranging bike shipments and may be able to get you better deals through UPS or Federal Express than you can. The website provides instructions on how to pack your bike yourself, if you want to economize. You can buy a hard or soft shipping case, or simply get a used shipping box from your local bike shop. The website also provides a list of bike shops that will pack and ship or receive and reassemble your bike for a fee.

For my mini-tour of the Great Divide, I used bikeflights.com to ship my bike to the Whitefish Bike Retreat. The retreat, a hostel and camping facility for mountain bikers and bike-packers outside the town of Whitefish, MT, holds bikes for guests for free. I reassembled my bike in the retreat’s shop. My friend Dave and I also booked space on the retreat’s shuttle to start our GDMBR ride at the U.S./Canada border.

Other great resources for researching bike routes are the journals on crazyguyonabike.com.

I read several while researching my GDMBR ride, including this one:

https://www.crazyguyonabike.com/doc/?o=1mr&doc_id=18096&v=17o.

Still another great resource for planning a GDMBR ride is Michael McCoy’s, Cycling the Great Divide https://www.amazon.com/Cycling-Great-Divide-Americas-Long-Distance/dp/1594858195. The book provides a lot of great information about the route and suggests an itinerary.  I downloaded the McCoy book to my iPhone and read the relevant sections daily to help plan each day’s ride.

ACA map elevation profile

Whitefish Bike Retreat hostel

Bike retreat bicycle handrail

Bike retreat shuttle

Prevention is the best remedy for saddle sores

During my first effort to cross the U.S. by bike in 2016, I developed such bad saddle sores by day four of my westward trek that I had to call my girlfriend and beg her to give me a ride home.

I was in pitiful shape. I was so sore from the bleeding, quarter-sized popped blisters on my backside that I could not bear to sit on the seat of my bike, or at the picnic table in the day-use area on the Blue Ridge Parkway where my adventure came to its untimely end.

There was no way I could continue riding the more than 4,000 miles remaining to Oregon. I had to change plans.

Three weeks later, after a strict regimen of sitz baths and Neosporin applications at home, I was back in the saddle, headed in a new direction. Over the next four weeks, I rode more than 1,500 miles from DC to Bar Harbor ME via Pittsburgh and Erie PA.  I am happy to report that this time I had nary a blemish on my derriere.

This is because I had taken a number of steps to prevent the sores. I had switched to a better saddle and higher-quality, padded cycling shorts, and I was applying chamois cream to my backside several times daily. Chamois cream is a lubricant intended to reduce the friction that can cause sores.

In addition, I was carrying two pairs of cycling shorts, washing the used pair at day’s end and drying them on the bike the next day, so I always had a clean pair to wear each morning.

I also either took a shower, or at least cleaned my nether regions with baby wipes, every evening. If there were the slightest indication of irritation or abrasion, I also applied a thin coat of A&D Ointment or Desitin to the affected area.

On top of all this, I took at least one full rest day every seven to ten days to give my backside a break from the saddle.

To this day, several thousand miles of touring later, these same protocols have kept the sores at bay.

Some cyclists have told me that they’ve never had issues with saddle sores. But many have shared the misery.

The sores, along with being major pains in the rear, have been responsible for the premature conclusion of too many tours.

Do what you can to prevent them from ruining your own tour.

I wasn't smiling four days later

This Brooks Imperial B17 saddle treats me right

Shakedowns

Skyline Drive

Before heading out for a major bicycle tour, it’s a good idea to do a shakedown ride to test your gear and mettle closer to home.

It’s better to figure out what works for you and what doesn’t—and to make any necessary adjustments—before you head out of town.

As a group of friends and I discovered earlier this year, shakedowns can also be great adventures themselves.

Because we were training for a ride on the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route, we selected shakedown venues near our Washington, D.C., area homes that we thought would approximate the gravel and hills for which the GDMBR is notorious.

The first shakedown was a four-day, 250-mile lap of the Great Allegheny Passage, a picturesque gravel path that links Cumberland MD and Pittsburgh PA, and mostly tracks the Casselman, Youghiogheny and Monongaleha rivers.

There is a bit of an ascent on the GAP climbing the first 24 miles heading west from Cumberland to the Eastern continental divide. This is not nearly as steep as the hills on the GDMBR, and the GAP gravel is smoother. But the ride proved to be a valuable learning experience for us. 

Two of our four riders got painfully acquainted with saddle sores. They will have to figure out how to prevent the sores from recurring in the future.

I discovered that my sleeping mattress leaked, that my Thudbuster seat post caused my seatpost bag to hit my rear tire whenever I rode over a bump, and that my rain gear was inadequate for the downpour we endured over the entire 24 miles east to Cumberland back from the continental divide. The mattress, seat post and rain gear were replaced.

We liked the two campgrounds we stayed at on the GAP—The Outflow campground in Confluence PA and Dravo’s Landing near Buena Vista PA. The Outflow campground has hiker-biker sites and a shower. There are several restaurants in Confluence.

Dravo’s, which has a well, two shelters, vault toilets, and a covered picnic pavilion, was originally constructed by Boy Scouts for an Eagle Scout project. There are no showers or restaurants. But there is plenty of complimentary firewood and admission is free. 

The second shakedown was Shenandoah National Park’s Skyline Drive. The spectacularly scenic 105-mile road that winds its way across the top of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains is a roller-coaster ride for challenge-seeking cyclists.

Unlike the GDMBR, Skyline Drive is paved. Also unlike the GDMBR, Skyline Drive has ample automobile traffic to worry about, and offers little to no shoulder. But the sustained quality of the ascents and descents is similar in both venues. 

We started our ride at the Dickey Ridge visitor center, milepost 4.6 on the park’s northern end, then rode to Big Meadows campground (MP 51) where we spent the first night.

On day 2, Dave and I did a short lap south and camped again at Big Meadows, while Peter, the third member of the team, continued riding south to where his car was parked near the park’s southern end.

On day 3, Dave and I rode back to our cars at Dickey Ridge. This time, all the gear worked fine.

Overall, we rode 124.3 miles over three days, with a total ascent of 12,756 feet. We got too close for comfort to a bear and a deer during a couple of those screaming descents, and we got walloped by a thunderstorm on the ride back to the cars on day 3.

Skyline seemed like a venue that should be considered by experienced riders only. If you try this one yourself, check your brakes, because you’ll need good ones to stay under the park’s 35 mph speed limit on the downhills. Also, wear a brightly colored jersey and use a stroboscopic reflector to make sure that drivers can see you. 

The Big Meadows campground is huge but very popular so reservations are recommended. The campground has showers. The Big Meadows Lodge has rooms and a restaurant.

I thought our Skyline ride was a great workout. I liked it enough that I returned a few days later and did another lap, this time solo.

Outflow campground, l-r: Peter, Jim, Doug

Dave at Skyline Drive's highest point

Skyline, l-r: Peter, Doug, Dave

Out for a walk

I rediscovered the simple joys of walking in late July this year, largely because it was the only form of outdoor aerobic activity I could safely do at the time.

In the wake of a bicycle accident, cycling, my preferred form of outdoor activity, was on hold.

But my doctors told me that walking would be good for me, as long I avoided any falls that might aggravate my broken ribs and separated shoulder.

So I started walking regularly, usually anywhere from five to nine miles a day.

I guess I had been a cycling snob, viewing walking as vastly less efficient and productive, second string on the junior varsity for aerobic exercise.

But lo and behold, I found all my walking helped me shed a few pounds.

I also found that I grew to value my walks as prime time for relaxing and thinking, including about subjects for new blogs such as this one.

One nice thing about walking is that it doesn’t require more gear than a comfortable pair of shoes or sandals.

If you are planning to walk more than a couple of miles a day, it’s a good idea to put Superfeet insoles in your shoes. These may help you avoid foot ailments.

Don’t forget to wear a sunhat and sunscreen, and use insect repellent to ward off ticks and other pests if your walks take you off the sidewalks and pavement. I find that I am most comfortable walking in shoes that are up to one and a half sizes larger than my street shoe size.

For longer walks, you will want to carry water. A fanny pack or small backpack will do the job. And if you hike through mountains, walking sticks might be a good investment, particularly in helping you protect your knees on the descents.

If you want to add spice to your walks, try birdwatching. If you get bitten by the birding bug, you’ll be impressed by how much you learn quickly, with the assistance of a good birding app, such as this one: http://merlin.allaboutbirds.org.

By early September, I had healed enough to ride a bicycle again. But I haven’t stopped walking. Now both cycling and walking are important and valued parts of my daily exercise diet.

Proof that you can bird and bike at the same time.

20-mile lap on the bike on Sept. 3. First ride since July.