Doug Moe: At 70, retired teacher embarks on biking adventure
She woke Easter morning in Sanderson. Pat Calchina had been in Texas a week by then and was enjoying it, the open spaces and vistas, the funky motels on the edge of little towns.
Easter would be a demanding day. One hundred and 11 miles, all the way to Del Rio. She hadn’t biked that far in a day in 30 years, and never on the chip seal surfaces popular in West Texas.
Calchina ate breakfast in the dark. She saw the sun rise from her bicycle. It was stunning. Her legs felt good. She didn’t have to worry about her tires, either. After five flats, she’d finally acquired puncture-resistant inner tubes. Still, the last 20 miles were brutal. There was lightning, cracks of thunder. She made it.
“I don’t think I’ll ever do another ride like that,” she wrote the next day.
It was part of the deal, what she signed up for.
“It seemed at 70,” she had said 10 days earlier, “I was ready for an adventure.”
Pat Calchina retired three years ago from teaching social studies and history at Madison Memorial High School. She was an activist as well as a teacher, outspoken on women’s and gay rights, leading protests against the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
The adventure Calchina embarked on early last month is a cross-country — California to Florida, they dip their tires in the Pacific and Atlantic — bicycle trip in the company of about 30 other women under the auspices of WomanTours, a company now in its 20th year.
The tour began March 7 in San Diego. Of course, for the riders, it really began earlier. You don’t just get on a bike and ride 3,000 miles. Calchina, a longtime bicycle enthusiast — she often biked to work at Memorial — decided to take a spinning class at the East Side YMCA in January and February.
Her classmates — “the sweetest people,” Calchina said — quickly became friends, and cheerleaders for her pending trip. She promised to write them from the road, and she has.
Calchina sent one dispatch from Arizona, about 10 days into the trip.
“Phoenix to Apache Junction today,” she wrote. “The past four days have been very hot, evidently some kind of record. The miles have been doable, 58 today, 67 yesterday, pretty flat, times when the traffic is daunting, other times when repaving of the road wouldn’t be a bad idea. A beautiful bike path for a while this morning, which was really a treat. Our hotel looks out on the Superstition Mountains. Arizona is really beautiful.”
I reached Calchina by phone a few days later. She was in a hotel room in Silver City, N.M., with a rare rest day, no bicycling.
“I counted the miles so far,” she said. “Seven hundred and thirty-two.”
Two women had dropped out due to injury, Calchina said. Everyone on the trip was over 50. It hadn’t been easy. There were roads with no shoulders. “You stay on the white line,” she said, “look in your rear view mirror, and pray.”
Calchina was one of a dozen who had biked the whole way — there is the opportunity at any point to take a ride in a van. One of her YMCA buddies had given her a goal: EFI. Suffice it to say that “e” stands for every and “i” for inch. Calchina hoped to bike every inch.
Her days had settled into something of a routine. Up early, breakfast at the hotel, then the day’s ride, which she found she liked making alone. She enjoyed having the freedom to eat her peanut butter sandwich when she wanted or sit on the steps of an abandoned building and peel an orange.
An exception was crossing the Continental Divide, when Calchina was grateful to be in the company of three other women. “It was incredible,” she said. “A real milestone.”
The group gathers together for dinner, cooked by a chef in the back of a van. They sit in a circle on 30 white plastic chairs and talk about the day. There is a feeling of accomplishment, even jubilation. They’ve done their miles. A hotel room, maybe a hot tub, awaits.
I heard from Calchina again Monday, a note written from Brackettville, Texas, near the halfway point of the trip, which concludes May 2 in St. Augustine, Fla.
She’d had to accept a van ride one day, she said. It was a 90-mile day with hills at the end. She didn’t have it. It was a learning experience and not all bad, setting ego aside. A few days later, on Easter, Calchina rode the whole 111 miles.
The trip of a lifetime. I thought of our earlier phone call, from New Mexico. Somehow she communicated both exhilaration and exhaustion. She had a massage scheduled in a couple of hours. “This is amazing,” she said.