Mille Bornes

Actual French milemarker -- though I presume they use kilometers.

There's a card game called  Mille Bornes, French for "thousand miles," and as I recall it consists of accumulating cards with mileage markers, while avoiding hazards played by your opponent, until one player's total reaches 1,000.  I vaguely recall the first time I played it, when it was new discovery by my cousin Linda Olson, back in the early to mid-1960s. 

The game came to mind recently as I was down in our company "gym", using the stairstep machine.  I noticed that my water bottle was one that I got for participating in the 2000 Corporate Cycling Challenge, in Omaha, and my t-shirt was the one I got for participating in 2010's Centurion race (shortened to 50 miles because of storms), here in Madison -- or, rather, in the hills surrounding nearby Mt. Horeb. 

There's a lot of distance between those two markers, considerably more than ten years and 400 miles.  Things that have changed, and things that stayed the same.

I don't recall much of the Corporate Challenge; I know we assembled on a gray morning in north Omaha, in the shadow of the old Florence grain elevator. 

The Florence Grain Mill

I know Mark was there, and Paul too.  I remember that Paul's wife Mary was there to see us off, and I think she met us at the finish line.  In any event it was one of my first organized competitions, though of course I'd been riding for several years.  That was before Rocinante, so my mount must have been good old Adastratus, the silver 12-speed from Specialized, I think.  (Adastratus derived from the Latin phrase, Ad astra per aspera, "to the stars through struggle").

The species of Adastratus, I think.

 I recall talking briefly to a rider beside me, a sort of gruff and apparently determined rider.  When the start signal was given, I leaned slightly toward him as I began to ride, he swerved and hit the curb, and went down in clatter of cursing.  In my mirror I saw him remount, but I never saw him again -- and never wanted to, lest he have hard feelings.  I  don't recall much else of the ride, which I believe ended down by Missouri River.  I know I was nowhere near the front, nor did I expect to be.

As for the Centurion Race a decade later, that's been chronicled elsewhere in these pages. We went into that more confident, and came out more chastened, Rocinante and I.   The hills took their toll, and we limped home.  So if I set my mile-marker at 100, I failed; if I set it at 50, I succeeded.  I'll take the 50.  That's one thing about milestones -- they're just there; it's we who make something of them.

Thinking milestones also reminds me of a time long ago, in the early, early 60s, BB ("Before Beatles" -- my temporal milestone).  JFK had just been elected President, and he was pushing physical education; he happened to mention a Marine Corps requirement that a healthy man should be able to walk 50 miles in a single day, so distance walking became the rage.  The local teenybopper radio station, Mighty 1290 KOIL,  sponsored a walk one Saturday, and covered it.

I listened from my bedroom, and I remember that one group was planning to "twist" all the way to Lincoln, and it started out as a raucous crowd.  And a couple hours later I recall the announcer saying that it appeared people were beginning to realize just how far the walk was, and beginning to drop out; I don't know if anyone actually completed it. 

My point -- and I do have one -- is that sometime milestones take on an illusory magic of their own, become an abstraction devoid of reality, until one begins to try and reach it.  Then it all sinks in.