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When I tell people I am planning on doing a 350 mile bike race typically the first question I get is “how many days is that?”. I usually get funny looks when I respond with “one” or actually “one and a half” (since it is a 36 hour time limit). Since the race begins at 3PM obviously this means even the pros will be riding through the night and for us mere mortals it means through the night and likely well into the next.

I have a rule about never being on 2 wheels in the dark without more than 1 light. I really don’t want my one and only light to fail me on a downhill corner (because you know that is exactly when it would fail). So, I have 2 lights. One mounted to the handlebars which is good for general illumination and a second one on my helmet.

Both of these lights have batteries that can be easily swapped and I made sure to buy a helmet light that used the same type of battery as the bike light so I don’t have to carry 2 different types of spares. Both lights can also be charged via a USB cable from a USB battery pack so hopefully I will have enough battery capacity to get me to the finish.

It has been several years since I have been on a bike after dark and in the past it had always been on familiar roads. I figured while I am on my training trip to Kansas I should get in some applicable training miles in.

For the last few days I have been camping just south of Emporia KS right along the route where the 2022 and 2023 races went. I planned out a 37 mile route and headed out on the bike just past sunset on a dark moonless night.

I forgot how wonderful it can be out in the middle of nowhere in the dark. So peaceful, nothing but the sound of my tires on the gravel and the stars above. It was all peaceful except for…. the Kamikaze bunnies! A couple of times I had rabbits jump out into the road ahead of me just barely avoiding running right under my front wheel. I don’t know if it was luck of extreme rider skill (ok, yeah probably luck) but I survived them.

The other thing I really enjoyed is it is pasture burning season here in Kansas. No, these are not uncontrolled wildfires but prescribed burns to rejuvinate the grassland and improve it for grazing. It is absolutely spectacular to see at night. The downside is there is a lot of smoke in the air that probably didn’t do my lungs any good.

I was happy to see how well the lights worked. I could run them both on medium power most of the time and just bumped one or occasionally both up to high when going a little faster on the downhill sections. Now the only real question is will I have enough batteries to get me through the race.

When I finished up the ride around 11:30 PM I was pretty pumped and had trouble sleeping which is unusual for me (I am typically in bed around 9 these days). The sense of accomplishment and satisfaction for how well the ride went kept me up for a while. But, I certainly did sleep late the next morning.