EFI

EFI was our goal in Guatemala,inspired by my earlier ride, far from Latin America.

The longest bike race in the world is the Tour d'Afrique. Starting in Cairo, it runs for nearly 12,000 km thru the length of Africa to Cape Town. That distance is covered in 120 days, of which 100 days are spent on the bike. Riders come from all over the world to participate in this great adventure and encompass all different ages, including some who are in their 50's and 60's. Many of the riders have absolutely no expectation to stand on the podium in Cape Town, but most have one aspiration, which is to attain EFI status; or, in other words, the fierce desire to ride "Every Fucking Inch" of the way.

Our Guatemalan tour was a more modest expedition - 12 days, of which 9 days were spent in the saddle, covering nearly 900 km. In some respects, however, it was similar to riding in Africa: beat up roads, funky coke stops, very hot weather, lots of climbing, crazy bus drivers, different types of food which could cause the shits, mechanical failures, and always the possibility of a crash around the next bend in the road. For all these reasons and more, it is bloody difficult to achieve EFI on the Tour d'Afrique, and it proved to be difficult for us on the Tour de Guatemala.

Trying to achieve EFI is both good and bad. For most riders, keeping one's EFI status means he will fight thru considerable pain and exhaustion. EFI fuels the desire to just keep going instead of taking the easy way out and hop on the bus. But, EFI can be a bad thing, for it can make one do crazy things in order to maintain the status of this misguided concept.
For us, we lost EFI on the 7th riding day. Steve, who’d fallen the day before and suffered bruised ribs, found it quite painful to
breath hard on the ascents. A short way into day 7, Steve got in the van. One down. The rest of us were trying to ride from a lovely little town called Uspantan to Chichi, no more than 90 km in distance, but up and down some serious mountains. It turned out to be a brutal day of riding. At the end of a long struggle, in the hilltop town (what else?) of San Pedro Jocopilas, about 27km shy of Chichi, the paved road was washed out and in its place was a deeply rutted dirt road which in sections had 15% declines. It was late afternoon, and the traffic was kicking up great amounts of dust making it hard to see anything. Thankfully, we all decided it was time to declare victory, and after downing a couple of cold beers, we gratefully climbed into Edgar's van to ride the remaining distance to Chichi.

As a postscript, once one loses EFI, there is a feeling of liberation and it is relatively easy to hop on the bus going forward. We were lucky to have lost EFI before Chichi, for it made next day's decision pretty simple. The road south from Chichi dives 2500 meters into a deep ravine with a correspondingly steep climb on the other side. This road carries heavy traffic, including lots of crazy chicken buses, the ride made dicier due to the daunting 15+% inclines and declines. We could have killed ourselves or we could have taken a couple of hours negotiating this section, but because we no longer were concerned with the misguided concept of achieving EFI, it was easy to agree for Edgar to drive us this stretch of the route.



Scott (2/28/10)