The Banana Protocol

I’ve come to believe the official food of the MS Ride is the banana.

Not the watermelon, though it’s excellent. Not the orange wedges, which taste better than fruit has any legal right to. Not even the salt-and-vinegar chips, whose physiological importance I’m prepared to accept on faith.

The banana.

I’m convinced of this because, over the years, I’ve learned that no matter what you ask for at an MS Ride rest stop, someone will eventually hand you a banana.

It started the first year at the first control, maybe twenty kilometres in. I wasn’t hungry. I’d eaten breakfast. My bottles were still half full. Natalie and I rolled up mostly to stretch our legs and confirm we were still on the right road.

“Banana?” the volunteer asked.

“No thanks, just topping up my water.”

“Orange, then?”

“I’m okay, really.”

“You should probably take a banana.”

I did not take a banana.

At the second control, different town, different volunteers, a woman asked how I was feeling. I said pretty good. She said good, and handed me a banana anyway. I started to wonder if she was just an enthusiastic volunteer having a good day. By the third control, I stopped wondering. Same question, same offer, same faint disappointment when I said I was fine. One volunteer had a banana in my jersey pocket before I’d even finished saying I didn’t need one.

I began to suspect there was training involved. Somewhere, I imagined, new volunteers sit through an orientation. Here are your T-shirts. Here’s where we keep the ice. Under no circumstances does a cyclist leave this table without a banana.

By the fourth stop, the banana had stopped being a suggestion and become a kind of universal answer to every conceivable question.

“Is this the road to Grand Bend?”

“Yep. Banana?”

“My chain’s making a weird noise.”

“Have a banana.”

”Where are the washrooms?”

“Just around the corner. Grab a banana first.”

None of this was pushy in an unpleasant way. The volunteers were calm about it, unhurried, entirely convinced they were right, the way a good nurse is calm and unhurried and entirely convinced you should take your medication. They weren’t trying to win an argument. They were simply waiting for me to catch up.

They were right, of course. Somewhere past the sixty kilometre mark, riding into a headwind that had been building all morning, I got hungry.

I pulled into the next stop and, before the volunteer could say anything, I heard myself ask: “Do you have a banana?”

She smiled. “Thought you’d never ask.”

I ate it in four bites, standing next to my bike, mildly ashamed of how much better I felt.

After that I started noticing what I’d been too busy declining bananas to see. The volunteers slicing oranges. Refilling coolers, hauling ice, cheering for the last rider with the same energy they’d cheered for the first. Some of them had handed out hundreds of bananas by lunchtime, to hundreds of cyclists who each, individually, insisted they were fine.

They can’t do much about the actual ride. They can’t shorten the hills or turn the wind around. They can’t cure MS, which is the whole reason any of us are out there in the first place. What they can do is stand behind a folding table for eight or nine hours, watching riders roll in hot and tired and a little too proud to admit it, and quietly make sure every one of them leaves with something they need. Surprisingly often, it’s a banana.

By the last stop of the second day, I’d started asking questions of my own.

“Do you ever get riders who don’t want a banana?” I asked one volunteer.

“Sure,” she said. “They all want one eventually.”

I still don’t take the banana at the first stop. But I know better than to argue.