I probably can’t do a post every day right now. It is too much deciding on what to type (and believe me, thought does enter into it or most likely I would type out giberish) and using only 1 hand to type is kind of hard. I kept thinking how much easier it would be but it isn’t.
Well I am sort of back. I guess my story is one of neglect and the negative aspects of it.
You see, I had a stroke. I didn’t mind being overweight or the high blood pressure. I figured it would either kill me or I would make a drastic comeback. Suffice it to say that I was not ready for this. The aftermath is that now I am the proper weight and the right blood pressure. It has been a tough way to learn.
That being said, I am grateful to have survived. I’m living at my father’s house at the moment and doing my best to endure. I only have my left hand at the moment but I hope to get my right hand back eventually. All of my stuff is also in storage right now so I am just making do.
This has become my trip back I guess. Eventually, I will be riding once more.
I love it when things go exactly according to plan.
At least, I imagine that I would love it. It so rarely happens though.
My work for my business trip went fairly well Tuesday night, but there were a couple of bumps along the road. Wednesday was another matter altogether. Tuesday was supposed to be the hard night. We couldn’t start our work until 9 and we estimated that we would be there until 3 AM or later. We actually got out of there by 11.
Wednesday was supposed to be a walk in the park. We were going to be able to start work around 6 and we estimated finishing up no later than 8 or 9. With a 2 hour drive back home, I expected to be in my own bed before midnight.
By 6:05, we knew things weren’t going to go well. And things continued to go down from there. We ended up being there until right around 4 AM… still with a 2 hour drive home.
I climbed into bed just before 6:30 for what amounted to a power nap as my alarm went off less than 30 minutes later. I got up, got showered and dressed, and headed to the office.
Around 9, the boss sent me home. I think it frightened him when I started giggling uncontrollably for no apparent reason.
I got home and attempted to go to sleep, but I couldn’t. The constant yawning was keeping me awake oddly enough. I got up, got dressed and went driving around hoping to wear myself out. I passed by a barber shop and remember thinking, “I should go get a haircut.” Not long after that, I thought, “I should go get the forms, head to the DMV, and get my tag renewal taken care of.”
The next thing I remember is waking up in my truck. I was parked in my parking spot at the apartment and the engine was off. The keys were in my pocket and I was sound asleep in the back seat.
I went upstairs and climbed into bed. I slept for a couple of hours before getting up again.
The rest of the night was hit and miss. I would sit down and doze off, but not for long. I would get up and do some work around the apartment, but get tired, sit down again, and doze off once again.
I finally went back to bed for good around 1 AM last night and slept through the night.
I woke up this morning and walked to the mirror. I jerked back in surprise when I saw that I apparently did get a hair cut afterall. I have absolutely no memory of doing it, but I apparently did. I didn’t get my tags done though. How nice would that have been to have gone through the pain of the DMV and have no memory of it?
Oh well.
I have tentative hopes of riding this weekend. I’m feeling withdrawals since I haven’t ridden since Monday, but we’ll see. The winds are present with interest today. I’m hoping they will calm this afternoon and stay calm through the weekend.
I’m on the road for work for the next couple of days, so won’t have time to post. Even if I did, I’m going to be putting in 18+ hour days so I won’t have anything to talk about anyway.
See you all later in the week.
I had some other things that I wanted to talk about today, but I’m too angry to really focus on it.
First, on Saturday, I had a woman intentionally try to run me over while I was out riding. How do I know it was intentional? Because when she missed, she came back around and tried again… and again… and again. She made 6 or 7 attempts all total. Each was more aggressive than the last.
In the end, the only reason she gave up was because I had gotten off of my bike, grabbed a pipe from the back of a pickup truck and was waiting for her when she came around the corner again.
And then on Sunday, I heard about a lady from my home town named Cindy Whitney who was killed by a motorist on Saturday while she was out riding. The idiot who killed her actually had the balls to tell police that he was playing with his cell phone, had dropped it, and was reaching into the floorboard to pick it up.
All while traveling at 70 mph.
The kicker is that the police let him go without so much as a verbal warning.
Then then I read Fatty’s report on the Tour de Donut. At the beginning of his report, he tells of a young lady who was killed on her bike. That one at least appears to have been an accident, but still.
I am extremely angry right now.
I hooked up with the local cycling club last night for their Thursday night ride. I’ve been invited to go quite a few times, but have never made it before. Sometimes it has been work that has prevented me, sometimes it has been how I’ve felt going into the evening, and sometimes it has been a lack of courage. There is also some small amount of me hating feeling rushed. They meet outside of town at 6. I get off at 5. It typically takes me 15 minutes to get home and would then take me at least 15 minutes to get changed and load up my gear. Their kick off spot is a 30 minute drive from my apartment when things go well. If there is traffic or bad luck at the lights, it is further. From what I have been told, they roll out of the parking lot at 6 straight up. Even if they know you are coming and aren’t there yet, they go.
I generally like to get home from work and relax for a bit before doing anything else… basically unwind from the day. This ride prevents that. It was a race against the clock from the second I signed off of my machine until I was sitting on my bike heading down the road.
I made it though. I got there with enough time left over to put on my shoes and even put my bottles into their cages before they were rolling out of the parking lot. There was no time to stretch or warm up.
As we made our way through the parking lot, I mentioned to my buddy that I hadn’t had any chance to warm up or stretch. He laughed and said, “No one ever does before this ride. You’ll be okay.”
Well, okay or not wasn’t the point. Jumping into any kind of strenuous exercise without properly warming up is just asking for trouble. That’s when you pull muscles, blow out knees, tear an Achilles… any number of things.
These guys didn’t ease into things either. There wasn’t a slow move away from the cars building up to a medium speed to the first turn and then a gradual increase to full speed. It was like these guys had been launched off of an aircraft carrier catapult. They clipped in and were gone. I was at risk of being dropped before we even left the parking lot.
We entered the street and the groups started forming. I was told there would be two groups… the racers who would leave us all behind in minutes and the more sedate group that would stick together to the end of the ride. I only nodded dumbly because I was already feeling trouble.
We hit the end of the street and turned to the right. The racers were already disappearing on the horizon. The “slow” group jumped up to about 22 mph and continued to accelerate. I stomped the pedals and tried to stay with them, but I was feeling the fact that I had been off the bike for several days and the lack of a proper warm up. I started sucking wind harder and harder. I looked down at my computer and saw that we hadn’t even covered 4 miles yet but I was already about to crack and drop off.
Around mile 5, I slowed to a “sedate” 20 mph and let the group leave me behind. I glanced behind me and saw a group of 3 or 4 a ways back looking ahead and shaking their heads. At least I wasn’t the only one feeling bad.
I saw my buddy look back and see me falling into the distance. He dropped back and started riding with me. He said, “Take your time. When you feel up to it, we’ll try to catch back up.” I looked at him like he had just burst into flames. “This is it. I’ll be lucky to keep this pace. You guys blew me up leaving the parking lot. Are they insane? No work up, no stretching, no nothing. You can’t do that.” He just laughed at me.
We worked our way around at my pace. I felt bad because I knew he wasn’t getting the ride he was expecting. The odd thing was that my legs felt strong… just not fast. About mile 8 or 9, we hit the first canyon drop. This was a canyon I had ridden before and I knew the climb out was brutal, but when I hit the climb, I felt decidedly better than I ever have before. I’m typically in the small ring granny gear about 50 yards into the climb. I never had to drop into that gear this time. I still ended up in the small front ring, but not until I was halfway up. By the time I crested the climb, I was only about halfway down the rear cassette.
My recovery was a little slower than normal. My legs were recovering, but it was a few minutes before we were back up to speed. Not long after I started feeling really good again, we hit the second canyon drop.
This drop was fun. It was my first time riding this canyon so I was a little hesitant on the drop. I wasn’t sure if there would be any sweeping turns. I could see a left a few hundred yards ahead, but didn’t know what was beyond. I made that turn and saw a straight shot to the bottom, so I released the brakes and jumped into the drops. I ended up getting up to about 52 mph on that descent.
It made me giggle.
One of the guys who was still behind me managed to pass me on that drop, but I passed him again on the climb back out. This climb was a bit harder than the first, but I felt stronger than the first and maintained between 8 and 10 mph through the climb.
That climb was followed by another 5 or so miles to the third and final canyon. This one was the height of cruelty. It was a straight road down, a straight road across, to a straight climb out… all into the wind.
As we rounded the turn to the drop, I looked ahead at the canyon and saw what I thought was a tall, skinny building ahead. I found it odd that a building would be there since we were off in the middle of nowhere. Turns out, that tall, skinny building was actually the climb out. It was a nasty climb. It certainly wasn’t like I imagine riding in the mountains would be, but it felt plenty brutal to me.
I cleared the top of the climb and saw that we had caught a group of about 6 other riders. We joined in with them and continued on down the road. One of those guys had developed a slow leak in his tire, so he was putting air in and then racing down the road until it was flat again. He would then stop and we would catch him while he was airing it back up and then he would blow down the road again.
At one of the stops, he was having problems with his inflator so we stopped to see if he needed help. That was when we were swarmed with what looked like a flight of pterodactyls. As it turned out, they were just rabid mutant freakishly large mosquitoes. They were about the size of a dime and they had no finesse. There was no sneaking in to land and bite you. They would smack down with a noticeable impact and then impale you with a needle-like mouth that seemed it would stick all the way through the arm and shatter the bone. We were slapping, waving, and cursing up a storm before finally jumping on the bikes and hauling bloody hell down the road to try to outrun them.
We finally rolled back into the truck stop where we had begun the whole thing. It was a good ride for me, but I feel bad because I know my friend was hoping for a more difficult ride. He would never complain or say as much, but I know he was disappointed.
I might try to join them again soon, but not at their next ride. They do that ride every Tuesday and Thursday evening, but I will be traveling this next Tuesday and won’t be able to ride at all. It will be an overnight trip with 2 late nights, so it remains to be seen if I ride when I get home on Wednesday either. I won’t join them on Thursday because I figure I’ll be pretty run down and don’t want to try that when my body is on the verge of collapse. We’ll see about the following Tuesday.
Did I happen to mention that I was probably the youngest person on the ride last night? A good chunk of these people had 30, 40 or more years on me. It was shades of Happy Gilmore getting his tail WHUPPED by Bob Barker.
How’s that for a title?
It just occurred to me a minute ago as I was leaning over my trashcan spitting out the last bite of the banana I brought to work and gagging like crazy. So weird.
I love bananas. I always have. Even when I was a kid and all I wanted was candy and McDonald’s, I loved bananas. Bananas and hot sauce, but not bananas in hot sauce. That would just be weird.
Still, for as much as I love bananas, I have the hardest time eating them. I can cut them up and I am fine. I can blend them into a protein shake and I am fine. I have figured out that I can be out on a long ride and suck down a banana like it is ambrosia.
The rest of the time?
I’ve been trying to bring a banana to work with me every day. The current eating diet I am doing involves having either a bowl of oatmeal or a bowl of Grape Nuts for breakfast. Around 10, I eat a banana at my desk. Lunch is a sandwich of lean shaved turkey breast on whole grain bread with a small cup of jello vanilla pudding for desert. Dinner is a baked chicken breast with a bowl of salad.
I’ll be honest here. I remain hungry much of the time. I’m running a caloric deficit here which I shouldn’t be doing. I’m not planning on doing it for long. I’m just trying to jumpstart my body.
Anyway, I start in on that banana every day and everything is fine. As I start getting towards the end, I have more and more trouble eating it. It isn’t that it tastes different. It isn’t that I’m getting full. For some reason, unless I’m out on the bike, my gag reflex starts to kick in at about the mid point of every banana I eat. I end up having the hardest time finishing it off.
Which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. I can take the same freaking banana and chop it up into small pieces and eat it just fine. It’s only when I try to eat it straight from the peel that I have issues.
Maybe I just have issues in general.
I know you were all interest in hearing this. There is nothing in the world like reading what makes another person start gagging… especially right around lunch time.
You are welcome.
“I’m too old for this sh$#!”
After working 8 to 5 yesterday, I had to come back last night at 1 AM and work until 5AM. I then had to be back at 8 this morning.
Those kinds of sleepless nights weren’t quite so debilitating 10 or 15 years ago, but I’m spastically careening towards 40 years old. I need my ugly sleep or I have the personality of a bear rudely awoken from winter hibernation.
There was no ride last night. My energy was gone yesterday. My Sunday and Monday rides were both bad because I think my legs were still tired from Saturday. The temperatures were into the upper 90′s yesterday and the humidity was very close to 100% thanks to all the rain we have had lately. Around 4, the winds started really kicking up and they were blowing at a sustained 30 mph by the time I got off of work.
I considered my current energy level and the atmospheric conditions outside and decided that getting out to ride would put the hurt locker sneer on my face that Jens Voigt had on the climb in the tour yesterday when he was pulling for Andy Schleck.
I did eventually talk myself into jumping on the Bowflex and doing a workout for a while, but it was break night from the bike.
I am hoping that I get to ride tonight. Right at this moment I am dog-tailing so bad that I can hardly think straight, but I’m going to head out here in about 2 hours and try to get some sleep. If I can pull off a solid 2 or 3 hours of hard sleep, I hope I’ll have the energy to get out and ride. I just hope the temperatures stay down. It is still oppressively humid outside, but we have some cloud cover which is keeping the overall temps at a comfortable level.
I’ll ride regardless if I have the energy. I would just prefer riding in mid-80′s to upper-90′s or triple digits.
I have found recently that I’ve been buying into praises… even though I knew better.
Let me ‘splain. No. There is too much. Let me sum up.
I lived in a pretty much perpetual state of denial for a long time with regards to my fitness level. During all the years that I had some idea wrapped up in my head that fitness was determined by the size of your muscles, I had it in my head that I needed to strive to reach 235 pounds. I spent years being frustrated that I seemed to peak out at 220 and I simply couldn’t seem to find a way over that hump.
As my body fell into disrepair and increasingly alarming trends of roundness, I finally breached that 235 pound goal… and then rocketed right past it. Glances in the mirror didn’t tell me what everyone else saw and no one was cruel (or honest) enough to tell me how large I was getting. I avoided cameras like they were the carriers of a fatal plague and so I was able to continue on with my self delusion that nothing was wrong… that I was still as fit as I ever had been.
I’m not sure exactly what the catalyst was that made me finally accept the fact that I was fat. I think it was when I started my current job and a comment was made that was intended in jest. The former IT manager said to me upon first meeting, “I would have known you were an IT guy without meeting you. I recognize one of my people… fat, sloppy and completely unconcerned about it.”
Oddly enough, that comment didn’t spark any desire to do anything about it. I wrote it off as someone not knowing what they were talking about. I continued to hide behind increasingly baggy clothing while telling myself everything was fine over my fast food lunches and dinners.
I don’t think I even accepted how fat I had become when I started cycling. I knew I was struggling, but I convinced myself that it was just my cardio… that my body was still fit and capable. I don’t think it was until a friend snapped a few shots of me during a ride and then e-mailed them to me that I finally accepted what I had become.
Over the last few months, I have finally started losing weight. I came out of my state of denial and forced myself to acknowledge what the scale was telling me… that I was 265 pounds and that it wasn’t even close to the realm of being healthy.
As I started dropping the weight, people started making comments and feeding the ego. The ladies who work the front office at my complex make comments every time I go in to pay rent. Two months ago, one of them said, “You should be careful. You are losing so much weight that you are starting to look like someone with an eating disorder.”
I knew it was flattery or a blatant exaggeration, but taken with all the other comments, I started feeling really good about where I was.
When my weight finally dropped down to 230, I started to convince myself that the main part of the work was done. Why would people keep telling me that I didn’t need to lose any more weight if I was still fat? When I was at my most fit point (lowest body fat percentage), I was at 220 and striving for 235. Now I was 230. Surely I must be fit now and be to a point where what I had left to lose was bulky muscle that I don’t want on the bike.
I allowed myself to convince myself of that fact and weight loss took a back seat to improving my overall fitness on the bike. In the back of my mind, I knew I still needed to lose at least 30 more pounds. I knew that I was still a fat person.
The comments though… they lied to my ego and I started to see what I wanted to see in the mirror again.
Someone ended up posting some pictures of the ride from this past weekend. As I was looking through them, I focused on looking for pictures of my friends and remembering how enjoyable the whole experience was.
At one picture, I paused. There were my two friends at the start talking. I knew I was right there with them, but I didn’t see myself. Maybe I don’t show up on film?
And who was that bloated guy sitting between them looking completely out of place on a bike? Could that bike even support him?
Yeah. The camera doesn’t lie. No matter how much others might lie to us to make us feel good about what we have done and no matter how many times the mirror lies when we look, the camera never lies.
And I have a long ways yet to go.
In the aftermath of that rather disturbing realization, I have found an increased drive and motivation to shed this person I have become. I started really focusing on what I have done over the last 9 months and identified all the areas where I have gone wrong.
Quite simply, I was relying too heavily on the bike to make the changes for me. I had cut back somewhat on how often I pick up fast food, but not nearly enough. Rather than picking up 3 meals a day from a drive through, I was only picking up food once a day… sometimes twice. But I was still eating fast food every day. I was drinking fewer soft drinks, but I was still drinking some every day.
It’s kind of like telling someone that you have run the course of the New York Marathon but not telling them that you broke that course up into 100 much smaller stages and ran it over the course of a full year.
Anyway, I spent the better part of yesterday and last night being completely disgusted with what I allowed myself to become. Once I crawled out of my self-loathing, I went through the kitchen and threw out all the little things I pick up at the store using that little voice in my head that loves to whisper, “It won’t hurt if this is the only bad thing you do this week” knowing full well that it won’t even come close.
And I am now back on my very strict eating plan that allowed me to be fit and competitive way back when… only now it will be to help me get down to an ideal weight for my size. I’m looking at needing to drop a minimum of 30 more pounds and, honestly, closer to 40.
I have no illusions. It is going to be tough and I’m going to fall along the way.
My new rule going forward is to quit listening to flattery and keep reminding myself that the camera doesn’t lie. I suppose it is time for me to quit running from the camera and start taking pictures of myself… not to be shared. Just so I can watch my progress and see the truth rather than relying on others.
It took me about 7 months to reach the halfway point of the journey, but now it is time to climb to the peak. This is the harder part of the race, but I’ll get there.
It may just take a while.
With all the difficulty I had with my tire last week, my run in to my Saturday ride was much more hectic than what I had anticipated. When I climbed onto the bike Friday evening at 6 to test the tire, I still had no idea if I would even be able to ride on Saturday. The bike shop thought they had finally fixed the tire, but I wouldn’t know 100% until I put some miles on it. I had already proved that I couldn’t find what was wrong and the bike shop had failed to find the issue once. If it wasn’t fixed now, the shops were closed for the night and they wouldn’t reopen until it was already too late for me to make my Saturday ride.
I didn’t have to worry though. The tire was fixed.
In the lead up to the ride, I had intended to take Friday off from the bike so I could go into Saturday with fresh legs. I had also planned on spending a lot of time riding the week leading up to the ride, but couldn’t do that because of the tire.
In short, nothing had gone according to plan.
I kept my ride short on Friday. It was partly a conscious decision and partly the decision of others. I stopped at about 10 and a half miles. I think my stubbornness would have caused me to push on for a while, but I got stopped at least a dozen times during the ride. One time was because I saw a dog running around in the middle of a busy intersection looking frightened. Cars were honking as they zipped by and he was jumping left and right trying to get out of the way, but the cars were coming fast and furious. He couldn’t seem to find his way free.
I rode out into the middle of the road and blocked several cars… much to the anger of the drivers… and whistled for the dog. He ran over to me and I led him out of the busy intersection and over to a side street. I reached down to pet him and he was shaking all over. He wasn’t wearing a collar so I had no idea where he might have belonged.
I started down the street slowly and he ran right beside me constantly looking over his shoulder to make sure I was still there. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with him, but I wanted to get him away from the busy street. At one point, I heard a kid yelling, so I turned around and headed towards him. The dog wasn’t his, but he said he knew who it belonged to. He ran inside to get his mother while I stood there playing with the dog. She eventually came out and we spoke for a few minutes. She told me that they would take care of the dog and I continued on.
I had several more interruptions as I rode, so I eventually called the ride quits figuring I wasn’t going to get a great ride in anyway. Besides, I didn’t want to burn my legs up.
Saturday was interesting. It was cloudy and overcast. It was nice because it kept the temperatures down, but it was annoying because the starting point was in a dirt parking lot. We got rained on several times prior to the ride starting, so the dirt turned to mud. My cleats got clogged up pretty good and I would have difficulty all day clipping and unclipping.
The ride organizer finally came out and told the racers to move towards the front. He was going to lead them out and then the rest of us would leave 10 minutes later. That seemed odd to most of us since the racers were likely to get way ahead in short order anyway, so why wait? And 10 minutes? In the mud?
Only a couple of guys moved to the front and it turned out that my two friends, myself, and a few others were on the same line as they were. People started asking us, “Are you guys racing?” We laughed and made comments. I think mine was, “I’m not in the racing group. I’m in the ‘fat guy who is going to try not to throw up’ group.”
The organizer got in his car and started forward. He leaned out the window and yelled for the racers to start in 3, 2, 1… and they shot off like a bullet. The rest of us waited for the count of 3 and then we headed out.
I was riding along with my two friends talking and having a good time. After about a mile, I realized that the 3 of us were alone at the front of the pack. Maybe 10 minutes later, a group of 8 or so caught up to us and fell in. I was on the right side and was starting to feel really cramped on the non-existent shoulder. I was scraping the grass and nearly lost it once when I got too close and my front tire cut a line in the mud on the side of the road. I moved to the back of the pack.
About 10 minutes after that, I started hearing sounds behind me. I was trying to concentrate on staying on the wheel of the guy in front of me and maintain my position. It was my first experience riding in a peloton… even of this small a size… and I didn’t want to screw up and crash us out.
My concentration finally relaxed enough that I could start making sense of the noises I heard behind me. It was people talking about the pace and how fast it was. I risked a quick glance over my shoulder and saw that the main body of the ride had joined us. Our small group of 3 had grown initially to about 12 and was now between 30 and 40 strong.
In spite of the pace, I managed to stay with the group for a while. I even pulled for about 8 miles or so. When I was ready to drop off the front and rejoin the peloton at the rear, I screwed up.
I moved to the side and started slowing down. I ended up slowing down too much so that when the back arrived and I tried to drift back in, they blew right by me.
I jumped up and charged back in, but it sapped a lot of energy to do so. Shortly after I rejoined, the two who were at the front dropped off and two new riders went to the front and jumped up the pace some more. I tried to jump it up and keep with the pace, but it proved to be too much. I started to realize that if I tried to keep that pace for much longer, there was not much chance I would finish the ride.
I dropped off the back.
During the time that I was in the pack, we caught up to and absorbed 3 of the racers. Once I dropped off the back, I was able to keep them in sight for a while. I didn’t fall back too far. Maybe 4 miles later, we came up on the second aid station (we skipped the first one). The whole group had stopped, but they were getting ready to head out again right as I rolled up. I dismounted and started moving towards the table and my two friends looked over and yelled at me, “Jarrod, you ready to head out?” I looked at them like they were out of their minds and said, “I just got here. I’m going to have a picnic. You guys go on.”
The pack started moving out and I attacked a banana. I finished off the banana and then went to refill one of my bottles. It was only then that I noticed that one of my friends had stayed behind. “You okay?” he asked. “I’m fine. I just can’t keep that pace any longer… not if I want to finish. You go ahead. I’ll ride on at my own pace.”
He started to argue with me and I appreciated the thought. He didn’t want to leave me alone. I knew, however, that he was using this ride as a training platform for the Hotter ’N Hell 100 race that he is riding in next month. He needed to ride his ride… not babysit me. I told him as much and finally talked him into riding on.
I spent another couple of minutes regrouping at the aid station and talking to the volunteers before I finally got back on the bike and continued on.
Now, I would be lying if I said I was feeling confident. I tend to expect a lot of myself and having to drop from the group felt like a complete failure. I was angry and frustrated with myself and spent the next 4 or 5 miles really beating myself up. I debated turning around, heading back to the aid station, and asking them to send the SAG vehicle to come pick up me. I wasn’t feeling physically destroyed. I just felt like a failure.
I spent some time simply riding… concentrating on turning the pedals. I started to realize that I wasn’t riding badly. I was still keeping a pace of about 20 mph. I would drop to 18 from time to time, but I was mostly keeping a steady 20. All these other, much more experienced riders, were simply faster than me. I don’t know how quickly or how long it took them to get to that level of fitness, but I’m less than a year into this sport. I’m still carrying about 30 pounds of extra weight on my body and I am still working up towards long rides. Why was I so angry with myself?
With that perspective, I started looking around. I was riding through nearly perfectly flat countryside. There were farms on all sides of me, few trees, and even fewer buildings. Vehicle traffic was extremely sparse. Black clouds were rolling all around me and there was hardly a sound to be heard. The wind was only blowing a very gentle 5 mph.
I allowed myself to forget that there was a pack of at least 40 riders ahead of me and started really enjoying what was going on around me. I watched the sky and marveled at the fact that I could literally see for miles in all directions. I enjoyed the peace of the moment and allowed myself to take it all in.
I also started playing games with myself. I started setting milestones. “At 27 miles, I’ll drink 4 swallows of CarboRocket. At 30 miles, I’ll have 4 swallows of Gatorade.” At the start, I had put CarboRocket in one bottle and water in the other. At the aid station, I had dumped the warm, bordering on hot water and filled up with ice cold Gatorade.
Around mile 30, I came up on another aid station. I got off and spent some time chatting with the volunteers while eating another banana and drinking down some water. While I was there, 6 more riders blew by. I had assumed that I was at the end. Seeing more coming by was a surprise. Still, I took my time. This wasn’t a race and I had decided not to treat it as one.
When I was ready, I climbed back onto the bike. My legs were feeling a little sluggish now, so I reached back and pulled out a Power Bar Goo packet and sucked that down. I felt invigorated almost immediately and picked up the pace.
At mile 35, 2 things happened. Mile 35 marked me going over the 1000 mile mark so far for the year. I also came upon a parade of tarantulas crossing the road. It was like March of the Penguins, but with freaky, nasty, eight-legged spots of pure evil. No one will ever know how hard it was for me to ride through that section of road because I don’t think I will ever be able to adequately describe my primal fear of spiders. During my last ride, I rode within a few inches of a 4 foot rattlesnake which freaked my buddy out. Snakes don’t bother me. Spiders scare me to such an irrational level that I can’t sleep if I spot one in my apartment. I’ll tear the place apart trying to find it so I can kill it and my heart will be thundering in my chest the entire time.
And here there were hundreds… maybe thousands of them in the road directly in front of me. The road looked like a moving sidewalk there were so many of them.
I closed my eyes and pushed through. The noise of running over so many of them threatened to unleash the mother of all panic attacks that I already felt building. I could feel my heart rate redlining and my whole body was shaking uncontrollably. I started to envision losing control of my bike and falling over right in the middle of them and the panic nearly overwhelmed me.
And just like that, I was through them and on the other side.
Just for the record though, the yell I let loose was a victory roar of crossing the 1000 mile mark. It was not, I repeat not a shriek derivative of a woman facing the killer in a bad slasher movie. It was a VICTORY ROAR dammit!
I was still shaking pretty badly when I rolled in to the last aid station. The volunteers working this station were all firefighters so they immediately recognized my physical condition. They asked me if I was okay and if I needed a ride back. With a voice still shaking, I explained the spider tide and my fear of spiders but that I would be okay. I tried to eat an orange, but my hands were shaking too badly to peel it. Same with the bananas. I settled for topping off my Gatorade bottle.
It was at this aid station that I realized the ride organizers used creative math. My odometer showed that I was sitting at 36 miles and I was on a “40 mile” course. One of the other riders who was stopped asked one of the firefighters, “How much farther?” The firefighter said, “About 8 miles.”
Hmm.
I was still feeling great though. Part of me was regretting my decision to stick with the 40 mile track and not take the 60 mile turnoff. Still, the last ride was fresh in my mind when I passed the turn off so I happily took the 40 mile track.
I spent a few more minutes talking to the firefighters while I worked to calm my panic. When I was finally no longer shaking, I climbed back onto the bike and continued on.
For the last couple of miles, I started singing. I’m not sure why… it just cracked me up to be doing it so I did it. By the time I rounded the corner back into the parking lot and blew past the line of volunteers clapping for those who were coming in, I was belting out, “I AM HENRY THE EIGHTH I AM” at the top of my lungs.
They laughed at me. Which made me laugh and sing even louder.
I rolled up to my truck and climbed off the bike. The guy parked next to me was laying down in the bed of his truck breathing heavily. He looked over at me and asked, “Do you know how far that was? My computer isn’t working.” I looked down and said, “I’m showing 44.98 miles.” He looked at me. “.98? That’s just wrong. Why don’t you ride around the trucks a few times and make it an even 45?” I smiled pleasantly and said, “Why don’t you go to hell?” We both then started laughing so hard that people probably thought we were drunk.
Gotta love those endorphins.
The 40 mile stretch wasn’t the only one using creative math. Maybe 30 minutes after I had rolled in, the first of those who had gone the 60 mile route started rolling in. One of the first was one of my two friends that I started the ride with. When he saw me standing there, he raised his arms in a Tour de France salute. When he zipped by me, he gave a little bow and sent me off into another fit of laughing. After he had stowed his bike and we were moving in to the feed line, he said that the 60 mile ride was actually a little over 75.
Looking back on it now, I can see a few things that I did correctly and a few things that I did incorrectly. I did learn my lessons from the first ride. I pre-hydrated on Friday… maybe a little too much because I was up and down all night long needing to go to the bathroom. I had a solid dinner Friday night of spaghetti and garlic bread. I also had a good breakfast of oatmeal, a banana, a glass of Gatorade, and a whey powder shake. I made sure that I took a generous drink every 3 miles whether I felt like I needed it or not and I alternated between water and CarboRocket… at least until my water got too warm and I swapped it out for Gatorade.
Where I went wrong is that I didn’t get enough sleep Friday night… due to the constant bathroom trips. I also didn’t get in enough riding the week prior thanks to the tire issue. And I probably shouldn’t have ridden Friday at all.
Still, all things considered, once I quit beating myself up for not being able to keep up with the pack, I’m fairly happy with the result. I was among the last of the 40 milers to roll in, but a decent size group came in just 100 yards or so ahead of me. I heard that nearly a third of the starters ended up calling for a ride from the SAG wagon and I was actually able to ride this one in… and I was in fairly good shape when I got there. I didn’t feel overly winded or tired. I felt pretty good in fact.
I was a bit sore yesterday… and then I got out and put in 20 miles. That ride yesterday put me deep into the pain cave. I had very little power, not much speed, and absolutely zero will to fight the 20 mph wind. After that ride, I spent the rest of the day feeling like I had been rolled over by a semi truck. I feel fantastic today though. I expect I will have a great ride this evening… if it stops raining anyway.
The rains have returned. I wonder how long they will last.
I have about a month to prepare for my next ride. My goal for that ride is to be able to spend even longer with the leaders before having to drop off. We’ll see how that goes.
