Drinking Problem

One day the Seyboro Cyclists decided to ride to the beach. This is a regular occurrence – you ride about eighty miles (or a hundred if you want to start from a more distant location), you eat a big meal, you get driven back home, and a good time is had by all.

A beach ride was scheduled, but there were a few of us unfortunate souls who couldn’t give up the entire day to a bike ride, no matter how fun it would have been, so we decided to ride part way with the group and then turn around and head back home. We’d get a lot of miles, we’d get to ride with friends, it would be great.

There was one teensy little problem: it was hot.

No, let me rephrase that. It was scorchingly blisteringly hot.

The heat is not really my friend, but I was doing fine when we set out. (Of course I was. It was early in the morning, so it wasn’t hot yet.) My problem came at the turnaround point. By this time I was starting to feel a little bit cooked, and my bottles were empty. That’s when I made the mistake.

Since we’d be driving back, that meant we had a nice little convoy of vehicles with us, so they sagged the ride, carrying food and drinks for the rest of us. I needed to get my bottles refilled, and, as I wasn’t paying attention, they were refilled with a sports drink that I will call CrocodileAde instead of using its real name because I’m subtle that way.

Now, being a biologist by training, I understand about hydration and electrolyte replacement and natremia and borborygmus and defenestration. (Okay, so those last two aren’t, strictly speaking, related to drinking, but the next to last one is certainly related to many cyclists I have known and the last one would be a form of exercise.)

What was I talking about?

Oh, yeah.

Being a biologist by training, I understand about hydration and electrolyte replacement, but most sports drinks are just too thick and too sweet for my taste. I’d rather take an electrolyte replacement capsule and just drink water. I took my first sip of CrocodileAde, and it just sort of coated my mouth with sticky sweetness. This was not what I wanted while trying to ride in 90 degree plus temperatures. Gradually, without realizing it, I began to drink less and less.
By the time we got back onto home roads, I was dehydrated and fried.

We hit a road that I had ridden scores of times, and I figured I could do the ten or twelve miles home on that road under any conditions. After all, I had ridden that road in the wind, in the rain, in the group, after having been dropped…this was my territory, and I was comfortable. I was also wrong.

I was, however, not capable of doing more than about twelve miles and hour. We had a pick-up truck with us, and I could certainly have allowed them to pick me up, but I didn’t. I got some water from them and dropped some ice down my back, but the water was too little and too late. I tried to get the other riders to go on because I was afraid I was spoiling their ride, but they wouldn’t leave me.

So why didn’t I get in the truck? Well, it starts with st…

Stupidity? Stubbornness? Stupendousness?

Something like that, anyway.

Well, we slogged back home.

Slowly.

In fact, I think we gradually slowed down.

Well, I gradually slowed down out of necessity and they gradually slowed down so as to not leave me.

About two miles from the parking lot they left me. Finally. They wanted to sprint for home. I just wanted to crawl slowly. In fact, I think I was limping and crawling while riding my bike. I am a multi-tasker.

The driver of the truck decided to autopace me. This let me get my pace up to about twelve miles and hour, I think. I had never autopaced before. It might have been fun if I hadn’t been parboiled. I kept wanting to go faster, but all the driver had to do in order to speed up was press down on the accelerator, while I had to press on the pedals, and I just couldn’t press anymore. My path down the street was so wobbly that any passing police officer would have stopped me for a chat.

I finally dragged my sorry self back to the parking lot and pulled into the shade and stayed there.

Of course, I didn’t have my car and I lived three miles away from the parking lot…

No, I had my cell phone. I could call for pickup, and I did.

Finally.

A few days later, with a camelback strapped on, I went for a sixty-five mile solo ride just to prove to myself that my problems had been due to poor hydration and not to just being me.

That was good.

Drink drink drink. Water, that is. That’s the thing.

See you on the road.

Say What?

Lunicycle’s recipe for success:

A couple of days of so-so nutrition and inadequate hydration topped off by an evening filled with stress and very little sleep. Then you go for a ride.

I tried this recipe for success myself just this morning, and it was absolutely successful if you want to ride like me. If you don’t want to ride like me (a thing which, by the way, I don’t recommend) then you might want to try someone else’s recipe for success.

I fooled the dogs and the wind this morning by dragging myself out of bed later than usual and thus hitting the road later than usual. I can imagine the wind having woken up and checked, finding me still in bed and rolling over for just that little bit of extra sleep that makes all the difference. Then, happy and comfortable, the wind wakes up and finds me out on the road. “Hey,” says the wind. “What do you think you’re doing out there without me?!” and the wind then comes to join me on the road.

Having learned (so I thought) something about this area of the county, I finally constructed a route for myself that wasn’t just out and back again, only to find that I don’t know this part of the county half so well as I thought. The route I had chosen was about ten miles shorter than I thought it was, so I had to tack on a randomly chosen loop to get the extra miles.

I spotted a guy being taken for a drag by his dogs. The man was standing on a skateboard holding the lashes of two good sized dogs who were jogging along nicely and pulling him behind them. This is the easy way to take your dogs for a walk, I suppose.

I also spotted a dead snake by the side of the road that was over three and a half feet long at the very least. This was a little startling. It was so startling that I kind of jumped (not a thing I recommend doing while riding a bicycle, by the way) a bit later when I saw what turned out to be a garden snake.

Okay, it was a garden hose but it might have been a snake.

I passed three other cyclists. I prefer to phrase it this way for my own self-esteem, but the fact is that we were headed in opposite directions. I don’t think I knew any of them, but I hope they were near the end of their ride, because one of them was covered in sweat.

Well, I don’t suppose I know for a fact that it was sweat, but he was certainly covered in something, and if it wasn’t sweat, I don’t want to speculate about what it was. It was good to see other riders on the road, even if they were headed away from me and I couldn’t draft off them.

I got back to the neighborhood a mile short of the distance I wanted with some very tired legs indeed, and I forced myself to ride around the neighborhood as hard as I could go. I actually passed my Lovely Lovely sitting on the porch and didn’t see her. I was too busy acting as my own coach, which basically means fussing at myself to keep the pedals spinning around at a reasonable rate of speed. I don’t know why I did this, but it seemed to help.

Today’s ride end up being harder than I anticipated (or possibly I was weaker than I anticipated – it pays to think of all the possibilities) but even a hard ride is a good ride. (Sometimes a hard ride is an especially good ride.) I ended up with a good distance and a good pace.

Now I’m going to get some rest.

See you on the road.