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.

Fresh As A...Flounder?

It was 85 degrees out with a heat index of 95 and 59% humidity. Is that the most boring beginning to a blog post ever, or do I need to try harder? I thought I’d do a little exploring but wouldn’t push myself too hard because of the heat. It was like trying to ride while wearing a warm, wet blanket.

Yech.

I decided to explore a little bit, which usually means that I’m going to get lost, and that is, in fact, what happened. The road I started out on has a few hills and a couple of dogs. Following some excellent advice left in a comment, I had a pocket full of rocks ready, but the two most troublesome dogs were penned up. They barked with deep regret as I passed, but other than vocally they were no-shows.

The county I live in has no signed bike routes, but I wandered into the next county and took bike route seven just to see where I ended up.

It was shortly after that I got lost for a time.

I had on a cap underneath my helmet, but, after a while, every time I had to stop for a stoplight or sign (What?! You stop at stop signs?!!! – Yes, especially when not stopping is likely to end up with me decorating someone’s front grille) the sweat would run down into my eyes.

I passed – and let us remember the temperature here – some people selling seafood out of a trailer on a corner, and not a refrigerated trailer, either. They had an umbrella over it, but that was pretty much it. I'm not sure how effective that was at keeping the fish fresh. Several items on their sign had been crossed off, either because they had sold out of it or it had gone so far bad that no one would possible buy it. I’m not going to try and figure out which.

The cars were especially bad at passing me. I don’t know why. Something in the air, maybe, like the smell of seafood that’s been baking in the sun all morning…

A guy on a motorcycle got behind me and honked at me. A guy in a flatbed truck got behind me and laid on the horn. Then someone screamed me in my ear and my heart rate went through the roof. It turned out that no one had screamed. I was being passed by a small truck, and the screaming sound was coming from it’s engine. I’m no mechanic or anything (in fact, I’m pretty much the complete opposite of a mechanic) but I don’t think it was supposed to sound like that.
I passed a school bus that had been converted into a flatbed truck. There are a lot of converted school buses around here. They must sell those things cheap.

I passed a road with a name I recognized (how do you forget a name like Titus Mewborn?) and turned on to it. A couple of miles later I was at an intersection that I knew well and, just like that, I wasn’t lost anymore. Nice.

After a nice thirty mile ride I was nearly back home when someone screamed in my ear again, and my heart rate shot up just like before. It turned out that the same truck was passing me again. Boy. I wish they’d get that thing fixed.

It was something of an eventful day, I guess. It was still a good ride, though I admit that I was kind of done in by the end of it, mostly due to the heat. And I hungry. I wonder if those guys selling the fish have any...no, never mind.

See you on the road.

Tour de France

Do you like what is, in your household, town, state or county an obscure sport which seems simple to you but which nobody around you seems to understand despite its apparent simplicity?

Is the sport you like less complicated than the previous sentence?

Congratulations, you must be a cycling fan. Cyclin' Missy got me thinking about the TdF.

During most of the year, of course, many of the people I know have absolutely no interest in cycling at all (unless it is to wonder why I am so crazy as to do it), but then the magical month of July arrives…and they still have no interest in cycling at all. Unless, of course, Lance Armstrong has come out of retirement.

On the face of it, the Tour de France seems pretty simple: the guy who gets from the starting line (where ever it may be on any given year) to the finish line in Paris in the shortest amount of time wins the yellow jersey. What could be easier to understand?

Unless, of course there are time bonuses (which there aren’t this year, but – you never know – there may be again next year). And why are there teams if only one person can win? And what’s with those other jerseys?

I happened to have the race on yesterday, and my Lovely Lovely took a look at the TV and had an important series question for me:

“Did you see that guy?! What he wearing polka-dots? Why is that guy wearing polka-dots?!”

Well, he’s ahead in the King of the Mountains competition.

“So he wears polka-dots? Does he know how silly he looks? Even his pants and his helmet have polka-dots on them!”

I think he thinks he looks great in those polka-dots. I think he’s pretty proud to be wearing them.

"Well, it looks silly."

If it seems that my Lovely Lovely is more interested in the clothes than in the actual race, that’s only because it’s true. She is the light of my life, and I love her dearly, but professional cycling bores her. She isn’t really all that interested in clothes, but it’s more interesting to her than the actual race is.

Now, as a public service, I am going to answer the questions I get asked most commonly about the Tour de France. (Please note than none of these answers should be considered authoritative, because I am just some guy with a keyboard and not an expert on cycling.)

Is Lance Armstrong going to win the Tour de France this year?

No.

Will Lance Armstrong be back to race the Tour de France next year?

He says he will. My magic 8-ball says he will. I haven’t called Tele-Psychic and asked them, though.

What’s with the controversy involving Lance Armstrong, Johann Bruyneel and Alexandre Vinokourov?

Okay, I just made that one up. None of the people who ask me about cycling have any idea who Johann Bruyneel and Alexandre Vinokourov are.

Is Lance Armstrong going to win the Tour de France this year?

You already asked me that. The answer is still no.

What’s that thing where all the guys on the same team ride together?

A team time trial.

Did Lance Armstrong win that?

Well, technically, the team wins or loses that, not just one guy.

Okay, so did Lance Armstrong’s team -

Yes. Yes they did. Yes.

How come so many guys in the race have unusual names? Why can’t they have simple and easy to pronounce names like –

Don’t say it. You seem to have something of a narrow focus here.

Speaking of which, Is Lance Armstrong going to win the Tour de France this year?

Oh, dear. Watch and see.

Did they even have a Tour de France last year?

Yes.

Did Lance Armstrong –

No, that was Carlos Sastre.

Oh. He beat Lance?

No, Lance wasn’t in it last year. They decided to have the race anyway.

Why?

I don’t know. You’ll have to ask them.

Can I ask one more question?

Is it about Lance Armstrong?

Um…yes…

Then, no. No you can’t.

I think I’ll go for a ride now.

Where Am I?

Wow. Fried by the sun and beaten to death by the wind all in the same day. Is this a great sport or what?! It was hot today. Everything was hot. Even the wind was hot.

At first I was going to say that it was like wind from Death Valley, but I suppose that a Death Valley wind would be dry, so, on second thought, this was more like a swamp wind. The wind blowing in your face (and it blew in my fact a lot today) was like having someone put a hot wet blanket on you. It was unpleasant is what I’m trying to convey.

Of course, where I ride isn’t actually swampy at all. You don’t hear the distant sound of a whippoorwill or the roar of an alligator. Around here, surrounded by corn and tobacco, by old shacks on the verge of collapse, apparently held together only by the kudzu, you’re more likely to hear the sound of a distant banjo being pluck by a young boy.

Ding-a-ding ding ding ding ding ding ding

Ride fast. Ride very fast.

I set myself a minimum pace to ride at, and I did finish the ride above that pace, but it was tough.

I passed a man who was all in brown – brown pants, brown shirt, brown hat, even his skin was brown. He was wearing green tinted sunglasses and had a big plastic tank on his back with a hose coming from it. As I passed him, he was vigorously pumping a handle attached to the tank. We each looked at the other curiously. It was a little weird.

I passed a subdivision which was clearly the place to find your thrill. If you’re old enough or your taste in music is varied enough, you now know the name of the place. If not, you’re probably confused by what you just read.

I got chased by a medium sized black dog. I was doing about twenty when the dog spotted me. Without even a second of hesitation, and paying no heed to the voice calling him, the dog took off after me. He was at a distant corner of the yard, so I wasn’t worried. The advantage was all mine.

Or so I thought.

From his first kick that dog started gaining on me., and I really had to lift the pace to leave him behind. I barely made it. The dog came out into the street after me, put his head down, and ran. I went up through the gears and pedaled as hard as I could, and I just managed to gap him. Once I got a gap, I was able to extend it and then the dog gave up, which is good, but I wasn’t going to be able to keep that pace up for any time at all.

And I got lost. Did I mention that?

I wanted to get at least thirty miles in, so I decided to explore a bit. I ended up exploring a lot and got well and truly lost. I had a vague idea which direction home was, so I started picking roads that looked like they might go in the direction I wanted, and I was eventually right, but only after an solid hour of wandering around with no clear ideas about where I was.

Why is it that riding roads you don’t know is harder than riding roads you do know?

I was tired by the time I finally got back home, but I felt great for having gotten some miles in.

Maybe I’ll manage to get some more tomorrow.

See you on the road.

How Do You...

This is a tender and delicate subject, but I’m going to broach it anyway, because the Tour de France is going on at the moment, and the Tour de France always makes me think of this. (Some people just enjoy the sport. I think of things like this. Oh, well.) It is what Phil Liggett would call a “nature break.” You can always tell when a nature break is occurring because dozens of riders all pull off to the side of the road at the same time to…um…attend to their business. I don’t imagine that this is the sort of event the discerning fan particularly wants to witness, but there it is. When you get two hundred guys on the road for several hours at a time, there are things that need to be done.

Bob Roll tells a story (which I will not repeat here in all of it’s hilarious and intimate detail) about surprising some fans during the Tour de France when as urgent need overtook him suddenly on the road. (Just for the record, my mother was appalled, but my aunt almost hurt herself from laughing so hard, so I can’t say how you would react if you read the story, but get a copy of Bobke II: The Continuing Misadventures of Bob Roll and read it for yourself if you want to find out. (This is one of my two favorite cycling books, and you get an undiluted dose of Bob Roll’s personality in the bargain.)

The fact is, when you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go, and this is, oddly enough, one of the things that people ask me about the most – what do you do when you’ve got to go during the middle of a ride.

I did meet a guy on the road once who’s solution to this was to ride home as hard and as fast as he could. This was a guy I had seen once or twice on the road. I caught up with him and he immediately explained the situation. Apparently it was pressing on his mind. I passed him, let him draft off me (from which you may conclude that he couldn’t have been going all that fast after all) and then watched him nearly get splatted by a car because I, not having his clearly urgent need, stopped at the red light and he didn’t.

The obvious answer to “what do you do” is that you find a convenience store and make convenient use of it. This is the optimal solution. But what if you can’t find a store? What if you’re out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by trees and nothing else? Well, you’ll just have to find your own solution. I wouldn’t have any idea at all how to deal with a situation like that.

Sometimes, at a pro race, you can find a guy who really needs to do something but just doesn’t want to stop. Such a rider will sometimes call on a teammate to put a hand on his back and hold him up while he deals with the situation in motion. Sometimes, on a casual ride, you can find a guy who wants to do the same thing, but he isn’t usually able to find anybody willing to help him stay upright at such a moment, so he has to attempt the feat singlehanded. We do not recommend this.

First of all, wrecking at a time like this would probably be an exceedingly bad thing. I will not elaborate on this, but my imagination is vivid enough to paint an unpleasant picture, and I bet yours is, too. I now offer a formal apology to anyone who might still be reading at this point for putting pictures into your head. Sorry about that.

I do know of a case where someone did attempt this feat on a ride. (Let us be perfectly clear here – I am not talking about me. I have more sense than that.) He managed to perform his task and to stay upright, but he did suffer a slight problem. His water bottles were apparently…um…in the line of fire, so to speak, so he didn’t want to drink from them for the rest of the ride.

Now, when I started riding, this topic was not discussed in any of the books I read, and nobody I talked to mentioned anything about it. This is not surprising to me. Only a very strange person would write about this stuff.

Wait a minute. That didn’t come out right.

For reasons beyond my control I didn’t get a ride in this weekend, and it rained all day yesterday, so, though I could have ridden, I admit that I chose not to. That’s why posts like this happen. This just goes to show that the world is a better place when I get a chance to ride, doesn’t it?

I’m sure that I haven’t exhausted this particular topic, but I’ve probably said more about it than you ever thought you’d read, so I think I’m done for the time being.

See you on the road.

Leg Stretch

Sofa ride time.

I really just needed to go out and stretch my legs, so I climbed onto the hybrid and set out to pedal the neighborhood. The computer on the hybrid doesn’t work, so I couldn’t worry about things like pace or cadence even if I wanted to, and sometimes that’s a good thing.

As I set out, I passed a red headed guy out for a walk. I only saw him from the rear, since the idea of staring at him as I passed him seemed rude, but he turned his head slightly as I approached, and I thought that I saw a bushy red moustache to go with the read hair.

I was ducking into and out of every cul-de-sac in the place, not raising my heart rate and barely breaking a sweat despite the heat and humidity. I saw the red headed guy in the distance at another point, and then, after a couple of loops and swoops we ended up facing each other. As I got closer to him, I realized that “he” was, in fact, a “she” and there was nothing even vaguely resembling a moustache. I don’t know what made me think there was.

Offering a silent apology, I moved on.

I decided to go across the road and on into faerie land – a magical place that I only visited once before.

To get there, you travel down a road that is in positively terrible condition, filled with cracks, ruts and potholes. Then you see a sign that says, “State Maintenance Ends” and the road immediately becomes wonderful – smooth and easy to ride on. Make of that what you will. You then pass a sign that says, “Private Property”. If you are brave enough to continue on, you go over three speed bumps and you have arrived where the sun shines brighter but isn’t so hot and the air is sweeter and more refreshing.

As I approached the entrance to faerie land I saw a man on a bike ahead of me. He was not wearing a helmet, and he had what appeared to be a baby seat attached behind his saddle. Just as I had this thought he hit the first of the speed bumps, and the bundle behind his saddle bounced up and almost out like that stuntman in the chariot scene from Ben Hur. Not a baby then. Perhaps a bag of groceries.

I took a little turn to pass by the swimming pool. The last time I had seen it, it had resembled nothing so much as a science experiment, but now the water was blue, clear, cool and inviting. Nice.

I headed back to the road and pedaled on. Ahead of me, I saw the man on the bike go to the right, so I went left. I didn’t want him to think I was following him, after all.

At the end of the road I came to a spot I had seen once before: it was a cul-de-sac surrounded by trees. There were more houses on the other side of the trees. The ground sloped downward at the point and there was a narrow wooden bridge over a ditch. I went down the slope and over the bridge, and I was not in faerie land anymore. I know this because the first thing I saw was a rusted out pickup truck, and the first thing I smelled was cigarette smoke hanging in the air. There was a sharp downturn in the condition of the houses and of the road. (I suspected that State Maintenance hadn’t ended here.) I rode around until I found myself at a road I knew, and then I turned around.

As I headed back toward faerie land, I passed the guy on the bike. He did, in fact, have a baby in the seat behind his saddle. The child was wearing a helmet and was strapped in, but when he went over the speed bump, either the kid wasn’t strapped in or the straps were made of elastic, because the child went six inches up into the air at that point.

From this side, the slope down to the bridge was steeper and there was a raised lip on the bridge. It was harder to get back into faerie land than it had been to get out of it. As I headed down the slope and over a root, I thought about all the mountain bike riders who wouldn’t even have deigned to call this an obstacle. I am not of their number, but I made it back across with nothing more than a little spike in my heart rate.

I cruised the smooth roads and headed back out the way I had originally come in. A sheriff’s car passed me, and, a few minutes later, passed me again headed the other way. Interesting. Perhaps there can even be trouble in faerie land?

I headed back home after that. What else could compare, after all? It was a nice ride, if a little bit strange in spots.

See you on the road.

A Quick Ride

I didn’t have much time – just enough for ten or twelve miles, but a little ride is a lot better than no ride at all, even if you have to start the ride downtown in a heavy traffic area.
I dropped the car off at my Lovely Lovely’s workplace with my bike in the back. I wandered inside to drop off the keys with the receptionist.

“You went in there in your bike clothes?” my Lovely Lovely asked me later. “Well, yeah.” That just netted me a strange look. Well, the first few times I wore a kit I felt like I must look like nothing in this world, but now I just wear them without thinking much about it. I’m quite sure whether or not I embarrassed her by walking in there dressed like that.

The main road was far too busy for me to want to tackle it on two wheels, but there was a labyrinth of small roads winding around all of these little office buildings. As I was finding my way through the maze, I was passed by a car with almost no clearance at all. I thought a few choice thoughts to myself. Ahead of me was a pickup truck stopped in the middle of the road. The car that had just passed me passed the truck, again with almost no clearance. Apparently it’s habitual with that fellow.

I went around the truck. It had three people, one large and two small, sitting in it. A quick turn put me next to the main road for a hundred yards or less. While I was there, I heard voices behind me arguing. I could only understand the occasional word – generally obscene, and the tone made it clear that unhappiness was in the air. The arguing voices got louder, and then the pickup truck passed me. Someone inside it was extremely unhappy and wanted to make sure that everyone, no matter how far away they might be, was aware of that fact.

The noise faded into the distance, and a quick cut through parking lot finally got me onto the road I wanted to be on, where I was stopped by cars turning off of the main road. I was too lazy to want to pull my feet out of the toe clips, so I did attractive little circles around the parking lot while several cars went down the road and then I pulled out after them.

My original idea had been to saunter the six miles back home, but, somehow, it just didn’t happen that way. It was really hot. The temperature was around 1,875 degrees F
(1,023.9 degrees C)*

*Rather than checking the weather report, I have chosen to estimate the temperature based on how I felt, so there may be a slight error in these numbers.

The wind was whistling down the road, and my legs didn’t feel great, but, somehow, I just kept going hard and picking up speed. I would sometimes decide to just cruise at the current speed, but my legs would assure me that we could go a bit faster, so we did. It was a hard ride, but a good one. I guess that one of the advantages of a short ride is that you can go as hard as you can. I was going so well that I took a longer route home and turned the six miles into twelve
miles – still short, but nice just the same.

There are people who will tell you that, if you only have a short time to ride, it isn't worth it. Don't you believe them. Ride when you can and your life will be better.*

*Not a guarantee. Void where prohibited. Offer good only between the hours of 12:01 am and 12:20 am on alternate Thursday in January during years with a full solar eclipse. Tax, tags and license fee extra. What's up Doc? Go, Speed Racer, Go.

See you on the road.