Author: kennettron

There are a couple well known signals that most cyclists know about to let them know if they’re going to be tired for their ride when they wake up in the morning.  I employ a couple of these.  One that most cycling books talk about is your morning pulse, or heart rate.  Supposedly, if your morning heart rate is higher than normal, your body is stressed out/tired.  I’m pretty good about checking my HR in the morning.  When I’m really rested, it’s 28-30 bpm.  When I’m pretty rested, or what it normally is, it’s 32.  And sometimes it gets up to 34 or 35 when I’m tired.  This particular fatigue measurement method isn’t that accurate though, because sometimes I’ll have a great ride and be super energetic even if it’s 34 or 35.  And sometimes just the opposite if it’s 32.

After taking my heart rate, I take all my vitamins and minerals.  They’re spread out in about seven different bottles, and if I’m tired I usually drop the one or two of the bottles while trying to open them, and a couple pills, before the process is over with.

Another sign I use to tell if I’m going to be tired is how long it takes me to get breakfast going.  On a normal day, once I get into the kitchen I have the oats on the stove within 12 seconds, mushrooms and meat cut up in a pan with eggs within 33 seconds, and fruit being chopped by 40 seconds (estimated time).  I get the process going quickly because, most likely, I’ve been thinking about eating food since five minutes after last night’s dinner.  If I happen to find myself standing in the middle of the kitchen with a blank stare on my face and not a thought going through my head, that means I’m tired.

But all these things don’t necessarily add up to a bad ride or tired legs.  They could, but then again, with the right amount of coffee and the right mix of riding buddies for me to try and drop, my legs could definitely turn around.  There’s only one true measure of my fatigue.  It’s the number one sign to tell how tired I’ll be on any given day: the number of times I cuss at inanimate objects while getting ready for my ride.  I know if it’s going to be a tired day if I’ve sworn at six or seven objects before I’ve gotten breakfast half way down.  This morning I’d thoroughly cussed out a bowl that was dirty, a spoon that dropped on the ground, the stove for being crappy, an orange peel that missed the garbage can, the garbage can, a spatula for being in the dishwasher instead of the drawer, the house for being cold and smelling like paint fumes, the paint fumes, and the fridge for being empty—all in the first five minutes of waking up.  That’s a lot of things to drop the F bomb on that early in the morning.  I mean, I REALLY let these things know how downright useless and terrible they were.  How utterly worthless their existence was and how much I despised them and how much they should despise themselves.  It’s a good thing none of the objects were alive and were without emotion, because otherwise I’d feel pretty bad about the things I’d said.  This morning I knew I was going to be tired all day.  And I was.

The train is just leaving the designated fresh air/smoking stop at Eugene. Yes, that’s exactly how it was worded: the “designated fresh air and smoking stop.” It’s moving very slowly. But at least it’s heading the right direction: south. The weather in the northwest, for riding, has been off and on. A week of mild rain, a week of heavy rain and cold, a week of upper 20’s and snow. Another week of rain. Mainly I guess it’s just been off. Miraculously I’ve gotten through it all and remained healthy, and haven’t missed a day of training since I started at the beginning of November.
My bag of food sitting next to me is shrinking at an alarming rate. The train ride will take another 25 or 30 hours and I’ve already eaten approximately 25% of my food…in the first 90 minutes. I have a feeling that things are going to get pretty bad tomorrow.
The compartment I’m in is mainly full of senior women. I’d say the average age is 68, with a few exceptions of young people. Almost no middle age people are riding the train. They all own cars, which are of course superior to trains and any other form of transportation. No, I’m not being sarcastic at all.
I’m in the upper compartment of the train, which is the first time. The view was pretty good earlier in the day when it was light out. Now that it’s dark I can’t really see anything out the window because of the conveniently-placed overhead lights directly up above and against the windows, illuminating and reflecting off the glass so that people outside get to see us. Not that anyone’s watching.
Earlier we passed some lovely little communities and homes backed up against the tracks. There was a lot of chain link fence and razor wire. Those homes and businesses must be extremely valuable to need such extravagant protection.
Two days ago I didn’t know where Michael (the friend I’ll be training with in Solvang) and I were going to live. The house we were going to stay at moved. It was a 5th wheel. The other house we were going to live in didn’t have a bathroom or fridge. Or a second bed. It was an RV. And the third house we were going to live in was too expensive for only two of us to pay for. This house was an actual guesthouse. All three of these houses were right next to each other on the same person’s property.

Unsuccessful in finding a third person to help pay the rent for the guesthouse, we planned on staying in the RV until we found something more permanent. Something with a bathroom. But more importantly something with a fridge.
Yesterday I posted a housing wanted ad on a cycling listserve in Solvang and got a couple responses and our problem was solved. Now there was no reason to live in the RV. So I emailed the woman who owned the RV and told her that we wouldn’t need it anymore, but we’d still appreciate a ride from Santa Barbara (destination of my train and Michael’s bus) to the new house in Solvang, which is about 25 miles away. She replied with bad news. A day ago we had a ride (from her) to Solvang, but nowhere to stay other than her RV. Now, angry that we weren’t staying with her, she didn’t want to give us a ride anymore. So now we had a place to stay but no way to get there. Luckily our new host was nice enough to agree to come pick us up. Imagine reading through your emails, coming across something about two cyclists needing a place to stay for three months, calling them up and saying, “come on over!” Then also agreeing to come pick them and 400 pounds of their stuff up at the train station—all that in just a day. Sometimes kindness can be confused with a person’s desperation, which in this case would be money. Although that isn’t the issue here, it’s just kindness. This is why I don’t believe in Karma. Lots of good things happen to me and lots of people help me out, yet I never seem to do any good to other people or the world. Maybe I’ll do some great deed in the future that the Karma gods know about.
A few weeks ago I exited the grocery store and walked into the parking lot and saw the driver parked next to me had left their lights on. I decided to rack up some quick karma points and walked back into the store and told a clerk to make an announcement that the owner of the car with the license plate “whatever” had left their lights on. My good deed done, I went back to the parking lot and saw that the car’s headlights were already off. It was just the automatic headlight deal where they turn off 30 seconds after you park. I was left wondering if it’s the thought that counts towards karma points, or if it’s making an actual difference. I would guess it’s half and half. But of course the points are diminished if you do it purely for the sake of acquiring karma points.
Now my food rations are down another 5%.
I didn’t bring anything to read or do for this 30 hour train ride. Other than my laptop, which had no movies on it, and two ipods. So I can either listen to the music on my computer, or I can listen to the music on my ipods, all three of which have the exact same songs. Or I can type.
I think I should just eat all my food right now and get it over with. It’s occupying all my thoughts as it is. Damn it, why didn’t I bring more food? Why didn’t I eat more before I got on the train?
Down another 5%.
If you flip a quarter 1,000,000 times, there’s a chance it will land on heads every time. It’s a small chance, but it’s possible. Likewise, I have a theory that there is a person that has never had to stop at a red light. A person who drives an average commute 5 times a week, goes on cross country vacations a few times a year, has been driving or has ridden in cars since birth, and will lead their entire life without every having to stop at a red light. If this is true, there also exists an unlucky person who has never gotten a green light without having to stop first.
What am I at now? I think I’m at 65% food rations left. BUT! That’s not including cliff bars or the giant bag of whey protein. That’s just counting fruit, bread, rice crackers, and deli meat–of which there is none left. Of course the deli meat is the first thing to go. Actually the very first thing to go was a pear. But not before it got smashed in my bag and slimed every other item of food. That’s the problem with pears. They’re one of nature’s weakest, most fussy fruits. They spend days and days being too hard and unripe to eat, then when all of a sudden they get ripe, they get really soft and the slightest ding will peal off their skin. This makes them poor traveling fruit, as apposed to something sturdy like the apple or coconut.
If the train was moving any slower, I could get wifi from one of these houses we’re passing by. Unlike the no-red-light-for-life-person theory, there does not exist a human being who has ridden Amtrak and hasn’t gotten pissed off.
I figured out why they have all these bright lights on the inside of the train up against the windows. It’s so you can’t see out and get a visual reference of speed. Instead, we’re left to judge by feel. It feels like we’re going 14mph. But it could be 12mph. I’ll never know because I can’t see out. It would be a pretty cruel punishment to keep prisoners in constant wonder about how many days they had left to serve. If they were kept inside with 24-hour artificial light and there were no clocks or calendars and the guards were forbidden to tell them what day it was, the prisoners would most likely go crazy. One hour would seem like four. In fact because of the seemingly slowing down of time, they could serve less time and get the same “benefit.” Think of the money that would be saved if the typical 20-year term were shortened to 5 years. And that’s not even counting the money that would be saved from not having to buy clocks and windows!
I can see outside a little. We’re going about 12mph. And I’m out of roast beef. Woah! I just remembered I have “WolfQuest, Survival of the Pack” on my computer. I think we all know how I’m going to spend the next 20 hours.

Never mind. The game’s not working.

Part II

Last night I made a PowerPoint presentation about the train ride. It took a good hour and a half maybe. Then the woman who owns the seat next to me came back. She had been in the lounge car the entire time. She was slightly drunk and a bit high from a muscle relaxer. She asked if I wanted one. I said no thanks. After 30 minutes of her talking at me and shuffling around in her seat I said I was interested in a muscle relaxer after all. It didn’t do anything. I spent a couple hours staring out the window at nothingness and willing myself to sleep, but by midnight, I still hadn’t made any progress. I decided to try somewhere else on the train.
The lounge car had all of its lights on and some people were talking. But there was ground space to lie on next to the windows, so that’s where I spent the night. It was right next to a heater vent too, which was nice.
This morning I’ve spent my entire time in the lounge car, which as a bunch of open seats facing the windows. There’s enough space in here that I can take up three seats. It’s all very exciting.
I’m also pretty excited about a banana sandwich I’m planning on making in an hour or two. I have one apple and a banana left. Plus most of my loaf of bread and rice wafers. I found a small piece of roast beef at the bottom of the bag earlier this morning, which was a nice treat. And I had a cliff bar. So all things considered, I’ve grown quite accustomed to train life. The California scenery passes by slowly, yes. There’s not much to eat or do, yes. But then again, there’s a strong sense of community here. Out of sheer boredom and drunkenness, people are striking up conversations and friendships with each other. They’re even traveling in small packs to and from the dining car and roaming up and down the train cars in search of adventure. I imagine all these aspects of train life add up to a pretty accurate picture of what pre-agriculture-based society was like. It really baffles me that the train doesn’t have wifi though. I mean come on! By the time I post this it will be over a day old, and therefore meaningless.

Part III

I’ve spent the day trying to sleep, listening to music, looking out the window, and playing chess against my computer. It isn’t very fun playing against a computer, because it doesn’t make mistakes and its moves are always super rational. There aren’t that many tricks, and when there are and I see them, it doesn’t even matter because whatever I decide to do, the computer will win that set of moves. By the time it does something “risky” or tricky, its planned so far ahead and so well, that its actually not risky or tricky at all. Maybe this is why the best humans are able to beat computers even when they’re set“unbeatable.” The human knows the computer will plan for something practical and safe, and counter that with something irrational. Or maybe the computer knows that the human will play irrational and expect the computer to play rational, so the computer rationally decides to play rational, in which case if the human is still able to beat the computer, they must have figured out the computer’s reverse psychology. Maybe I should just set it on an easier level.
It’s sunny down here. The train just stopped at San Luis Obispo and I got off for the first time to walk around. It was probably in the upper 60’s. Nice and warm. Shorts and short sleeve weather. Before I got back on the train, I ran and got a sandwich wrap at a store.
I’ve come to the conclusion that traveling by train could possibly be better than by air. First of all, it’s much less stressful than flying. There’s no security, no giant airport terminal to get lost in. No worry about being late for the train, since it will certainly be later than you.
Secondly, there’s a lot of room on a train. You can get up and walk around, get off occasionally at stops. There’s room to lie down, seats available to put your feet up and even lie down if you get one of these sweet lounge couch things I’m on right now. It’s not as loud as a plane. Not even close. And the scenery is better, depending on what you like to look at. If you like the grand scheme of things, observing from a far distance 30,000 feet above the ground, giving the earth an apparent calm and feeling that everything is just A OK, then flying is for you. If you enjoy getting a close-up look at the closest thing the US has to slums and shanty towns, houses built out of cardboard and bed mattresses, trash-strewn back yards and tattered plastic snagged on razor wire and blowing in the breeze of the passing train, then the rail is the place for you.
Flying from Portland to Santa Barbara would take about 2 hours. Plus add in an hour and a half for terminal time. Taking the train is going to be 27 hours (it made up time after all and looks like it will actually be a few minutes early). But if you need to take a day or two of recovery, which I was going to have to do anyways, taking the train might be better than flying due to the lower cortisol levels and the ability to keep your legs elevated and moving about throughout the day. I’ll see how I feel tomorrow. Come to think of it though, 2 hours in a plane isn’t that long and wouldn’t hamper performance or recovery unless you got sick, which is also more likely on a plane than on a train, I believe. If a train could cover the equivalent distance of a six or five hour flight in 25 hours, then as long as you weren’t in a hurry, I think the train would be much better.
And lastly, if you include the price into the equation, $100 for a train ticket obviously beats $200 for a plane ticket. And then of course you have to count the fact that all I paid for baggage was a meager $30 for my two fifty pound bike boxes jam packed with equipment, my bike trainer and altitude tent poles, two large cardboard boxes with stuff in them, a big duffle bag, a backpack, and a bag of food. That would have cost an extra $500 if I went by plane. Yes in deed, trains are the waive of the future, just like they were back in the early 1800’s.

Part IV

I take it all back. Trains suck. Amtrak sucks. We’ve been sitting here not moving for the last 40 minutes because a freight train in front of us needs to do “maintenance.” This is after the conductor assured us that there would be no more hold ups. Time to add some more slides to my PowerPoint slide show.

Part V

F- it. The train was stopped for well over an hour and finally it gets going…up to a blistering speed of 20mph because the traffic stop lights have been set to the speed the freight train was going. And they won’t adjust to our speed due to some malfunction. So we’re an hour and a half behind schedule and now we’re going 20mph, which will make us even later. Amtrrak, I really hate you.

The Original Concept:

 

Early August: my teammate, Spencer, and I began dreaming of winter training down south.  We began scoping out locations in the Southwest using Ride With GPS.  A couple hours mapping out rides every night and before we knew it we had found the ideal spot: Solvang California.  It is, of course, the happening place to go train in the winter.  It’s rapidly becoming the new Tucson, the new winter Mecca, in case you didn’t know.  Eager with excitement, Spencer and I doubled hour daily hours on Ride With GPS and began mapping rides by the dozen.

 

The Plan

 

Mid September: by now Spencer and I were looking forward to the off-season.  It had been too long since we’d gone to a dance party or eaten a burrito without guilt.  But this was no time to forget about Solvang.  In fact, I began thinking of it more and more as I finished up my last couple races.  By the time the true off-season began, it was time to start a solid plan.  Here’s what we came up with: Spencer was going to join me in Solvang in mid to late December, where we’d train until mid February, then go to altitude for a couple weeks before our first big races of the year, San Dimas and Redlands.

 

Following Through:

 

I got on top of the logistics quickly and found a place for us to stay by October.  This was a full two months before I actually planned on heading down there.  You can imagine how organized I must have felt.

The living situation would be a 5^th wheel and an RV, both parked on a nice woman’s 3-acre lot, just outside of Solvang and a short walk from the grocery store.  Rent would be cheap, and I imagined warm evenings sitting around a campfire after a hard day of training.

 

Making backup plans:

 

Just in case the house fell through, I kept two other households as options, who I had found on Craigslist.  I also found a third person to come train with us, named Michael, just in case Spencer backed out.  Training by yourself for months on end sucks, especially if you don’t know anybody in town.

 

Being glad you made backup plans:

 

Shortly after I found the house, it became clear that Spencer was going to opt out.  Now it was down to Michael and I.

 

Original plans begin to crumble:

 

Two weeks before we were set to leave (me from Portland on a train and Michael from Iowa on a bus), our host informed me that the 5^th wheel wouldn’t be available, due to it not being up to the electricity code.  So our options became 1) contact the backups, which I did but neither of their homes were available anymore, 2) both sleep in the RV, which didn’t have a fridge or working bathroom, 3) one person sleep in the RV and one person sleep in a tent (notice that this doesn’t solve the problem with the fridge or bathroom), or 4) find a third person to make renting the woman’s $800 a month guesthouse economically viable, which only had one room but did include a fridge and bathroom.  We quickly began scrambling to find a third person.

 

Things Take a Turn for Good:

 

With a week to go, I found a third person to come stay with us.

 

Never Mind:

 

Half a week later: Yeah that was too good to be true.  Turned out he couldn’t drop everything he was doing and leave for California for three months with one week’s notice.

 

Last Minute Game Saver:

 

With two days to go, I contacted the Solvang cycling listserve and posted a housing wanted plea.  It worked, and I got two responses within a couple hours.  We were saved.

 

The Fumble Continues:

 

I emailed our original RV/5^th wheel/guesthouse host and told her that we had found a new place to live, but we still needed a ride from the bus and train stations in Santa Barbara to Solvang, located 40 miles away.  She quickly replied saying that she would NOT come pick us up because her husband and her had spent the entire previous day getting the RV and guesthouse ready for us.  They needed some revenge.  So now we had a place to stay but no way to get there.

 

Saved Again:

 

Not to worry, as the train passed through the Bay Area, a mere eight hours before I was set to arrive in Santa Barbara, our new host confirmed that she could come pick us up.  And there you have it.  Everything planned out in the last two days.

 

Past: I’m being coached full time this year. No more do it yourself strategies for me, as I don’t believe they work very well, at least for the amount of training knowledge I have, which has become very tangled and confused over the last couple years. My first real training year had too much intensity and too many hours for the amount of fitness my body was able to handle. Then I got a coach, Gilad. He had some good ideas about training and nutrition and stuff, but they were out of date and not structured very well. I had a great season anyways. Then I got a new coach, Jeannette. Her training was too easy, so I modified most of it and did my own thing a lot of the time, which is not equivalent to truly being coached. I had a good season nonetheless. I like that word because it’s a combo of three words. And this year I had no coach at all and planned to “race into shape,” which worked extremely well…for the last six weeks of the season.

So I decided to get a coach who I knew, and who I also knew knew his stuff. Sam Johnson. It’s been about two and a half weeks and I’m feeling fast. I started this fall a lot faster than I started last fall, since I took a shorter break, but the training he’s having me do also deserves some credit. It’s hard on the hard days, easy on the easy days, and medium on the medium days. Makes sense to do this instead of always going the same speed or always going hard. I did 18 hours of riding last week and will do another +18 this week. Lots of tempo and threshold work, which I have never done in the past. I say lots, but I’m pretty sure it’s at its minimalist amount right now. I’m expecting much more pain in the coming months. Also a good amount of pealing drills, which I feel like they might help a lot.

A few days ago I had an amazing ride. It was cold and misty out the entire day, but never seemed to actually be raining. I was soaked the whole day though. I went south in the morning over some familiar hills near sherwood and made my way out to a big climb, about 30 miles away, that I had only done once a long time ago coming from the opposite direction. It’s about a 45 minute climb if you go up the whole way to the top. I couldn’t believe I never knew about this climb before. I’m still finding new roads here in Sherwood despite living here my entire life. There’s a lot of roads.

Anyways, I stopped for a fried burrito, mountain dew, and snickers bar at a gas station on the way home, which was about an hour and a half still to go until I got home. I’d been feeling a tiny bit tired, but once that Mountain Dew hit my lips, it was game on. I cranked up the volume on my ipod, switched it to my intervals playlist, and let the sugar/caffeine high carry me home. I had left late in the morning, maybe even after noon o’clock, and it became pitch dark with about 30 minutes to go. And then it started raining. It was maybe 40 degrees out. And I was lovin it even more than a McDonalds slogan. I hammered up the last climb shaking my head in furry to Rage Against the Machines. Probably the most fun I’ve had on a ride in months.

Present: there is no present. It’s always the past or future.

Future: I have two more weeks here in Oregon until I leave for Solvang CA. The housing situation is a bit touch and go. Mainly touch. I think. I’m not sure what the “touch” and the “go” stand for in touch and go. One of my riding friends from Tucson, Michael, is meeting me down there on December 2nd at the bus station and we’re going to be picked up (hopefully) by the woman that was going to give us a place to stay. The problem is that now there is a problem that I can’t be bothered to explain and you probably can’t be bothered to read. It’s all very boring stuff really. So I won’t write it. I should get back to my short story. I haven’t made any progress on it for a few days. It’s easier to write in a blog, with no direction or forethought of what I’m about to write down. It just comes the instant that the thought spontaneously generates in my head, travels through my nerves to my fingers, who then write it down. Like that thought. Nothing to it. Ahhh, who am I kidding. The story I’m writing has the exact same process, which is probably why when I read parts of it to myself, it sounds like ten different people are writing it and directing it in opposite directions. Come on now fingers, get along and do like the legs do and go the same direction. Forward. And in circles. Scraping dog shit off your shoe, as my former coach, Gilad, would say, as well as my current coach, Sam. That’s one thing they have in common: they spend a lot of time thinking about scraping dog shit off their shoes when they’re riding bikes. I don’t know why, because you don’t get dog shit on your shoe while riding a bike. It’s all very confusing, which is why I just nod and say, “Uh-huh. Makes sense to me.”

In other news I got shocked by an electric fence the other day while attempting to feed grass to a persnickety horse. Three times. And the horse never ate any grass!!

This is a difficult problem many Americans face daily. Just how is it possible to eat this much in a period of 14 waking hours a day? What should I eat? How many sticks of butter must I consume? Will I be ill? Do I need an IV drip or does all the food have to be chewn? Will my jaws get sore? How many times will I have to use the toilet? The short answers to these questions are: a huge appetite due to riding 4-5 hours in the rain, lots, 0-20, possibly, no, maybe, depends but possibly a lot.

The long answer to what exactly you need to eat is recorded here:

Scenario for day #1 (remember, save room for about 3 gallons of water per day)

Breakfast:
1/2 cup of regular oats
1 package of instant cinnamon/apple oats
extra cinnamon

apple
pear
plum
orange
banana
sunflower seeds
grapes

1 whole egg
1 egg white
1/4 can of salmon
2 cups of mushrooms

2 cups of coffee
small bowl of chili

ride food/lunch:
2 almond butter, banana, and honey sandwiches
1 cliff bar
1 snickers candy bar
1 deep fried gas station burrito with 2 packets of hot sauce
1 can of Mountain Dew
1 banana

post ride food/dinner
smoothie made of 2 cups spinach, 1 scoop of whey protein, 2 cups blueberries, 1/2 cup of cherry juice frozen concentrate, 1 banana, cocoa powder, cantaloupe.
1 bowl of fruit cobbler pie stuff with about 1/6 cup of honey on top
1 leftover bowl of pho Vietnamese soup with extra steak added in
1 small piece of pepperoni pizza
1 apple
1 can of sardines
1 orange
sweet potato/cranberry sauce/turkey/mushroom mixture
more turkey and cranberry sauce
grapes

Scenario for day #2

breakfast:
1/2 cup steel cut oats
apple
pear
1/2 orange
banana
cantaloupe
sunflower seeds

2 cups coffee

turkey/cranberry sauce

ride food/lunch:
homemade granola bar
bottle of juice
bottle of maltodextrin
1 cup coffee
2 almond butter and honey sandwiches
1 more cup coffee
1 cup hot apple cider
1 bowl of steel cut oats with chopped nuts, raisins, and a half cup of brown sugar (provided at a cyclocross race food pit stop)
1 banana

post ride food/dinner:
smoothie made of: 2 cups spinach, 2 handfulls of blueberries, cantaloup, whey protein, cocoa powder, juice, vanilla yogurt, banana
1/2 an orange
apple
1 bowl of leftover pho soup with extra steak
1 small piece of pizza
2 bowls of yellow squash/carrot/potato/bell pepper/turkey mixture
more turkey/cranberry sauce
bread with honey and almond butter
another smoothie made of whey protein, cinnamon, banana, cocoa powder, and blueberries
fake crab meat

I hope this helps!

ps I haven’t been updating the blog recently because I’ve been writing a really long short story. It should be done Thanksgiving weekend, so I’ll post it then.

I got a free doughnut on my ride today
It tasted great and I didn’t have to pay
I said to the lady at the country store,
“How much is them doughnuts? I’d like three or four.”
She said, “Well, mister cyclist guy, they’re 60 cents each.”
“If you’d like, I’ve got one that tastes like peach.”
“But it costs 75 cents, I hope that’s all right.”
I said, “Yeah, I can manage, peach would be tight.”
I went outside to my bike and bike bag
I searched and searched but the only thing in it was a dirty old rag
I went back inside and said, “I aint got no cash.”
“But that’s OK because doughnuts give me a rash.” (not true)
She said, “Oh I insist, take one anyway.”
I said, “No, no, no I’m not a stray.”
“I wouldn’t feel good, I wouldn’t feel right…
…to take a doughnut without paying for one bight.”
“I already used your bathroom and filled my bottles.”
“I’ve got plenty of food and am fueled full throttle.”
But she kept insisting, so I said, “Well thanks.”
I ate it outside by the propane tanks
It tasted good, flavor sweetened by kind favor
I was soon re-thinking our species’ savior
Maybe there’s a chance that people are good
If that’s so, let me not get hit by a truck full of wood
But after riding a minute, my feeling of bliss turned to bitch
For logging trucks galore drove me into the ditch
I cursed, screamed and spat, middle finger thrusting in the air
But it was all to my great despair
It made no difference, they were too big
How could they notice? To them I was an insignificant twig
Uncaring and ignorant, the speeding trucks were shitty
They were all too busy transporting forest to city
Because money makes doughnuts, not a kind woman’s pity

It has become popular belief that the off-season should be spent resting and recovering after a long year of hard training and racing.  After months spent on the road hammering away on the pedals in a never-ending repetition of circles, by the time September roles around the body is a bloodied battlefield and the mind a frail, weeping child left alone in the trenches.  Common sense and modern science say it’s time for a break.  But modern science and common sense are WRONG.  It’s time to thrust that weeping child into a pair of combat boots and give him a bayonet.  It’s time to grow a pair and swing ‘em around in a circle for all to see.  We get to do our sport while sitting down for crying out loud!  The off-season isn’t about taking it easy, doing yoga, sitting in a warm bubble bath and listening to Cheryl Crow (although I don’t frown upon that for other purposes).  NO.  The off-season is about saying, “Hey body, you think you’re hurting now?  Well just wait and see what I have in store for you over the next six weeks, ya damn whimp!”  If done successfully, by the time serious on-the-bike training begins in November, you’ll be so hardcore that cycling will seem like a stroll in the park.  In fact, the off-season is actually those other 11 months of the year that you ride and race a bicycle.  Now is the time to go on an all meat diet, grow a mullet, take up spear fishing and jiu-jitsu, climb a mountain or two, and start a fight with a badger.  Frankly, Nancy boy, it’s time to Harden Up.

I wasted little time when my off-season began a few weeks ago.  My first activity was to go wakeboarding.  This proved to be very un-hardcore.  Wakeboarding, though fun, did not make me any harder than I already was.  Most of my time wakeboarding was spent eating chips and salsa in the back of the boat and staring at the two girls in bikinis sitting next to me.  I guess I hardened up a bit, you could say.

Next up was a stop to the skate park.  I only watched, so that wasn’t very hardcore at all.  But I DID have to stand up for an extended period of time.

A few days later I went on a run.  It was more of a walk, actually.  I ran for a few hundred meters, got a side cramp and had to walk it off.  Eventually I started running again and did a solid mile before I turned around and started walking again, this time because my knees were screaming at me to stop.  I think I did two miles in a little under half an hour.  It was hilly though.  Hardening up takes patience.

The next week I did some cross-training type stuff, which included a bunch of sprints (running sprints) and a few hundred jumps.  It left me really sore for the next couple days (actually I’m still sore).  But that’s what hardening up is all about.  Getting really sore.  My next step to get hard would leave me sorer than I had been all year.  My next task was walking.

This wasn’t just any walk, though; it was a hike.  My teammate, Spencer, and I set out to do the Wonderland Trail in Washington, which circumnavigates the 14,400-foot volcano, Mt. Rainier.  The trail is 93 miles long and has a total of 22,000 feet of elevation gain.  And 22,000 feet of elevation loss too, which in a cyclist’s mind don’t exist.  In backpacking, they do.  They actually exist twice as much as the uphill.

We failed miserably.  Setting an unrealistic goal of 30 miles a day, we planned on doing the entire trail in three days, carrying 35-pound packs.  Turns out our completely non-impact sport didn’t carry over so well to a sport that is 100% impact.  We made it 19 miles on our first full day (the previous evening we had time for six miles after driving to the trailhead).  After our 19-mile, 12-hour day we woke up completely wrecked.  Even if we turned back, it was going to take the next two days to just make it back to the car alive.  And it did take the next two days.  By the time we got to within a mile of the parking lot, we were going so slow that a legless chipmunk passed us.  Seriously, though, it took us over an hour to do the last mile.  For those math whizzes out there, that equates to less than a mile an hour.  We slept in a hotel that night and cried ourselves to sleep.  Turned out we weren’t as hard as we thought.

If at first you don’t succeed, go and do the exact same thing and expect a different outcome.  I think that’s how that saying goes, or at least that’s what it implies.  And that’s what I did.  First I went on a few more runs, dug out a huge tree stump from someone’s yard, and went dancing.  Yes dancing hardens you up.  If you’re even questioning this you’ve obviously never spent four hours in a static squat, which is the equivalency of grinding all night at the clubs.  So anyways, I ate some steaks, applied gel to my mullet, developed an upper respiratory infection, and set out on my next hike.  This time I was going to harden up or die, which, come to think of it, would be pretty hardcore.

My mom dropped me off at the Timberline Ski Lodge on the slopes of Oregon’s Mt. Hood on an early, cold October morning.  It was still dark when I took off in search of the trailhead of the Timberline Trail, a 41-miler that traverses the base of Mt. Hood.  Like the Wonderland Trail, it involves thousands upon thousands of feet of climbing and descending.  A knee breaker for sure.  But I was ready for it.  My knees had adapted from the last hike and I was going to crush this trail.

My knees started hurting almost immediately as I walked up the paved path under the ski lift on my way to the trail.  “Crap, this is going to hurt”.  Time to harden up.

And harden up I did.  I busted out the first nine miles in a little over two hours, running short sections at times, only stopping to eat “fun-sized” Snickers and drink my ultra low-weight food system made of maltodextrin and whey protein.  I didn’t bring any two-pound cans of corned beef like Spencer and I did on the other hike.  This time I was going ultra lightweight.  Nothing but the essentials.  No tent, no extra clothes, no toothbrush, no stove.  Just 10,000 calories-worth of candy bars, instant pudding, and maltodextrin.  A diet for someone who’s serious about getting hard.

Things went south (actually east) when I got to mile nine and became incredibly lost.  I came to a large glacially carved riverbed and went east when I was supposed to head west.  Unlike the fake world we live in, the outdoors doesn’t mark every intersection with a sign.  I spent hours scrambling over boulders in the riverbed trying to find the trail on the other side.  I finally said screw it and climbed the cliff on the adjacent side of the river and began hiking through the forest in search of where I thought the trail should be.  Long story short…I mean loooooonnnnngg story short, I found it and got back on track after my short, six-mile detour.  I spent no time celebrating, as there was daylight to kill.  Plus I had to drop some imaginary teammates drafting behind me.  I mean competitors.

I dropped them on the next big climb as I put in a hard attack at the base and kept it at threshold for a good 30 minutes before stopping to take a drink of water.  My knees were throbbing pretty good by now but my legs were still fresh.  I had been hiking for seven hours by now and had another five hours of daylight. My legs didn’t stay fresh for long.

Over the next five hours, I went from that one “evolved” image of man on the far right to the knuckle-dragging one on the left.  It got dark at 7PM and I dropped my bag on the side of the trail at the very top of a ridge, which is a good place to spend the night without a tent…only if you want to harden up.  It got very windy and cold.  And I spent most of the night in the fetal position hearing imaginary bears walking in the woods around me, which I’m fairly certain actually existed.

The next morning I woke up with painful wooden planks attached to my torso where my legs should have been.  I had done 33 miles the previous day and I was feeling it now.  But, as a disciple of the Harden Up Church, I put on my shoes and started trotting down the path, grimacing until the endorphins took over.  Today was only going to be 14 miles anyways.  Not too big of an obstacle.

Except for the small detail that the trail was closed at the next river crossing due to it not existing anymore.  In 2006, the trail had been washed away in a major flood.  The banks had been deteriorating ever since and now there was a 100-foot drop off to the river below, as trail signs had warned me a few miles earlier.  Not to worry, though, I used to be a rock climber so I bushwhacked my way through the over-grown trail and found the edge of the cliff.  It was steeper than I had imagined.  And it wasn’t just rock.  It was a mixture of car and bowling ball-sized boulders cemented into crumbling dirt and mud.  Many of the boulders were loose.  There was a rope that people used to use to get down, but it had been cut half way through by the park service to deter people from being unsafe and trying to climb down the cliff.  Yes, it’s much safer now that there is a rope that goes half way down.  Thanks for that.  Anyways, this didn’t matter to me since I wasn’t going to depend on a rope anyways. I was getting pretty hard by then so I climbed down, avoided the falling rocks, crossed the river, and climbed back up the other side without incident.  This made up for my previous un-hardcore whimpering the night before when the slightest scurry of a mouse would set my mind to bear terror mode.

I won’t bore you with the details since you’ve got a lot of hardening up to do in the next month, but I finished the hike a short five hours later, tore the loose skin off my blisters and gave a middle finger to the bike gods.  “See that?” I said.  “Yeah, this is who you’re going to have to deal with next year.  I’m gonna break some cranks, just wait and see.”

I’ve got a ways to go before I consider myself to be truly hardcore, but I did quite a bit of hardening up over the last couple weeks.  If you haven’t started yet, I recommend doing so now.  Remember, start out nice and slow, and then immediately go as hard as you can.  This isn’t training.  You aren’t supposed to do it intelligently.  So go start a bonfire with a gallon of gas.  Go throw some bricks off a bridge.  Go crash a frat party.  Hell, if you’re up to it, go on a long, long walk.  Just remember one thing: you’re a weak-boned cyclist so don’t get too discouraged if you can’t handle it at first.  Pain is good, though.  It will make you stronger for next year.

 

 

I started writing this a while ago but never finished. Here it is:

It’s hot and humid out here on the east coast. I’ve never been to Vermont before. I like it. There’s lots of trees, rolling hills (some are pretty big), and lots of rivers. Yesterday we ate at a sandwich shop out in the country and swam in a creek that was right below the patio that we ate on. The serene country atmosphere was all a very nice contrast to the previous 24 hours:

Earlier that night (the night before, so technically the day before) I had gotten a taxi ride from my host house up in Park City Utah to the Salt Lake City airport at 9pm. I checked my bike in and watched some movies on my laptop while the plane was delayed by an hour. We took off at 12:40 am. It was a four and a half hour plane ride. I had the aisle seat, even though I’m pretty sure I reserved a window seat. I dozed but never quite got to the point of sleeping since the flight attendants kept bumping my arm, leg, foot, and head with every pass of their metal cart. I had planned well for the noise though. I had ear plugs AND my carpentry earmuffs. Plus I had taken some tylenol sleeping pills. This all helped block out the screaming baby right next to me. Anyways, we flew to JFK. Then later to Burlington VT (that stands for Vermont, not Vermen, like I originally thought).

My teammate, Alan, picked me up. We also picked up Spencer and our friend Trisha, who had just gotten off a plane as well. We drove to our host house way out in the woods here and then went to eat sandwiches and swim in the river. This is a really poor post so far. I can’t really think and all I’m doing is listing events that have occurred recently. This is where most people go wrong in their race reports/writing about pretty much everything else also. No one wants to hear a boring timeline of events. Like in history. No one wants to learn a bunch of dumb dates of when “so and so” started some boring (and pointless) war 290 years ago. They want to hear about a cool, funny story that happened to “so and so” when he was drawing up the war plans. There’s been a million wars throughout history. That’s a fact, there have been exactly 1 million wars, look it up on Wikipedia if you don’t believe me. And if it says otherwise, you shouldn’t believe everything you read on Wikipedia. Anyways, people don’t want to hear about the date of the war, the reasons it started, which are all the same anyways, or the countries involved. They want to hear about how “so and so” accidentaly stubbed his toe on a table when he was plotting his war plans and how he knocked over a big plate of chicken on the dinning hall floor. The castle dogs ran over and ate the chicken and the combination of stubbing his toe and the dogs eating his chicken made him so mad he burst a blood vessel in his eye. Later that night when he got together with his friends to just go have a good time out on the town, they all made fun of him for hours because they thought he was really really high but he wasn’t. He had just burst a blood vessel but they wouldn’t believe him!! Anyways, that would be a much better story to learn about in history class than all the text book crap they teach.

I started the race with high cortisol levels since my teammate Chris Wingfield drove off with my aero helmet and didn’t get it back to me until about 3 minutes before I started. It was a 9.5K TT. It was a hilly course and I blasted through the first 3K climb, almost catching my 30 second guy right off the bat, but didn’t quite close the gap until a few K later. I ended up taking 10th out of a darn good field of 100 cat 1’s and pros. Ted King took 1st. That’s it for the race report.

Just so you know, our host house is almost directly located ON the TT course. We all either rode our bikes to the TT start or some of us drove there but rode home. This meant all the team’s cars were strewn about all over the place.

Later in the day after the race was over and we had a chance to go home and eat, Lang, Spencer, and I drove the entire length of the final day’s RR course. A very wise move since the final day had some massively steep climbs at the end. On our way back to the house, Lang dropped me off near the start of the TT course so that I could drive Alan Adam’s car back to our house. As they dropped me off, I told Lang to wait for me since I wasn’t quite sure how to get back home. He said OK, then immediately drove off (squealing the tires), both he and Spencer no doubt laughing hysterically as they sped away from me as I stood in the middle of the road. I crossed the street to the gravel pull-out where there were a few cars parked. I took a pee behind a tree. I found a key on the tire of Alan’s car, right where I was told it would be. I got in and began driving home, concentrating on not getting lost. Once I was on track, the drive home was just a short few miles that mainly followed the TT course. As I was driving along, I noticed a lot of strange odds and ends in the front dash of the car. When I had first looked in the back seat before I found the key and got in the car, I had seen a cliff bar and a pump, some shoes and a few other bike-related items. Typical bike racing stuff. Now, as I looked in the front seat area of the car I noticed a bunch of stuff that didn’t seem like it would belong to Alan. Alan is a pretty neat and organized guy, and the front of the car was littered with dozens of pens and pencils, change, pieces of paper, other odds and ends, and a pair of old-man reading glasses. “Hmmm. A lot of crap up here for a rental car that we’ve only had for 2 days,” I thought. I continued on driving.

As I passed the multitude of masters riders currently racing the TT course, a thought went through my head. Apparently the first one in quite some time. “Is this the right car?”

You know where the story’s going from here. I grew more and more paranoid that I had mistakenly gotten into and was currently driving a stranger’s car. My palms began sweating, my heart rate increased a bit, my cortisol levels raised. My eyes were glued to the rear view mirror for a masters rider to pop his head out of his aero tuck and start shaking his fist at me as he realized his stolen car had just passed him. But I kept going, not quite convinced yet that I was driving some random person’s car. No way. That sort of thing doesn’t happen in real life. That only happens to the idiot friend in comedic movies. Plus, I simply didn’t want to believe it. If I did believe it that would mean I’d have to drive all the way back to the gravel pull-out, where I would most likely find out that I was indeed in the correct car and then I would have to start the 20-minute drive all over again. Not worth it. Just keep driving and everything will turn out just fine.

I got to the long gravel road that our house was on and four of my teammates (Alan Schmitz, Alan Adams, Robin, and Winger) approached from the other direction in Alan Schmitz’s car. I rolled the window down as we got closer. They were on the way to the grocery store. They saw me and slowed to a stop.

Me: “Uhhh, hey guys I have a bad feeling that I might be in the wrong car. Is this our car?”
Them (with very confused expressions on their faces): “That’s NOT our car.”
Me: “Shit.”

From here on I was in a bit of a panic. I flipped the car around and started my paranoid drive back to the gravel pull out. My teammates were in front of me, not really understanding what was happening and in somewhat of a laughing hysteria. They yelled back to me to ask if I was joking. I gave a very serious shake of the head “NO.” They continued their laughing. I continued thinking about what I was going to do if the cops were at the scene of the crime.

Unfortunately the driving was very very slow, since we were still on the TT course and many of the other category riders were either still racing or riding back to the start point. Alan and the other’s in the car decided to go back to the gravel parking area with me instead of the grocery store, just in case the cops had shown up and I needed some backing up. And I bet they also wanted to see me get hand cuffed.

My eyes were now glued to the rear view mirror looking for flashing red and blue lights. After the longest 20 minutes of the day, which any other day would have been during the time trial, I finally got back to the gravel pull out.

No one was there. Not even the owner of the car. He must have still been racing. I parked in the same spot the car had been, got out in a hurry, made sure not to leave any of my stuff in there, and wrote a quick note explaining what had happened. It started like this: “Hi, funny story…(I hope)…” I did not sign my name.

Alan Adam’s car (the car I was supposed to pick up) was sitting just to the right of where the car I had stolen had been parked. The car I had gotten into was a small 1990-something green sedan. The correct car was a new, large, grey SUV. The initials of our team “HB” was written in large capitals in the dust of the back windshield. I had spent the entire previous day driving around in this car. Whoops.

Alan and I got into his SUV and we all drove off, with me sighing many sighs of relief as my cortisol levels slowly declined. I came away from the situation having learned a valuable lesson–If I ever become a crack-addict, at least I know where I can easily find my crack money: stealing cars at bike races.

Walking.  It’s boring.  It’s bad for recovery.  It’s a waste of time when you’re used to wheels.  Before this week, I’d probably walked less than 40 miles the entire year.  Mainly to and from the fridge and bathroom.  Cyclists avoid it almost as much as they avoid running.  We have a similar mantra to the Marines’: “don’t run when you can walk, don’t walk when you can stand, don’t stand when you can sit, don’t sit when you can lay down, don’t lay down when you can sleep.”  Except for cyclists, it’s just: “don’t walk…ever.”  Especially up stairs.  With our fear of not being able to exercise while seated, Spencer and I set out on something harder than any other cyclists has done this year.  A long, long walk.

Walkabout Wonderland

Mt. Rainier is a big volcano.  There’s a long hiking trail that goes around the base.  It’s 93 miles long and has 22,000 feet of elevation gain (and loss).  Spencer and I decided to do a little cross training during our mandatory time away from our bikes, and thought doing a short backpacking trip would do us some good.  We’d been talking about it for a few months but didn’t decide on the destination until a few days before the trip.  The Wonderland Trail seemed like a good choice…especially since it was the very first map I found while looking through the map section of REI.

The recommended allotment of time to hike the Wonderland Trail is 10-15 days.  That’s less than 10 miles a day.  Spencer and I quickly decided that distance was for sopping wet wusses and knew that we could do it in about 3 days.  That’s over 30 miles a day.  I’d done some backpacking before, and had done a 50 mile trip in 2 days when I was 15.  I’m 24 now, so if I could do 25 miles a day way back then, I could easily do 34 miles a day now since I’m 9 years older.  Who knows, maybe we’d even do it in 2 days?  Hell, have you met Spencer and I?  We’re absolutely amazing…at everything.  Probably the best all around human beings in every category.  One thing is certain, we don’t lack self-confidence.

I was so un-concerned about the difficulty of hiking 31 miles a day, I went ahead and did a hard plyometrics workout a few days before.  Lots of jumps, running, and sprints and a hard core workout.  It left me extremely sore, and I was still very sore the day we started the hike.  Spencer was so un-concerned about the difficulty of the hike that he decided to get his wisdom teeth removed a few days before.  Spencer, we probably could have used a little of that wisdom—just sayin.

I took the Greyhound up to Tacoma and Spencer picked me up in his really cool yellow car.  We stopped to buy a compass and after an un-satisfyingly medium-sized breakfast for lunch at Sharis, we began our drive out to Mt. Rainier National Park.  But first we stopped at Safeway for a second lunch.  It’s the off-season, after all.  Spencer has already gained 27 pounds.  Mainly in his head.  He’s coming for you, Lang.

We got on the trail at 6pm and immediately took a wrong turn no more than 30 feet from starting.  Whoops.  We got back on track and burned through 6 miles in 2.5 hours.  We were flying.  It was almost all uphill.  And about an hour of it was in pitch dark.  Shit, if we could do 6 miles in 2.5 hours, we might be able to bust out a 40 miler the next day!  Man, we’re amazing!  No one even compares! We’re unstoppable!

We got up at 5:45 and were on the trail at 7 after a restless night where I dreamt about bears circling our tent all night (we left all the food in the tent with us because we couldn’t be bothered to put it in a tree).  Our pace was brisk.  I was still very sore from my plyo workout but endorphins quickly kicked in and I felt fine.  We treated the course like a race, tearing apart the climbs and trying to rest on the downhill and flat.  Except that there was no flat.  Ever.  And it turns out that hiking downhill with a 35 pound pack isn’t easy.  Our knees, ankles and feet started taking a bit of a beating.  Not to worry.  We can tolerate pain.  F’s sake, we’re bad-asses, right?!

We took turns taking pulls on the uphill, trying to shed imaginary competitors and drop the wheel suckers behind us.  When our imaginary opponents had been dropped, we attacked each other, trying to crack one another—all in innocent silence while pretending we weren’t savagely trying to defeat the other on a hiking trip (right Spencer?  Or was it just me?).

We stopped for a break to take a crap in the woods after 3.5 hours.  We downed food and water and had a glance at the map, expecting to have gone 10 miles or more.  We had done 6.  Crap.  We were drenched in sweat despite the cool, misty mountain air at 5,000 feet.  We had been going fast—we thought.  Maybe this was going to be harder than we thought.

But we were sitting down at the time so our confidence was high while we convinced ourselves that we in-fact could make our planned campsite at mile 35.  And that we could actually make it to the next campsite at mile 40!  Spencer and I brim with confidence when our mouths are full of beef jerky and chocolate trail mix.  We pursued our goal with even more zest.

It didn’t last long.  Spencer’s ankles were taking a beating on the downhill.  He had been rolling them all morning and had taped them up, but the downhill was destroying them.  I dropped him on the descent, taking pride in beating my teammate.  At last we reached the bottom and immediately started the next climb.  We put in a hard attack and were at the top an hour or two later.  A little more cracked than we expected.  In fact, we were a lot more cracked than we expected.  And the upcoming descent ruined us.  At this point, Spencer was employing two walking sticks while grimacing down the hill.  It took us over 2 hours to descend it.  Our knees were wrecked.  My quads were flimsy. Calves cramped.  Still plenty of energy though, so we continued on.  No flat.  We got to the base and immediately started the next climb.  Spencer gave me a great lead out up the lower section of the climb, then I attacked and dropped him.  I was feeling good.  I was tired and sore, but the uphill felt great on my joints compared to the downhill.  We stopped twice on the way up to eat and re-group; Spencer was losing confidence in his knees and legs and wasn’t sure that we’d be able to complete 36 miles that day.  I was still optimistic and feeling pretty good.  So I attacked him again when we got going.

The scenery was amazing.  But enough about that.  I grew my lead.

The top of the climb came at last and we started the descent.  All of a sudden, my ankles and feet cramped up and I became paralyzed like Spencer.  We stopped a half hour into the decent for a rest.  We started up again and I felt worse.  We both hobbled downhill with increasing pain.  The map said we had one long decent and one LONG climb ahead of us before we got to our back-up campsite—the one we decided upon if we weren’t going fast enough to make our goal.  The back up was still 10 miles away.  We had gone…gulp…a little under 20 miles that day.  It was now 6:30.  We came to the realization that 10 more miles wasn’t going to happen, so we compromised and decided upon a campsite 5 miles away.  We slogged on.

20 minutes later we reached a campsite.  We still had 5 miles to go.  We stared at each other, dazed, frowning, torn to pieces.  And without much conversation, both hung our heads low and drug our dead legs and bodies a few more painful steps and set our bags down.  We weren’t going a foot further.

What happened next was pretty pathetic.  Or apathetic.  Or both.  I set the tent up while Spencer shit his brains out.  We hobbled around like paraplegics as with third degree burns covering the entirety of their legs.  We set out our sleeping pads and laid them down in the mud.  And lay there.

And lay there.

And finally made dinner.  Ate a beautiful dinner of corned beef and top ramen, crawled in the tent and fell asleep at 9:20.

The alarm went off at 5:45.  We both lay there, incredibly sore.  I don’t think either of us have ever been that sore before.  I moved my leg a little bit in my sleeping bag while the alarm went off and a searing shot of acid-fire was sent through my hamstring.  We had to make up 10 miles today.  That meant a 40-mile day.  Twice as much as we did the previous day.  We both knew that wasn’t happening.  It was raining outside.  And dark and cold.  And we could barely sit upright.  We went back to sleep until 7:30.  10 hours of deep, deep sleep.

We finally got up and started hiking.  Back to the car.  We were defeated.  It only took this conversation to decide it:

Spencer: Kennett, I don’t think we can make it.

Kennett: Yeah I know.

Our new plan was to spend the next two days hiking the 25 miles back to the car.  It would have taken us over a week to complete the 93 miles and we were already getting low on food.  And there was no way our joints could hold up.

But within 10 minutes of hiking, the endorphins kicked in and I felt good.

Kennett: Hey Spencer, maybe we can make it.  At least, we could try.  And if we don’t think we can make it after today we can get off the trail at mile 55 and hitch a ride back to the car.

Spencer: Yeah…maybe.  I don’t know.

The endorphins weren’t running as strong in Spencer’s legs and he was thinking more clearly than me.  We ended up continuing on back to the car.

Basically the next two days went like this: pain, suffering, pain, suffering.  Eating.  Pain, suffering.  Hobbling.

Spencer looked like a little old man with a cane.  A broken little hobbit.  “Bilbo Fucking Baggins” according to Spencer.  I couldn’t stop laughing at his pain.  I would be up ahead on the trail, descending on my own, and I would start laughing by myself from a combination of my own pain, and imagining what Spencer must look like back there on the trail by himself.  Hobbling, grimacing, bent and broken.  Tripping over rocks and rolling his ankles.  Getting angry and smashing his walking sticks on rocks.  Finding new walking sticks.  Walking sticks breaking under his weight.  More swearing.  Possibly a tear or two.  More pain.  I laughed at the thought of this, stubbed my toe on a boulder and cursed.  Rolled my own ankle and limped over tree roots.  Searched for walking sticks of my own.  We weren’t meant for this.  Our bone density showed it.  Being frank, we were fucked.  Our legs were absolutely fucked.

The last mile of the trail took us over an hour.

3 days and one evening of hiking and our legs were more ruined than the Tour of Utah, Cascade, Mt. Hood, and Redlands combined.  We were blistered.  Feet, shoulders, and backs were rubbed raw from the backpacks.  Spencer’s ankles and feet were swollen.  Our knees clicked when we bent them.  We were bow-legged, hobbling, old men.  We got a hotel in Yakima that night.

Backpacking is like a stage race.  You’re completely consumed in the task at hand.  Nothing else matters.  You wake up and eat, pack up the tent.  Hike.  Hike all day and eat all day.  You get to camp, exhausted, and set up the tent and get water.  And sit around and eat until you go to sleep.  It’s an amazing thing.  You do so little while doing so much.  Our hunter-gatherer ancestors had a good thing going.  They didn’t spend time wondering what the point of their lives were or if they were living up to their full potential and ‘making the world a better place.’  They didn’t ponder the meaning of their existence.  They pondered their existence.  Whether or not they’d survive the next day.  Survival in the wilderness is the only thing that matters.  Just like training and racing.  Full concentration and suffering demand every fiber of will and effort in your body and mind.  The action in itself gives life meaning.  Backpacking and racing are all consuming.  And when you’re sitting in the dark on the cold wet ground, little things like a hot cup of apple cider are the cherry on top.

This was heavily contrasted by the comforts (and meaninglessness) of the hotel.  Hot water on command.  Huge soft beds in a warm room.  Food at hand and mind-dumbing entertainment on the TV.  It’s no wonder why people are miserable.  Life is about pain and suffering, they’re the only things that matter and the only things worth living for.

I know I’m late for the race report on this one, but here it is at last.

The Univest Grand Prix, 9/11 – 9/12, is a UCI race in Pennsylvania, about an hour north of Philadelphia.  The day after the Univest GP is the Univest Doylestown crit, which has all the same teams but isn’t part of the UCI race.

It was warm out.  I lined up close to the front after the call ups.  I was faced with 11 laps of a 5.8 mile loop and then 5 laps of a 2.8 mile loop, one steep KOM climb that was about a minute long, thousands of spectators lining the road, a large contingent of pro and “amateur” european teams, and last but not least: 154 other riders who desperately wanted one last result before the year was over.  Lucky for me, I had legs of steel.

My legs felt a little too good actually.  After the previous week at the Green Mountain stage race in vermont where I took 9th GC, I was riding with new confidence.  I had never felt better on a bike.  I was riding like an entirely different person, able to climb at the front of the pack with ease while others were popping.  This is also how I felt at Univest.  Except even better.  I was the first person to attack, and quickly got away by myself and caught the TV motorcycles within the first mile of the race.  My effort was short lived though as the pack obviously wasn’t about to let a lone rider off the front.  I got absorbed in the group and others attacked and chased for the next couple miles while I regained my strength.  I attacked again before a sharp right hand corner (there was a total of 400 corners throughout all the laps of the race).  I got away solo and bridged up to a guy who had been off the front for a little while.  I blew past him as we went up the false flat.  I hammered too hard actually.  A minute later a group of five guys caught me and I clung on.  Took a pull.  Rotated back.  I took a look behind and saw that the field was strung out in a long line of 150 riders with gaps opening up at the front, trying to bridge up to us.  A UHC rider who was in the group with me attacked and one other guy and myself followed.  This was only prolonging the futile move as I continued digging myself a large hole.  We were caught right before the steep KOM climb.  A perfect place to get caught after being off the front…not.

The KOM climb tore me a new one as I was pretty quickly shed to the middle of the pack.  It was only half way through the first lap at this point and I had already attacked 3 times and was actually getting worried that I might get dropped if the pace continued on like it was.  We tore around the countless corners at 30 mph, 35 mph, 40 mph.  The 88 mile course was being raced like a 90 minute NRC crit, which are hard enough in themselves when they’re only 90 minutes.  I hung on, continuing to lose places and slide further back in the group.  WTF?!!  I was supposed to be the strong guy on our team for this race.  Before we started, Joe had chosen me to be the protected rider–for the first time all season.  I was beginning to have my doubts as I hung on at the back of the single-file portion of the peloton, strung out with gaps forming in front of me.

I regained my strength by the start/finish though and made a hard chop in the next two corners and went from being 130th to 60th.  Over the next lap, I continued moving up and soon found myself near the front.  Although, now that I think about it, it might have taken me 2 laps to move up back to the front, which would have explained why I never saw the huge breakaway of 15 riders get off the front.  Yep, I finally figured it out.  Funny how writing something down helps flesh out the actual memory.  Damn it.  Reading this, I feel pretty dumb.  Nearly attacked myself out of the race within the first 4 miles of an 88 mile race, which also caused me to miss the breakaway.  Then spent the rest of the race trying to bridge up.

When the break was still only 45 seconds in front of us, there was a good chance at being able to bridge on the KOM climb.  I attacked on the climb or closely followed attacks almost every time up it.  And we went up it 16 times in the race.  Once every lap.  My best attempt was early on in the race, maybe on lap 6 or 7.  I got onto Lang’s wheel and he took me up on the side of the pack during the beginning of the false flat section before the KOM.  He then got on the very front and absolutely drilled it for about 2 minutes to the base of the KOM climb.  A lot of guys were certainly hurting that time up it.  Because Lang’s huge pull and then my attack on the KOM was by far the fastest and hardest we went on that section–which was the hardest section of the race.

Although none of my attacks worked, I guess I have to be happy with how my form was.  Yes, I messed up tactic-wise for attacking to hard and early and missed my chance at being in the break.  But at least I was ABLE to tactically mess it up.  Most of the year I’ve just been hanging on mid pack or only able to throw in attacks at the very beginning of the race when it’s flat.  Today, I was able to attack throughout the entire thing, and in my opinion was possibly one of the 10 strongest guys in the race.

Back to it:

I went off the front right before we started the 5 small circuits.  The breakaway was still away by a minute or so (they never gained more than a minute).  I wanted to be positioned well on the small laps since I knew they were technical and knew there would be crashes, seeing that it was our first time through.  My attack was weak on purpose, and I let two guys catch and come around me.  I was now sitting third wheel as we entered the first new turns onto the small laps.  The rest of the field was right behind.  Perfect spot to be.  If I kept this position, I could even launch another attack on the KOM climb about a mile later.  Perfect.  Except that that didn’t happen and I crashed immediately as we went around a sharp right-hander.  The guy in front took it too sharp and lost his front wheel to a pothole or bump in the middle of the turn.  All three of us went down, me riding over the guy who had caused the crash and then flipping over the bars (flying mostly over the sidewalk and rolling into the grass).  I was up on my feet BEFORE my bike was even done flying through the air.  I grabbed it, set it down back on earth, and got on.  The chain was off and the shifters were bent inwards.  I got off and fiddled with it in a panic.  The entire peloton was gone by the time I got it figured out and re-mounted.  I wasn’t hurt, but was shaking with adrenaline and anger.  I screamed FUCK!!! as loud as I possibly could and started sprinting off the sidewalk onto the road.  Joe came up in the team car and I got into his draft.  He yelled at me to calm down.  He floored it and I sat on the bumper at 35mph.  I looked ahead and saw Sean coming off the back of the pack.  It looked like he was going to be helping me get back on, but he was never able to catch onto the car’s draft.  I shot past Joe as we took some sharp corners leading into the climb.  Out of the saddle, sprinting into the base of the KOM, I could see the pack up ahead, half way up.  Part way up the climb, Joe caught me again and gave me a huge power feed.  I was still pedaling.  I had to because I couldn’t hold onto the bottle at the speed we were going up that hill.

We caught the car in front of us, nearing the end of the caravan.  I let go of the bottle and hammered my way to the back of the pack and caught the field as they summited the climb.  I wish I had a power meter for that whole section while I caught back on.  It would have been a crazy number.

It took me the better part of a lap to get back to the front.  But when I did, I felt strong and relaxed.  The Amore Vita team was on the front bringing the breakaway back, although it didn’t look like they’d be caught.  I sat easy on the climb the next couple laps, watching for moves as I sat in the top 15.

With 1 lap to go I realized I had lost about 30 spots in the group.  Even worse, I got boxed in on the last time up the climb and lost more spots.  After getting chopped in the next few corners I was sitting way back, roughly in 50th position.  I made up some ground but by the time we came to the 1 km sign, the race was decided.  I didn’t risk causing a crash trying to sprint for 25th place as we came into the final 200 meters and I rolled through at 31st.  In a lot of other big races I did this year, 31st would have seemed pretty good.  But I wasn’t happy at all with this one and I was pissed and bitter about it for a full week.

The next day was the crit.  It was raining and I didn’t feel like racing.  I had invested all my emotional energy into the day before and now I just didn’t give a shit anymore.  I lined up near the back.  Got stuck behind some crashes that caused the field to split apart (there were tons of crashes today).  And eventually pulled out even though there were only 60 riders left and my group eventually caught the front a few laps later.  Funny how one day you can be more motivated than you’ve ever been and the next day the least motivated you’ve ever been.  I watched the race from the sideline and immediately regretted pulling out.  My legs were probably decent enough to have sprinted to a top 10 that day.  Oh well.  There’s always next year.