Blog drafting

Not drafting in the literary sense, but in the cycling sense, where you don't have to work so hard because the person in front is making a nice hole in the wind. I'm going to draft here just like I do on the road, and encourage you all to have a look at this ongoing description of the NCAC ride if you haven't already. Avant-garde photography and a lively telling of it. Thanks for the pull, H.

tough day on the road

This was from Day 3 of the ride. Looks like the end of the day at the Yolo County fairgrounds in Woodland, judging from the looks of the trees and the rider. Bad helmet hair, skid marks, wrist tan line, smile, and all. A good day to have ended, and to reach a place where there were showers. I thought it might be quite nice to set up camp in the shower--it was a trade-off between being cool enough and having to stand up all night.

Photo courtesy of HMR. She knows how to make her subjects look their best. Imagine how I REALLY must have looked.

Hot and cold

Made it!

Ten-year record high temperatures (or something like that) for the last three days. I don't think of myself as highly heat-tolerant. In fact, it turns out that I am physically pretty heat tolerant, but mentally, maybe not so much. The riding in heat (and wind, on Day #1) was really tough but I didn't feel like I was having a 'meltdown' until after we stopped for the day and the initial bliss of finishing and having a shower had subsided. The first evening we stayed at fairgrounds in Gridley (home of Continental Athletic Supply, by the way). The main building was relatively cool and well-ventilated and there was plenty of good shade and grass for our tents. In consideration of the record-high temperatures, our director Joaquin announced we'd be rolling out at 6:00 a.m. instead of 7:00 a.m. Which meant a 4:30 a.m. wakeup call. It had been so hot that day that people cheered when they heard this. I don't think I cheered, but I agreed it was a good idea.

On Day 2, we looped to the north through Oroville and Durham (within 10 miles of my home, and my pool) and then through blazing hot, shadeless rice and wheatfields to Colusa where a bank sign in the shade said 101ºF. We stayed at the high school that night. I think I summarized my impression of it in a previous post. The legal aid lawyer in me wondered about the demographics of the high school. Not only were the facilities in sorry shape (except for the kitchen, which was air-conditioned and made our caterers very happy, so much so that I think they slept in there) but the only shady places to pitch tents were so overwatered that the ground was like walking on a sponge. I hit kind of a low point but didn't stay there too long (I say 'kind of' because I think I felt worse for awhile on the third day).

One adaptive technique was to fill ziploc bags with ice and place them on different places. Reportedly, our 55 riders and crew went through about 150 pounds of ice and 150 gallons of water per day for the 3 full days of the event.

I tried to feel grateful for the hospitality of Colusa and the high school. I don't know if I quite succeeded. The idea of having to go to school there every day was too depressing. I'm about to go off on another build school vs. build prison tirade, but I think I've done that before, and I'm too tired to do that and keep discussing the ride.

I started coming down with a cold on Day 3, but the riding before lunch (lunch happened between 10:30 and 11:00 or so) was stunning through the Capay Valley -- and mostly downhill after a long climb up Highway 20. Not only that, but the organization that provided our lunch that day cooked up some Cajun hot links in addition to the standard lunch meat and cheese. I can't help but get excited about something like that. Even though it seemed likely that I'd regret it later.

Though we didn't have wind to struggle with on Day 3, it sure did heat up in the afternoon. But sometimes heat is helpful -- in the last ten or fifteen miles I had yet another pedal - clip related spill. My second such incident during the ride and bringing my grand total to 4 times in the last 3 weeks. My bruises are getting bruises -- it's almost as good as football! But I digress. I was approaching a stop sign where it appeared that I would in fact need to make a full stop, but my right shoe cleat jammed because it had a rock and some mud stuck in it from the last rest stop and I couldn't get my foot out in time. Here we go again, I thought, as I went over. The heat was helpful in that the asphalt / gravel was so hot when I landed that I bounced right back up, whereas I might otherwise have lain there in the dust for a few seconds for the full dramatic effect.

The Yolo County fairgrounds in Woodland were an improvement over Colusa High School (except for the lack of A/C in the main building) but I was pretty much cooked. The fairgrounds had booked a dance party in the building next to where we were camping and trying to get to sleep around 8:00 p.m. "Achy Breaky Heart" in Spanish is more danceable than it is sleep-able. Too bad I wasn't there for dancing.

I think more than anything else, the people made the ride. One of my fellow riders, Travis, was featured in the Sacramento Bee last week. And singing songs with Heather made some of the hot miles pass pretty quickly. I thought of the Pioneer Children Singing as They Walked and Walked and Walked and Walked. It's an adaptive trait. I also thought of ill-fated parties who attempted their journeys at the wrong time of year. Good thing there were plenty of snacks at rest stops. I thought, at least we're not running the Badwater Ultramarathon in Death Valley where it's so hot the runners have to run on the white line so their shoes won't melt. I probably mentioned that out loud a couple more times than was necessary. Whatever it took to get through.

We're getting a CD of photos from the ride, for which I'm grateful because I was too lazy to carry my camera around. I'll post some when they arrive.

I need to go slather on more Vicks and drink my juice. I originally planned to go back to work today but I was too sick this morning. And a bit tired.

This time 2 weeks from now...

I'll be in my tent, hopefully asleep, at the Colusa fairgrounds, with about 180 of my 330 miles behind me.

Our household has had a bit of a stir recently. My roommate found a teeny tiny puppy...teeny tiny because it's a chihuahua...wandering around in a parking lot in some non-residential part of town. And brought it home, of course, because what else can you possibly do with a lost puppy. We're providing foster care for now. And having to practice some tough love as the puppy-wandering-around-the-house method was not having any really desirable results. I had a small animal playpen in the closet and he's been in it for about half a day now, periodically screaming like a peacock being boiled alive (I imagine).

If I got a medium sized handlebar bag and teeny tiny Doggles for him to wear, he could come with me on the bike ride.

He's pretty funny to watch with the cat (and vice versa). The cat is surprisingly tolerant of him. Though I could tell the cat wasn't thrilled with the screaming. He's a very expressive cat but I've never before, so clearly, understood his meaning to be "How long should I expect this to continue?"

Decades come and go, but a century is a long time

Lessons learned over the weekend:

• 100 miles of biking doesn't hurt as much as 26.2 miles of running.
• I arrived at the rest stops at pretty much the same time as everybody else from our group, regardless of how fast I tried to go, because they were smart enough to stay together and draft while I was riding off into a headwind.
  
• It's a bad idea to schedule things after a century ride that make you feel like you need to hurry up and finish it already, because:
• people think you're showing off (and then it's harder to get sympathy when you're tired);
• you are in danger of missing the things scheduled afterwards unless they're happening at the place where the century ends.

• The fun of riding as fast as you can for as long as you can keep it up (relative concepts; my all-out 'fast' would be a leisurely spin through the orchards for others) is costly, but the fun of having friends with whom to ride, through the good stretches and rough patches, and with whom to go to In 'n Out after two days of riding, is better than finding a sushi polka-dot jersey on sale.
• I can go farther than I ever thought. A nice motorhome with a fridge, or even a motorcycle, would be more comfortable, but there's probably lots of time to spend being comfortable.
• You can't bring too many snacks. A rider in our group said that her heart rate monitor said she burned about 2600 calories in the 8 hours it took us to finish (about six hours of actual riding and two hours of rest stops). Maybe I'll start wearing mine so I can calculate the number of In 'n Out menu items I can consume and still be in a calorie deficit.
  
• That would be some clever fast-food marketing...to hand out free heart rate monitors to people that track their exercise and how many calories they've burned, and for every 10,000 calories burned, you can get free stuff. Energy trading.

So next Sunday I've got a chance to apply some of what I learned. Maybe I'll start working on the Energy Trading project too...hello, In 'n Out Headquarters?

I Have Confidence

What would this day be like...I wondered.

I headed out to my first official group training ride for the NCAC this morning wondering if I'd be able to keep up or even keep going for 43 miles. Before the ride there was some not so reassuring talk of the hills on the route. With Karla still at the shop (I picked her up this afternoon, though) I was riding my skinny-tire bike (Billie, the blue KHS Flite 300 that survived some very heavy loads while I was in law school) with clipless pedals. Can someone can explain why they're called "clipless pedals," but we "clip in" when we ride them? Anyway, I haven't ridden "clipped in" since before the knee injury and it took a few miles into the ride to get over that fear of falling over if you forget to unstick your foot from the pedal before you stop.

The ride took us through the countryside southwest of Winters (about 30 miles west of Sacramento). Here's a map of the route. Except for a little bit of the first big hill that I had to hike after I stopped and couldn't start again because it was too steep, I kicked some hill butt. I didn't fall behind. Rather the opposite. I surprised myself. I guess those 5:30 - 7:00 a.m. spinning classes twice a week at my gym have paid off. I think I'm going to be a bit stiff tomorrow but so will a lot of other people. Felt good to know that there's nothing at all deficient in my bike legs.

Plus, when I picked up Karla, looking good as new (or perhaps even a bit better since the person who wrapped the handlebars knew what he was doing) at the bike shop, all the bike shop people said how super neat she is. Gosh. Kind of like when I take my cat to the vet and everyone compliments his glossy fur and linebacker physique.