Note: This post is rated R for mild strong language
and mature themes.
Introduction
In last week’s post I described the exploits, particularly the gastronomic ones, of my friends
and me as we tackled Stage 1 of the 2012 Everest Challenge stage race. Now, with the professional
sport of cycling collapsing around us—Lance Armstrong’s team, his maid, and even
his pet hamster have confessed to participation in his doping ring—I offer the
sorry tale of my un-drug un-fueled assault on Stage 2 of the 2012 EC.
Pre-race
I slept
unusually well for an EC second night; that is to say, I slept some. As my roommate John pointed out, the AC unit
had a continuous fan feature, as opposed to those enemy-of-sleep versions that
turn on and off all night. Still, as the
chilled air compressor periodically cycled on and off, its low, deep groaning
came and went. (Or was that John?)
The Uncle
Sam cereal was even harder going the second day, because I was at the end of
the box and all the heavy stuff—various kinds of seeds and, I think, gravel—had
settled to the bottom. John and I ate in
silence, which frightened me. Normally,
the EC motel room banter is the giddy, profanity-laced stuff of locker rooms,
but this was almost gloomy, like a wake.
John and I could be accused of having a poor attitude, but as you shall
see, prescience would be the better description.
We got to
the start line as the sun was rising and the moon was setting. I think there was even an occultation of Venus
in progress, but I was a bit distracted and didn’t look for it.
The main
source of my distraction was my bowels.
You may be rolling your eyes and groaning: “This again?!” Well, remember, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” The fact is, evacuation is a critical
part of this sport, and is too often swept under the carpet. Now. Don’t
get me wrong, the organization of EC is excellent overall, but they need more
San-O-Lets (aka Port-A-Potties). On this
day there were only two, and what’s worse, they were still atop a trailer. Not only did I not have time to wait in line,
but I feared, albeit irrationally, that somebody would drive off while I was in
there.
Fortunately,
I took a lesson from last year when a guy coming out of a San-O-Let told me,
“That thing’s out of toilet paper. I had
to use my arm warmers.” So I’d brought a
roll of TP from the motel. I found a
good bush off the side of the road that would provide excellent cover from most
vantage points—but not including, alas, that of the van. And that’s where the setting moon came into
play. All the guys were about to
photograph the moon over the jagged saw blade mountains when I entered the
frame. There was nothing I could do—I
had to go. You will not be seeing this
“double moon” shot on this blog, though I hear it’ll be on the cover of “Forbes”
next month.
Stage 2 – 76 miles, 14,030 feet of climbing
During the
race, I drank four bottles of Cytomax, two bottles of Gatorade, a bottle of
Heed, and two bottles of water. I ate
four gels. I swallowed enough pride to
produce a glut of bile, which tasted only a bit better than the Gatorade (which
was lemon-lime, a flavor I burned out on during my 1994 bike tour and have wisely avoided ever since).
The first
climb went pretty well, except for a) knowing that I was in 10th place and
should defend that, while b) knowing I should pace myself, which meant watching
twenty of my competitors ride away as soon as the road went uphill. It was sort of the “presidential primary”
strategy: don’t do anything bold that
might backfire; and, hope my opponents do.
John and I
did the first climb and about half of the second climb together. It was hot and dry and my legs were heavy and
I plinked along in my lowest gear a lot of the time, remembering how I’d
cracked on the third climb the previous year. The idea was to save up my strength
and finish strong, but I couldn’t find much strength to save. Paul, racing in the 45+ category that started
ten minutes behind, blew by us, inspiring me to … well, to train better next
year, or race smarter, or switch to an activity I’m better suited to, like
typing.
The race
promoters lengthened the second climb this year. They’d announced this on Friday evening, but
didn’t say how much longer it would be.
Looking back, I think we were all unknowing subjects in some kind of
cruel psychological experiment. I kept
expecting to see the leaders of my race coming down the other side, and the
longer I went not seeing them, the closer to despair I came. (A more foolhardy rider would have supposed
he was simply not that far behind. I knew
better.)
I spent much
of the climb trying to work out how I might calculate how far behind I was,
based on when and where the leaders passed me on their way down. Doing math during bike races is notoriously
hard, but I had plenty of time to think.
By the time I finally saw Craig coming down, I had it worked out: I held in my head the current altitude at
that moment (a better landmark than anything visual in this stark, Road Runner
terrain) and the clock time. When, an
eternity later (the climb having been, finally, four miles longer this year), I
crossed that altitude again on my way down, I checked the new clock time and
subtracted. Craig, it turned out, was
twelve minutes ahead of me at that point.
Pretty amazing, since he was still as sick as a dog, breathing raspily
and almost unable to talk.
I couldn’t
be bothered to pedal or get in an aerodynamic tuck during that descent. I just sat there, coasting, and waited for it
to be over. I finally reached the van, which
was parked at the base of the third and final climb, and saw Craig there, off
his bike and in street clothes. As well
as he’d’ been riding, he was still sick, and the heat and altitude made it
impossible for him to breathe well enough to continue. He and Ian gave me some drink, gels, and
encouragement, and I struck out for the final climb.
I was
feeling pretty close to despondent.
Where was all that energy I’d been saving up? Where was the enthusiasm I’d had on this
climb the first couple times I raced EC?
I couldn’t face the reality of what I had left to do: over two hours of climbing, with over 6,000
feet of elevation gain, in the baking heat.
In previous years I had a teammate or two to ride with; this time I was
off the back and oddly, breathtakingly alone.
No rider in sight, anywhere. I
could be anybody out here, on any day, in any era.
I couldn’t
use my mileage to measure my progress because I hadn’t worked out how much
longer that second climb had been. Meanwhile,
the thought of slowly ticking off the altitude benchmarks—4000 feet, 5000 feet,
6000 feet, 7000 feet, 8000 feet, 9000 feet, and, yes, even 10000 feet—was far
too demoralizing to face. (Plus, as
often as I wiped the sweat off my bike computer, I couldn’t keep the screen clear enough to read it anyway.)
I devised a
plan: instead of looking around me at
the terrain to figure my progress, I’d just keep my eyes on the road ten feet
ahead. That created the illusion of
speed, at least. And I decided to “play”
the entire double-album “Pink Floyd The Wall” in my head, including all the background sounds, TV snippets, the
schoolteacher yelling “wrong, do it again!”, etc. Because I knew my frazzled brain would get
caught in endless loops of certain songs, I could be confident that by the time
I got to “Outside the Wall,” I’d have been climbing for at least 90
minutes. Then I’d be close enough to the
end to monitor my progress without sliding into despair.
(The other
benefit of this strategy was preventing the random songs that sometimes pop
into my head while I’m riding. All the
way up Alpe d’Huez during the 2003 La Marmotte, I had Ravel’s “Bolero” in my head, which was the musical equivalent of a
prison sentence. John had had it even
worse during the final EC climb of Stage 1:
pondering that he had such a long way to go, he suddenly got “Ride Like
the Wind” by Christopher Cross stuck in his head, and couldn’t get rid of
it. Poor bastard.)
Around the
time my brain got to “Goodbye Cruel World” I was actually doing a little
better. At the higher elevation the heat
had subsided a bit and I had a decent rhythm.
I passed a couple of fellow Masters who had dropped me at the base of
the second climb, well over an hour before.
They were really crawling. “Dude,
you’re a fucking stud!” one of them
said. I have to admit, that
encouragement felt pretty good.
There’s a
descent about 2/3 of the way up this climb.
The road drops some 200 feet, erasing your progress toward the
finish. It’s totally demoralizing. I took the opportunity to eat a gel. Hunting in my jersey pocket I came upon a
sleeve of Clif Shot Blocks that Craig had given me. My hand groped it, trying to figure out what
it was. Once I’d identified it, my brain
tried to comprehend what Shot Blocks were and what they did. You eat them, right? But what are
they? And how do you get into the
package? Is it like Pez? I give up trying to fathom this great Shot
Block mystery and managed to find a gel.
I ran out of
head-music. The last lyric, “Banging
your heart against some mad bugger’s wall,” was eerily apropos. My own heart was working far better than my
poor legs; in fact, the heart’s foreman had sent half the chambers home. On the shallower pitches my heart rate wasn’t
even in the 130s. My breathing was
strangely, unsettlingly slow at times. I
kept pushing on the right shift lever, hoping in vain that I actually had one
lower gear. The final few miles were
like slow motion. The guy I’d passed
earlier, who’d called me a stud, now passed me back; if I’d had the energy I’d
have said, “Do you care to rescind your earlier statement?” Worst of all, I was starting to feel
lightheaded. Stretches of the climb
appeared that I don’t recall ever having seen before. It was like when something familiar, looked
at too closely, starts to look odd and strange.
Finally I
reached a terribly steep ramp with a couple spectators on it, and someone said,
“200 feet to go!” I couldn’t believe
it. I didn’t dare. But then, why would he lie? I saw race officials sitting on lawn
chairs. I saw a line painted across the
road labeled “FINIS.” Still I couldn’t
believe it (even though the finish line seemed long overdue). “Is this the finish? Am I done?” I cried out desperately. The officials laughed. “Yeah, you’re done.” Normally I would coast a few hundred feet
down the other side to where the food was, but I couldn’t manage it. I clipped out and stopped. “Did you get my number, 802?” I asked half a
dozen times. They had. “Can I borrow that empty chair?” Yes, I could.
I sat there at the finish line for a good ten minutes, watching other
riders come across. Two or three of them
cried out desperately, “Is this the finish?
Am I done?”
Finally I
made it to the rest area. Jamie, 4th
overall in the Masters 55+, greeted me enthusiastically and took my bike. I found a chair and re-slumped. I could smell the spinach-and-feta
quesadillas the volunteers were cooking up, and I was hungry, but I literally
lacked the energy to stand up and walk over there. For a whole hour I just sat. I couldn’t even bring myself to hunt for my
bag of warm clothes. I’ve never been so
shattered after a race.
Eventually I
made it to the food tables, drank some Coke, drank some chocolate milk, drank
some ginger ale, and then spied a big bottle of V-8 juice—the only real electrolyte
replacement drink. I asked if I could
pour myself some. “Yeah, please finish
it up because it’s our last bottle.” I
followed this with infinity quesadilla slices, then had to sit again. The chairs were all taken. I sat on a tarp. I found my bag, spent five minutes stretching
my arm warmers over my squeaky, sticky arms, and got out my camera.
Paul sat
down too.
At some
point John showed up. As with Stage 1,
he suffered terrible cramps during the last climb. (All my photos of the Stage 2 summit are from
the seated vantage point.)
John made
his pilgrimage to the food tent. He came
back after awhile asking, “Could you guys find any V-8 juice over there?” Oops.
Eventually
we found the energy to begin the descent.
Normally I love this descent, but I really didn’t feel like being on my
bike anymore. A short way down we
stopped at a scenic overlook to snap some photos. Here’s one.
Unfortunately,
the effort of descending that short distance overwhelmed me and I needed to lie
down for a bit. The sun beating down on
my face was intolerable. I was really in
bad shape.
Miraculously,
Ian and Craig showed up with the van. Here’s
our whole crew, stoked to be done with riding for the day. (The exception was Paul, who manned up and
rode the descent, just for fun.)
For the data
nerds among you, here are my climbing stats (power and heart rate):
- 248 watts
at 142 bpm on the first climb;
- 220 watts
at 133 bpm on the second climb;
- 220 watts
at 136 bpm on the last climb (my cadence was 61, so you can see my 39/27
gearing was actually plenty low enough, at least for a mosher like me)
Note that
these are “dog-watts”—that is, they’re based on my rate of vertical gain, my
speed, and my weight (f=mgh) without considering wind resistance, etc.
Post-race
We stopped
at a little hot springs resort to shower.
(I won’t tell you where it is; it’s great that no other cyclists have
discovered it.) One of the guys complained
that his coin-op shower had been ice-cold.
Craig went to investigate and determined, to his great mirth, that the
rider in question had only turned the Cold handle, not the Hot. This is how shattered an EC rider can be.
A member of
our bike club, Mary
Beth, had been in Bishop a few weeks before and recommended Astorga’s Mexican restaurant. We gave it a shot. The salsa was good and hot, I had my first
beer in many weeks, and someone ingeniously ordered guacamole. It was fantastic. I was starting to feel normal. But then things got really dicey because
there wasn’t enough guac to go around.
The only fistfight I’ve ever seen in a restaurant was at Juan’s Place in Berkeley and I had the feeling I was about to witness, if not participate in,
another. Fortunately somebody had a cool
head and simply ordered more guac.
My dinner
was the giant combo plate: chile
relleno, chicken enchilada verde, beef taco, beans, rice, and—just for the
empty calories—a side of flour tortillas.
It was a serious plate of food and I attacked it with a severity I only
wish I could bring to bike racing. It
has been said of my eating, “Sometimes I can’t bear to look.” I know Ken had a chile relleno burrito
because I recommended it; other than that, I had tunnel vision and the rest of
the table became peripheral blur, their speech a low drone. I was in The Zone. I should have been stuffed by the time we got
out of there, but I was only just sated.
As we drove
by the pizza place in Groveland, too late at night to stop, I looked longingly
out the window. I got some potato chips
from a convenience store when we stopped for gas. By the time we made the Bay Area I was more
tired than hungry, and had to figure out how to get home from Rockridge. Ken loaned John and me his old van.
“It’s been
totaled and the chassis is bent, so I had to remove the gear shift template,
but I made a diagram of it,” he told me.
Actually, that quote might bear no resemblance to what he said; I was
barely coherent by this point. It was
surreal driving that van across Berkeley at 1:30 a.m. Sometimes I was able to work the gears just
fine; other times I couldn’t find first and just sat there, idling,
hunting. As Vladimir Nabokov wrote, “The last long
lap is the hardest.”
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