Introduction
The one big
race I do every year, the Everest Challenge Stage Race—two days of racing with
29,000 feet of vertical gain—is coming
right up. In case that “29,000 feet”
description doesn’t tell you much, consider that each stage of this race is
like climbing a 5-mile staircase with 24,000 steps that would take you to the
top of a 1,160-story building. The first
day is bad enough, but the second day is murder. The third (and last) climb on the second day
is, by itself, the equivalent of a two-mile staircase with 10,000 steps
reaching the top of a 490-story building.
A friend
asked recently, “Are you ready?” It was
not my wife who asked. She knows better,
having had quite enough of my blather. It
was my friend John who asked; he flew out from New York to race the EC two
years ago.
I could have
simply answered John directly, since he was reckless enough to ask and might
actually be interested in the answer.
But why answer only him, when I could blog about it on albertnet, where other
people, like my mom and a Russian hacker, might also see it? Plus, maybe you’re considering racing the EC,
or have already signed up, and are wondering more generally, what does it take
to be ready for it?
(Perhaps most
importantly of all, this post will come in handy later, when the EC is over, as
a retrospective building block for self-flagellation.)
My gut
My gut tells
me that I’m ready. But then, what does
“ready” mean? I’m very confident I can
finish, since I have five times before. Beyond
this minimal sense, “ready” begs the question “Ready to do what?” To a snowboarder,
“ready” means “Ready to shred this gnar’!”
Which I’m totally ready to do, unless you’re talking about descending,
where my modern chickenshit approach and undersized “big” chainring keep me decidedly within non-shredding, non-gnar territory.
So, what am
I trying to do this year? Well, after
all the solid training I did last year, I ended up setting the wrong goal. (I should have followed my own advice and not set a goal at all.) I’d been so miserable on the final second-day climb in 2012, I vowed to take it easier in 2013 and pace myself better, especially on the
first day. (Day-to-day recovery is my
Achilles heel.) Did this strategy
work? Well, I certainly felt better on
the second day’s last climb last year, but I was only 3 minutes 40 seconds faster ... and I was 20 minutes slower the first day. So
whatever suffering I saved myself then has been dwarfed by the year of
self-loathing I’ve subsequently suffered.
(I’m reminded of a Steve Coogan line:
“Remember: death is but a moment;
cowardice is a lifetime of affliction.”)
So, this
year, I’m going to try to man up and go as fast as I can, both days. I know that sounds simplistic, but go try
racing for more than twelve hours over two days and then decide if you still
think this all-out business makes any sense at all. So: am
I “ready” to go utterly destroy myself?
Well, can you ever be “ready”
for that? And conversely, aren’t we all born ready?
Of course,
“my gut” doesn’t refer only to a subjective sense of readiness. It also refers to whether or not I’m
fat. “Fat” in cycling parlance means
having an abnormally low amount of body fat that is nonetheless still higher
than what you wish you had. I’m pleased
to report that my fancy electrode-equipped scale tells me, as of a couple days
ago, that I have 5.9% body fat.
There’s some
fine print, though: you have to configure
the scale with your height, age, and whether you’re an athlete or not. This last setting probably tells the
algorithm to simply lower the number so that the self-styled athlete doesn’t
get pissed off and demand a refund on his crappy scale.
The numbers
I keep a
really detailed training diary. I know,
I know, I should use Strava for this, everybody keeps telling me that, but I don’t feel like sharing all
my details with the world, especially if I’m updating the comments right after
a workout and might write something untoward.
(The pro team Omega Pharma-Quick Step has a rule against riders tweeting
within an hour of competition “when when emotions can be running high, and
logic and reason can go out of the window.”)
Old-school
Excel training diary in hand, I compared this year’s EC training to that of
2012. (Of course how I prepared in 2013
is irrelevant, that race being an ugly smear on my memory.) The below chart shows a comparison of the EC
training period (beginning after vacation and ending in mid-September) for both
years. What I’ve discovered is that my
preparation has been almost eerily similar:
Look at that. Only
ten seconds difference on Mount Diablo.
The biggest contrast is the number of Diablo ascents, but this year I
did two fairly comparable rides in Colorado (click here and here for details). The difference in
vertical gain might look like a lot, but actually, I gain that much vertical in
just a couple of weekday (i.e., evening) rides.
Now, if I
were a proper bike dork, I’d have a power meter and could look at all kinds of
extraordinary numbers. And in fact, it
would help me during my rides as well. I
saw this in action last weekend when, on the second trip up Mount Diablo of the
day, my pal Craig dropped my other pal, Ian, and me. Craig just walked away from us (figuratively
speaking). At the summit, when Ian
commented on this, Craig said humbly, “I was just watching my power meter and
trying to keep it between 300 and 350 watts.”
To which Ian replied, “Yeah, I was just trying to keep mine between zero
and 200.”
The requisite lugubrious day
I think it’s
pretty unlikely that anybody training for a race like EC, and then racing it,
will escape having a truly lugubrious day.
If he does, he’s either loafing too much (like I did last year) or is
egregiously lubed like the pros. (Yes of
course I noticed that “egregiously lubed” is an anagram of “lugubrious leg guy,”
except when it isn’t really, which is always.)
The trick, I
think, is to get that lugubrious day out of the way during training so that you
won’t have it during the race. It’s like
an insurance policy against having a particularly bad day when it really
counts. This almost worked in 2012 when
I did a double-Diablo training ride fueled entirely by greasy dim sum, as
chronicled here. But I wasn’t quite miserable enough that day to call it lugubrious, which
perhaps is why that last EC climb became my crowning lugubrious moment of the
year.
What exactly
do I mean by lugubrious? Well, you know,
just mournfully, pathetically, almost comically sad (though too sad for it to
be funny). This photo, I think, captures
it pretty well. Yes, I’m actually
sobbing into my orange slices (after totally cratering in the 2003 La Marmotte).
So, you may
be wondering, have I had my 2014 lugubrious moment? Well, I almost got it out of the way really
early, on January 1, when I raced the Mount San Bruno hill climb. I went into the race angry, and was hoping to
channel that anger into a great performance.
But as I wrote in my subsequent race report, “As I got dropped, I discovered that it’s possible to be bitter without being
angry. In fact, I just felt sad.”
Fortunately,
that wasn’t my most miserable biking moment of 2014. Nor was a frigid ride in the rain in February, though that experience was also awful enough to write about. No, my worst ride of the year so far—which
certainly deserves the lugubrious label—was my first double-Diablo after
getting back from vacation (i.e., from missing almost three weeks
of riding).
Man, that ride
was just awful. I clocked abysmal times
on the climbs, and couldn’t even keep up with my pals on the flat section back
from the mountain. (Because I’d taken so
long on the climbs, Craig had to really motor to get home on time, and couldn’t
wait up for me anymore.) I finished up
with over an hour of solo riding when I was barely able to turn the
pedals. By the end I was just totally
shattered. Everything hurt ... my legs,
of course, and my butt, and also my forearms, my biceps, even my hands. Even coasting hurt. I came away from that ride feeling that the “good
base mileage” rule is bogus—that I’d have been no worse off had I done no
riding at all during the spring. After that
ride I was totally useless for five days straight.
(They say
misery loves company, and I was duly cheered to learn that another pal on that
ride fared even worse than I had.
Despite skipping the second trip up the mountain, he had to stop to lie down three times on the way home.)
Omen
All those
stats I provided earlier may end up meaning nothing, as stats often do, so I
should probably hedge my bet a bit with an omen. I certainly have one to share, though whether
it’s a good omen or not remains to be seen.
Last week I
was hammering home through Tilden Park, at the tail end of an evening training
ride, in the last moments of weak daylight before dusk set in, when I saw
something swoop down from out of a tree.
Its trajectory was totally unlike that of a bird. It came right at me and then swerved at the
last second, but in the wrong direction so instead of going over my head, it
went down and actually hit my thigh on its way past. “What are you, blind?!” I thought, before realizing that yes, in fact, it
was. It had to have been a bat.
Moments after seeing it, I saw another creature of the same size and odd
flight style, but this one was silhouetted against the horizon and was
definitely a bat. I got home and googled
“bats Tilden park Berkeley,” and sure enough, bats can be found here. Or they can
find you. (The other odd creature I’ve
been seeing lately, but on Mount Diablo, is the tarantula. I’ve seen three of them in the last month.)
So, what
does it mean to be hit by a bat while riding?
Stay tuned to albertnet, because in early October I’ll give you the a
full report on the 2014 Everest Challenge:
what I ate, and how badly I destroyed myself, and thus whether being hit
by a bat is a good or bad omen.
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