From the Archives - My First Thanksgiving as a College Kid

Introduction

Here’s something from my archives. It’s twenty-five years old so maybe it’ll remind you of your teenager days, or prove that teenagers have always been this bad, or otherwise gratify you somehow.

My First Thanksgiving as a College Kid - November 28, 1988

I never much liked the phrase “Turkey Day.” I think we’re supposed to be thankful for more than just the dinner. I like to think I can relate to those early pilgrims. As I understand it, they were basically social outcasts who left England in exile, and then were so incompetent they almost starved to death. But instead of denying all this, they made a big point of showing gratitude to the Native Americans who saved them.

At least, that’s the story I was able to glean from the “Charlie Brown Thanksgiving” special and various picture books I read as a child. More recently I read an Art Buchwald article in the “L.A. Times” that made it all seem a lot more complicated. The article described how, after the USA worked the Native Americans over for a while and condemned them to reservations, we had to subtly shift the concept of the holiday to encompass thanks in general, for all kinds of things, not just escaping starvation.

I guess the main thing I’m thankful for is that I must have it pretty good, because it’s easier for me to figure out what other people should be thankful for. For example, there was this hapless guy I saw out on the highway the other day during my bike ride. He was also on a bike ride, though you couldn’t call him a cyclist. I don’t actually know what he thought he was doing out there on southbound 101. What he was doing was trying to fix a flat without any idea how this is done. He was trying to replace the tube without removing his wheel from the bike; I have no idea how he planned to get the tube around the frame. But even if, through some miracle, he achieved that feat, he never would have been able to inflate the sucker because he had a presta valve and a schrader pump. In true holiday spirit, I did the entire repair. It was easy for me to imagine how thankful he felt for my help. It’s a little harder for me to feel thankful about this whole affair since I didn’t really get anything out of it. I guess I can be thankful I’m not that ignorant.

Now, even though I don’t like the phrase “Turkey Day,” I do like turkey and do see fit to do more on this holiday than sit around feeling thankful. Thanksgiving is a celebration of food and family, too. So I went up to San Luis Obispo to share the holiday with my brother Geoff and our fond ex‑ roommate. We went to this fellow’s parents’ house, as they’re the closest thing to family we have on the central coast, besides each other. [After moving away from home, I lived with Geoff in San Luis Obispo until September 1988, when I moved to Isla Vista, further down the coast of California, to attend UCSB.]

The original plan called for me to ride my trusty Team Miyata [racing bike] up to San Luis Obispo on Thursday, recover while basking in the friendly companionship and male bonding of my friends in SLO, and then ride back down on Sunday. Unfortunately, nature and the customs of others conspired against me to stifle the original plan. The first heavy rain of the winter hit Isla Vista hard on Wednesday, drenching me completely during my 15‑mile (each way) commute to work at Bike ‘n’ Hike. That dampened my enthusiasm for a five-hour rainy slog the next day. In addition, our friend’s household begins Thanksgiving dinner early in the afternoon, which would dictate a 4:00 am departure time, which clashed with my better judgment. So instead, our friend came down in his parents’ new Mazda sports sedan, which has so many electric gadgets and gizmos I can envision a science fiction movie about the gizmos embarking on a hostile takeover of the innocent motorists.

An extra benefit of being picked up and driven to SLO is that I didn’t really know the way up there anyway. I’m not the greatest traveler, truth be told. But at least I was smart enough to pack light for this trip. All I brought was my bike, my biking gear, and the clothes on my back, which I figured I’d leave at Geoff’s apartment for the next time I rode up there.

Thanksgiving was fine. A good time was had by all (assuming, of course, that Geoff and I didn’t ruin the evening for anybody by leveling the buffet‑style spread, leaving our hosts precious little in the way of leftovers). After a long weekend of hanging out I was well fueled for my ride back to UCSB.

I’d guessed the day would start out cool and I wasn’t wrong, so I wore my Chillys Thermax tights. I bought these using my employee discount when I worked at the factory in SLO that makes Hot Chillys. Thermax is this new miracle fabric. Through some fancy technology, it insulates perfectly and don’t react with bodily juices to produce an offensive odor. The only drawback of these tights is that the crotch is designed with old men in mind. Old men fall into two categories: those who like the crotch of their clothing to sag around their knees, and those who like to pull their tights up to their armpits. The Hot Chillys accommodate both styles perfectly with a more-than-ample crotch. I pull them up to my armpits, but somehow they almost always end up sagging, too. I have a recurring nightmare in which the crotch gets caught on the nose of my saddle and I totally crash.

With great ceremony and deliberation, I filled my jersey pockets. In the left went two bananas and two Power Bars. In case you haven’t heard of Power Bars, they are a scientifically blended food bar fortified with all the nutrients, vitamins, and mineral replacements necessary to sustain an athlete during intense competition. In lay terms, a Power Bar is a block of highly compressed Tender Vittles cat food, but chocolate-flavored. They aren’t as tasty as a King Size Snickers Bar, but they do the trick out on the road. In the middle pocket, I put my keys and my pocketknife, and in the right pocket went the wallet, map, and Lou Reed tape (which I’d inadvertently brought up to SLO and had to bring back down). At this point, the pockets seemed full, but not stuffed. It’s a good thing they’re such stretchy Lycra because as the temperatures rise, the clothing gets shed, which always creates a storage problem.

The owner of our favorite bike shop did me a favor and mapped out the perfect route to Isla Vista. This route follows Highway 101 most of the way, taking various detours to remain legal. Cyclists are required by law to take a detour through every town they reach. I originally figured this bizarre legislation was conceived by area merchants, who see cyclists as a source of possible revenue. But actually, I reckon it was concocted with insane drivers in mind. In California, a motorist can only see the exit he wants from the far left lane, and has to do the notorious “L.A. Lane Dive”, a maneuver in which he cuts across several lanes and dives into a 15‑mph exit at 80 mph. A cyclist, of course, would be flattened in such a scenario if he weren’t already clinging to the farthest-right edge of the exit himself.

I had to dig through the local paper for the weather forecast. No little summary on the front page, no sir. The front page of the “San Luis Obispo Telegram Tribune” is reserved for important news events, such as the local high school’s basketball game, or a fascinating human interest story like the Jones’ garden growing a two‑foot pumpkin or two girls walking home from school. The weather report read, “Possible clear skies; otherwise, cloudy. Warm temperatures; otherwise, cool. Highs in the low 50’s to mid 70’s, lows in the mid 40’s to low 50’s. Fair weekend forecast; otherwise, poor.” Maybe it wasn’t quite as wishy-washy as this, but it was close.

The ride itself was fairly uneventful. As the weather warmed up, the jersey pockets filled up. Soon the bananas were mashed against the Power Bars and my Hot Chillys top, and then the jacket was forced to make room in the middle pocket for the tights. As the map became curdled (a result of repeated panic navigation checks) it seemed to grow, threatening to shove my sunglasses case out of the right pocket to its death. By the time I reached Buellton, I probably had the equivalent of half my body weight pushing down on my lower back.

Reaching Buellton was a major relief, as I finally knew I wasn’t lost. The Power Bars had hit the spot; I only bought a small Snickers bar and a Coke at my favorite food store. No, the world‑famous Andersen’s pea soup would have to wait yet again. But a harsh realization accompanied my arrival here: I had to go to the bathroom. That would mean finding a bathroom, leaving my bike unattended, removing my sunglasses, my helmet, and the overstuffed jersey, finding a place to put them, and then reassembling the whole mess. I seriously doubted this was possible, remembering the axiom that once you have opened a can of worms, there is no way to put all the worms back into the can. I elected to stick it out and do the last 35 miles on a full bladder. This led to a really fast pace and intense ache that began in the crotch and radiated outward, shoving my stomach into my rib cage and making every pedal stroke really unpleasant during the last few miles.

Here are the statistics of the journey:

Cost: $4.00 (food)
Distance: 100.3 miles (including loop around the La Loma parking lot to break the 100‑mile barrier)
Time: 4:51:58 (not including breaks); 5:05:30 (total elapsed time)
Average Speed: 20.6 mph (personal record)
Score: 10.0, 10.0, 9.5, 9.5, and 7.5 (from the Romanian judge).
Critical acclaim:
—”Two thumbs up!” (Siskel & Ebert).
—”The most important ride of the holiday season!” (Me).

Race Report - Everest Challenge 2010

NOTE: This post is rated PG-13 for mild coarse humor.

Introduction

Permit me to regale you with the tale of the 2010 Everest Challenge. I realize I already galed my albertnet readers with such a story last year, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned from Hollywood movies, it’s the value of cheap retreads.

As with previous posts about cycling events, this report is targeted at those who have little patience for bike race blow-by-blow accounts, but who have a lot of patience for reading about the strange and fanatical dining habits of the competitive cyclist, along with various road trip anecdotes. If you’re not interested in either topic, you could just scroll down because there are some photos. Or don’t. Whatever.

Pre-race

The attrition this year started before the race even began. Mark couldn’t come because he had to go to a wedding of some fairly close relative; our hopes that the engagement would fall through did not come to fruition. Craig couldn’t come because his wife had an important overseas business function; he was trying to get her to quit her job but ultimately she didn’t. Tim had a bad crash and wasn’t able to train; I have no witty rejoinder for this, of course, it being simply very sad. Nor can I explain, actually, why Lucas and Steve didn’t end up registering. So I went to Bishop as the sole East Bay rider in orange.

Paul and Jamie drove up together in Paul’s dark stealth vehicle, a Honda Element color-coded to match their dark stealth bikes. They’re able to put the bikes on a rack inside the car to keep those heavy, non-aerodynamic dead bugs off the bikes. Ian and I drove in his VW Golf, which is all tricked out with a metric dashboard, an ominous engine light, a broken fuel gauge, and—new for 2010!—working air conditioning.

We left early—too early, in fact, to hit that killer taqueria in Escalon. I was navigating, so we missed the turn for Tioga Pass and had to backtrack, so I’m glad we padded our drive time. We had gringo burritos at a gas-station-snack-bar in June Lake, an hour north of Bishop, because a) we were starved, and b) there was a sign out front saying “You must eat here!” The burritos, for being gringo and lacking both rice and beans, were actually pretty good. From a satiety perspective, though, they were roughly equivalent to a big puff of air from a bellows. We proceeded to Bishop, where we missed the turn for our motel due to my tendency to confuse north with its sneaky doppelganger, south. My poor navigation skills would end up being a recurring theme on this trip.

Paul and Jamie arrived at the Bishop Village Motel just after us, and right away began gloating because their room had a full kitchen and ours only a mini-fridge and microwave. I nursed a grudge throughout our 40-minute leg-shakedown ride. It was an easy spin, though we did one “effort,” just so we could talk about it later and feel really sophisticated using the term “effort.” In my case this was a mistake because I hadn’t used my inhaler and was wheezing as soon as my heart rate hit 150 beats per minute.

Dinner, like last year, was at the county fairgrounds where we checked in. It was free, and it was pasta. Alas, my first serving was like what you’d give a small child who had been eating Nerds, Tangy Taffy, and Tootsie Rolls all afternoon. I was ten minutes in line and about thirty seconds in eating my first plate, which at least included half a dozen hunks of cheesy bread. I went through the other line for my second helping, hoping for a more generous server. Just as I reached the front of the line, I had an impulse and grabbed a fresh paper plate to put over my old plate, hiding the sauce stain. I don’t know why I did it—instinct, I guess. You can’t teach this.

I asked the server to fill the whole plate, and she said—speaking down to me like a child—“Start out with this much”—she put a hatefully small pile of pasta on my plate—“and if you’re still hungry later, just wait until everybody’s been served and there should be enough for you to have seconds.” Yeah, right. I got back to my seat, and minutes later Jamie returned from the line, having been turned down for seconds. He looked stunned, like he’d just been told he had to race without shoes. How is anybody supposed to race 120+ miles with no fuel?

My second plate, like my first, simply didn’t register in my stomach. It’s like when you put a penny in a parking meter. I had to go back again. Paul doubted aloud that I’d prevail again against the pasta Nazis. I turned my baseball cap backward to fashion a basic disguise, and went back through the first line to try my luck. To my horror the guy ahead of me got totally hassled! I stared straight ahead, past the server, and tried to act natural. Amazingly, it worked and I got thirds, no questions asked. By this time they were out of bread, but when it was time for a fourth plate of pasta everybody had been fed and I encountered no resistance. I doubt the sideways ball cap was even necessary. My expert tactics in the food line had me feeling victorious already, though the race was still more than twelve hours away.

Now, I know you’re getting impatient for the real story: how was the pasta, anyway? Well, there was no sausage in the sauce this time, but it was still pretty tasty, in a cafeteria-grade, guilty-pleasure sort of way. Ian was drinking some beverage the color of antifreeze, which he complained was warm. But hey, free food!

After dinner we headed to Smart & Final for breakfast stuff. I’d brought a Tupperware of Cheerios—or, more specifically, the Trader Joe’s house brand. (My wife Erin persists in calling them by their branded name, “Joes Os.” I refuse to do this. In fact, I told her if she didn’t desist, I would start calling non-Kleenex-brand tissues “snot rags” in front of the kids.) We got milk and Ian picked out some bright green bananas. They were actually the ripest ones there, but way too green for me. He replied, “I like a firm buh-NAH-nah.” Perhaps it’s the English accent; my rejoinder—“That’s what she said!”—was just a formality as we were all laughing already. I realize now that this story is not that funny; I guess we were nervous about the race. Or maybe you just had to be there.

I spent a really long time pinning my numbers before bed. Ian taught me to crumple them up so they lie flatter and don’t flap in the wind. It’s so satisfying to continue progressing in this sport after thirty years. I was so pleased with my pinning job, finally, that I thought about not even wearing the jersey, but rather putting it on a mannequin that I’d display at home in a nice glass case. I suppose you could construe this as cold feet.

I was anxious, for sure. I wasn’t anxious about the race per se; I was anxious about being anxious, lest it disturb my sleep. I ended up sleeping pretty well, though I had anxiety dreams. I dreamt I left my laptop on Bart. In another dream I waited too long to ship out a modem line tap and had to rush all around for a FedEx office, eventually finding a Mailboxes Etc. that was also a taqueria. That’s how you know I didn’t get enough dinner.

Stage 1 – 122 miles, 15,465 feet of climbing

During the first stage I consumed four and a half bottles of my preferred brand of energy drink (two of which I’d stashed in a cooler by the car to grab before the last climb) and two bottles of energy drink provided by the race (which some of my pals have had trouble with, giving me incentive to mix my own bottles). I also had three Powerbar gels during the race. My stomach was actually pretty bad on the first climb, but I can’t blame the race-provided beverage for that—I’d not yet blown through my first bottles. Impressively, Jamie caught Ian and me on the first climb. (The Masters 45+ group, which included Jamie, raced with my 35+ group last year, but this year was split into a separate group, starting five minutes later, because there was such a huge turnout. The Masters 35+ group was twice the size of last year’s, and the 45+ field grew even more.) Unbeknownst to me, Ian stopped to take on nutrition at the top, and thus didn’t get to suck my wheel on the descent.

Toward the bottom of the first descent, disaster! I took a wrong turn, and Jamie followed me through it. (I haven’t taken a wrong turn in a road race since collegiate nationals in 1989. On that occasion, my coach famously said, “Don’t worry, I’m not going to talk to you about it. I won’t humiliate you any more than you already are.”) Jamie and I lost 3½ minutes as a result of this error (which I know from studying my race statistics graph later). The silver lining of this error was that Ian was able to rejoin Jamie and me for the rest of the descent and the flat section following it.

There are three explanations for how I could have taken the wrong turn:

1. I did it on purpose, as the best way to join back up with Ian. Slowing down inexplicably could have been dangerous, and it would have been impossible to explain myself to Jamie with all the wind in our ears. I timed the move to perfection so Ian didn’t even break stride getting back in our slipstream.
2. I only thought it was a wrong turn and route correction; Jamie and I were actually abducted by space aliens and taken to their beautiful ship where they did horrible, invasive investigations of our Senator Packwoods before erasing our memories and setting us back down on our bikes, minus a third of our hemoglobin.
3. The road cones wrapping around the corner were left there by a construction crew and were unrelated to the race, and the course marshal had abandoned his post for a little while—at the very moment we came through—before putting the cones in his car and taking them away to prevent confusion among the cyclists.

Though all three explanations doubtless strike you as far-fetched, I assure you that one of them is absolutely true. Needless to say my morale was severely damaged by this mistake. I ultimately reacted by going really hard on the last climb, far harder than I felt was even wise. Though many people had told me I should have a compact crank for this race, chalking my 39x27 up to pure foolishness, as it turned out I did most of the climb in my 24-tooth cog. I mentioned this to Jamie afterward (it was the closest I could really come to bragging), and still he insisted I should have used a compact. Gearing is like religion.

I don’t remember eating very much of the free meal at the top of the final climb. Certainly I had some cokes, and I slammed enough ginger ale for some really righteous belches (though I kept my mouth closed so as not to scare anybody). I had a few bean-and-cheese quesadillas and some Oreos. I was either too blown to eat a lot, or too blown to register what I was eating, or too blown to shunt the fact of my eating into long-term memory. I shudder to think, looking back, how little I ate with the second stage of the race still looming.

I compared my Stage 1 time this year with last year’s. At the bottom of the final climb I was about three minutes behind where I was at the same point in ’09, but by the top of the climb I was fifteen minutes faster for the stage. I have to be pleased with that, and I am. (Note that the altitude numbers are wrong on this. The final summit on Stage 1 is 10,250 feet above sea level.)

Dinner was at the same Italian place as last year, though we could have sworn the name had changed. (It hadn’t; the waitress confirmed: it’s had the same name for sixteen years.) We had some combo pizza as an appetizer, and it was excellent. It included green peppers, the consumption of which made me feel subversive as Erin is allergic. I had the same mushroom soup as last year—oddly spicy but very good. Oddly, I got about four bay leaves in mine, and Ian didn’t get any. It’s who you know.

The waitress couldn’t remember what I’d ordered last time, and I guess I can’t blame her since she may not have been my waitress last time. I knew it was either the chicken parmigiana or the chicken marsala, and whichever it was, it had been delicious. I should have re-read my own blog post about Everest ’09 and I’d have known it was the marsala; instead I guessed wrong this time and got the parmigiana. It was overly breaded and a tad greasy. I mean, it was fine and all, but I’ll never forget that marsala from last year. When I’m on my deathbed looking back at my life, trying to pinpoint where I went wrong and at what point things started to unravel, I’ll doubtless conclude it was this particular dinner choice. Meanwhile, my more meticulous competitors had probably done their homework and enjoyed the marsala, using my own blog against me!

Stage 2 – 86 miles, 13,570 feet of climbing

I approached this stage with utter dread. I’d slept very poorly; my ears were ringing as I lay in bed, as though I’d been to a loud nightclub or something. I finally managed to fall into a fitful sleep. At around 3 a.m. the dirtbag in the next room over, just across the thin motel wall, started yakking on his cell phone. I figured it must be an emergency call from somebody in Europe, and the guy would soon be on his way to the airport, but instead he just chattered away ad infinitum. I was wearing earplugs so I couldn’t make out what he was saying, but his tone was that of a happy homemaker discussing wallpaper samples. Finally Ian yelled through the wall for the guy to ring off or have his cell phone shoved so far down his throat it’d tickle his duodenum. Wait, come to think of it, Ian said something much more diplomatic; that must have been the comment I had been formulating. Anyhow, the guy shut right up, but neither of us really got back to sleep after that.

During stage two I drank four bottles of my preferred energy drink, two bottles of Heed, and a couple bottles of water. (It’s a lot shorter race than Stage 1, but it was hotter than blazes with no shade at all.) I also swallowed some electrolyte capsules they were giving out at a rest stop, and ate a couple fistfuls of grapes passed up by a Samaritan spectator who appeared a couple times along the road on the final climb. Somebody gave me a banana at one point as well, provoking Paul to quote Ian’s firm buhnahnah statement. I timed my consumption to perfection, running out of energy drink less than 500 meters from the finish line.

For the last fifteen kilometers I’d really been going hard—harder than I was completely confident I could sustain. I wouldn’t have been surprised to suddenly crack at any point. I passed a number of riders who had, in fact, cracked—including the previous day’s third-place finisher, who for awhile was five minutes ahead of the rest of the Masters 35+ riders. One guy, when I passed him, said, “Oh man, there’s another one!”

Near the top, I went by a couple of spectators, one of whom said, “Way to finish strong!” I felt like turning back and saying, “Say that word ‘finish’ again, would you? That sounds really good!” It was a real relief to be done: not just because the suffering was over, but because nothing catastrophic had happened. In the end I was about five minutes faster on this stage than I’d been last year. I didn’t place as high as last year for the overall race, nor in either stage, because the field was much better this year. That said, in the “Man vs. Nature” and “Man vs. Himself” competitions I am plenty satisfied with my efforts.

Here is the graph. Note that it’s altitude over time, not over distance, so the descents look steeper than the climbs. This is an illusion. I’d have shown you altitude over distance, except my bike computer was screwing up, so the altitude/distance graph looked like a long rubber band dropped from a great height onto graph paper. Not very useful. Also note that the altitude numbers are wrong. The final climb started at 3,800 feet and ended at 10,100 feet. (In fact, the distance and power numbers on my bike computer display were also reading low, which tended to make me both ride harder and overestimate how far I still had to go.)

At the top, after a bunch of water and some cokes, I started macking on these so-called Greek quesadillas they were grilling up. They had fresh spinach leaves, feta, and I think olives. The spinach was perfectly wilted, the tortilla perfectly crispy yet soft, the cheese gooey and salty … fricking amazing. I kept expecting them to run out, but the ‘dillas just kept coming. I was just shoving them in my face as fast as my hands could move.

I cannot estimate how many quesadilla triangles I consumed other than to say I surprised even myself. After a volley of eating I’d go sit down for awhile, the basic camp chair feeling like a throne of some kind, until the hunger would gnaw at me and I’d give up the seat for more food. This led to an interesting social question: is it fair to take over a fellow racer’s chair when she is called up for the awards ceremony? I ultimately decided it was, so long as I gave her the chair back later.

The medals this year were even cooler than the ones we got last year. I complimented the race director, Steve Barnes, about the medals (and everything else about this glorious event), and he said a few people had said they’d preferred a cash or merchandise price to the medal, but he chose to ignore that input. I agree with him: a money or bike tire would be consumed right away, whereas a medal can live in a drawer forever, occasionally brought out by your kids to admire or play with. In fact, without being prompted my daughter Alexa found a nice ribbon for this year’s medal:

Dinner was at Erick Schat’s Bakkery in Bishop—again, the same place as last time. I talked up the pastrami sandwich a whole bunch to Ian before realizing I was setting him up for disappointment. What do I know about pastrami? What makes me an expert? So I backpedaled and said, “Look, you probably should order something else. You’re bound to be disappointed. I shouldn’t have shot off my mouth.” He ended up ordering it, and as far as I can tell he liked it. I got the pastrami myself and it was nirvana. The only trouble was, they were out of their rye bread and the sourdough wasn’t as robust, and got a bit soggy from the sauerkraut I stuffed in there. I wished aloud that they’d grilled the bread, and Ian disagreed, pointing out that the soft bread conforms better to the stuff inside. Though I found this observation perfectly consistent with his race-number-crumpling technique, I couldn’t resist taking the bait, and soon we were fistfighting in the parking lot. No, of course we weren’t—far from feeling pugilistic, we were happy to be done with the suffering and to be stuffing ourselves with pastrami that a placard noted “is not lean.” Jamie had the “Mule Kick” sandwich. I was tempted to say, “You just like saying ‘Mule Kick.’” It really is a catchy name. I suppose it’s trademarked. If I start a sandwich shop maybe I’ll offer a “Jackass Spaz” sandwich. Paul had a platter of some kind; the vegetable side looked a bit limp and he wasn’t thrilled with it.

The trip home

No way were we going to settle for Taco Bell, like we did last year. We stopped in Groveland at a little restaurant that had pizza. I remembered the place from a Yosemite trip many years ago, and I remember thinking how awful it was, but here we were and I was determined to go with the flow and keep a stiff (if sunburned and chapped) upper lip. Pizza was indicated. Jamie and Paul said they only wanted a slice. This made no sense. Why would they lie? To be safe, I talked them into ordering a large. Oddly, a one-topping cost like $5 more than a plain pizza, and yet the super-combo with like five ingredients was like $1.80 more than that. Normally, on general principle I’d have insisted on a combo, but we were tired and a debate about topping choices might have been dangerous. So we went with pepperoni. It was glorious. The crust, though thin and crispy, wasn’t overly cracker-like: it still had some nice chewiness. The cheese was plentiful and the pepperoni was fattening. We should have ordered two or three of them.

After getting home around midnight and finally making it into bed, I dreamed of food all night. One dream involved dinner with some new friends, and they were serving carnitas. The problem was, instead of using forks or tortillas we were expected to lift the carnitas into our mouths with chips, and I couldn’t keep the meat from falling off the chip. I was getting hungrier and hungrier and progressively more embarrassed. When I woke up I had the relief that it was only a dream, but no relief from the hunger. In fact, I’m still hungry. I have to go.

dana albert blog

Race Report - Everest Challenge

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Introduction

About a year ago, some cycling friends made plans to do a big bike race, and were looking for takers. The race was the Everest Challenge, the California-Nevada Climbing Championship, a two-day stage race covering 206 miles with 28,035 feet of cumulative vertical gain. I was intrigued, but couldn’t get fit enough after being hit by a car that summer. The intrepid three who raced it last year—Paul, Jamie, and Craig—decided to do it again, and I determined to give it a shot. I even managed to bully another rider, Lucas, into joining us.

What follows is the official race report I sent around to my bike club. As I explained at some length in an earlier post, my race reports tend to talk a lot about the food involved. After all, most of us are in this sport for the food, and food is arguably more interesting than bike racing. If you doubt this, consider the following two passages:

I came to regret passing up the penne—pronounced “penny PAST-ah” by the locals—choosing instead a fettuccine dish consisting of limp pasta in Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup, with the lightest dusting of fresh Parmesan cheese, dispensed ineffectually by the waitress, who was new, and who held the excellent Zyliss rotary cheese grater backwards and upside down, thus turning the handle the wrong way and unscrewing it from the grater, until finally I gave up and said “when” and that’s all the cheese I got.

So anyhow, I was in perfect position, about eight riders back, but knowing that this one Team Spine dude in front of me had a really good jump and would probably take me past a least a few guys, when we come around the last turn and my tire hit this Botts’ dot, one of those domed round white ones, and I didn’t exactly lose traction, but it kind of made my tire drift just a bit, so I was just a bit off balance, and I knew I wasn’t going to crash but it just kind of screwed up my timing a bit, and lost the Spine guy’s wheel, and then I got totally boxed in by this Morgan Stanley guy and ended up with another pack finish. But I was so close to having a top five at least!

Okay, I think you can see where the real human interest is. So now, with no further ado, here is my official Everest Challenge race report. (Note: if you're still interested in the story of the actual race and not just the food and camaraderie, click here. That's my Daily Peloton story, in two parts.)


Pre-race

After much logistical discussion, our group of five arranged ourselves in two cars: Jamie and Paul in the “Climbers’ Honda” and Lucas, Craig, and I in the “Goliaths’ Volvo.” The climbers dropped us right away, getting on the road about an hour before us, which is a pity because they missed a glorious lunch at a little taqueria in a strip mall in Escalon that I miraculously remembered from having eaten there with Erin at some point. I had the carnitas burrito, which was glorious, but Lucas was issuing serious yummy-noises over his al pastor burrito. The place had all the hallmarks of a great taqueria: grilled (not steamed) tortillas (flour and corn only, none of this sun-dried tomato, spinach, or whole wheat crap), refried (not just pinto) beans, very spicy salsa, and cabeza and lengua on the menu. And guacamole came stock—none of this nickel-and-diming us to death like that damn 360 place.

We did a quick spin-the-legs ride before our dinner, which was provided by the race organizers. This was your standard-issue mass-pasta, four on a scale of zero being mush, ten being hard, and seven being al dente. There was some tasty sausage too, and when they ran out the volunteer server picked several slices out of the sauce for me, which was a nice touch. There was some chewy garlic bread that was pleasantly low-brow, almost vulgar (in the best possible way). It was a fine meal all around, though Lucas, ever-competitive, tried to keep up with my consumption and ended up with a stomachache. (Lucas, just with whom the hell did you think you were dealing?)


Stage 1 – 122 miles, 15,465 feet of climbing

Breakfast, early the next morning, was Golean cereal, courtesy of Craig. I guess it’s supposed to be pronounced “go lean,” but I’ve trained my kids to say “GOAL-iyan” so it sounds like something Captain Kirk might eat. Oh, and a banana. We were pretty nervous.

During Stage 1 I consumed seven gels, four bottles of my standard energy drink, a bottle of water, and two bottles of the race-supplied energy drink everybody had warned me not to use. It didn’t turn my stomach as I’d feared, and as everybody had predicted, which was a relief (though I actually stopped at the car for the second two bottles of my normal energy drink as a precaution). At the finish I had two or three large bean-and-cheese quesadillas, a tall stack of real Oreos, a Coke, a V-8 juice (far higher in electrolytes than any energy drink), a cup of homemade spicy chicken soup, and a pesto-and-sun-dried-tomato quesadilla that was, hands-down, the saltiest thing I’ve ever eaten.

Dinner that evening was at a groovy Italian place the Everest veterans ate at last year. We had a large pizza as an appetizer, and though we all agreed on mushrooms, only compromise kept a fistfight from breaking out over pepperoni vs. sausage. I couldn’t tell whether the waitress was a bit dim or I simply wasn’t speaking clearly, but it took several tries to get her to understand that we wanted mushrooms on the whole thing and half-and-half pepperoni and sausage on the rest. It was damn good pizza. Then I had this mushroom soup that the waitress had warned me was “a little spicy.” That sealed the deal, not because I like spicy mushroom soup (who ever heard of such a thing?) but because I couldn’t have my masculinity called into question with a stage remaining in the race. It ended up being very fiery, probably capable of stripping paint, and I liked it.

My entree was the chicken marsala, which the waitress all but insisted I get, having shot down my first two tentative choices. (I always have the waiter or waitress vet my food choice.) The marsala was brilliant: very rich and fattening without being greasy, with copious amounts of chicken breast that was tender and actually had flavor, unlike the blasted raspy retreads you get at Outhouse Steakback. Craig and Lucas developed a technique for dredging the oil from their primavera, and I guess they liked it okay, but I’ll just come out and say it: I pitied them their inferior choice. Perhaps I was just in a competitive spirit after doing a hard race, and doing it jolly hard. Anyway, Lucas felt the pasta was overcooked, and though it was about 6.5 on my doneness scale I had no issue with it. We didn’t have dessert, though Paul clearly wanted to; I’d had enough sweets for the day and also felt that if somebody ordered a pansy dessert like tiramisu or crème brûlée we might all be cursed the next day and never find the big ring.

Stage 2 – 86 miles, 13,570 feet of climbing

Breakfast on the second day was more Golean cereal, which was mighty hard to eat because nobody slept well and you could practically see the low cloud of flatulence that had gradually filled the room all night. My own flatulence was concussive almost to a window-shaking degree, which was a big part of our insomnia, but another rider’s gas (I won’t say whose) smelled just like an outhouse. So much for breakfast.

During Stage 2 I ate six gels, four of which were this foreign brand of gnarly race-provided gels that were supposed to taste like apple pie. Back in 1983 I did a bike tour in Canada and subsisted almost entirely on individually wrapped Pepperidge Farm cookies that were like a precursor to the Powerbar, and they were mostly apple pie flavored, and I swore I’d never touch them again. These gels tasted exactly like the Pepperidge Farm cookies, so needless to say they didn’t go down easy.

On the second climb I started having pretty bad stomach problems, so I consumed as little of the race-supplied energy rink as possible and managed, during the race, to have four bottles of my preferred brand (two of which I mixed myself, one while riding). I ended up with just one bottle of foreign drink, and several bottles of water because it was really hot (over 100 degrees) and the support was so awesome. At the top I didn’t eat as much as after Stage 1, because I didn’t have to replace my muscle glycogen—in fact, the idea of paralysis was very appealing at that point. Nevertheless, I had a couple bean quesadillas, a cup of chicken noodle soup (the noodles a crunchy 9.5), a V-8, and a Coke.

Our second lunch that day was at this bakery in Bishop. It was a huge operation that could probably provide bread for a large army, and I wonder how it can exist in such a small town. They had about eight or ten sandwich choices, each a rather pricey $8, but I was in no mood to pinch pennies. My brain was pretty muddy after two brutal road races, so for a few minutes it was hard to decide what to order, but then a little sign on the menu board settled the matter: “Note: our pastrami is not lean.” And it wasn’t: it was gloriously fatty. The rye bread was excellent, the cheese melted, the sauerkraut good and sauer, and the whole thing just eyeball-rollingly exquisite.

If my arms hadn’t been so tired from all the climbing I’d probably have beaten down my biker friends to steal their sandwiches. Lucas was very pleased with his “Mule Kick” sandwich, but I suspect he just liked the name. (It’s sort of the Hootie & the Blowfish of the sandwich world.) I have to say, the sandwich Paul had looked meager and vegetarian, but he didn’t seem to have any problem with it and I should really learn to resist gloating inwardly at my superior restaurant choices, or at least to refrain from documenting them.

The trip home

For the next several hours I dreamed of the burrito I’d be eating at the little taqueria in Escalon. Lucas, Craig, and I had talked the place up to Paul and Jamie, and we took some pains to drive together, caravan-style, so we could eat there together. This wasn’t easy because it got dark during the drive and we were all completely knackered. About thirty miles out of Oakdale (where we mistakenly thought the place was) Lucas realized it would be closed. He mourned this loudly and at length, and though I felt his pain—acutely—I was in denial and exhorted him to hold out hope.

Of course he was right, and though we managed to find the taqueria, it had closed at 3 (over six hours earlier!) and we were screwed. We went to Taco Hell, where the service was the worst I’ve ever experienced. Orders were flying out of the drive-thru window but we waited at least ten minutes for our grub. I even went and complained, causing the others to fear that our food would have spit in it. I really doubt this kitchen crew was that organized. I had five Cheesy Bean ‘n’ Rice burritos, which were heinously full of that grotesque plasticized nacho cheese goo. I was so hungry I actually ate them.

And that’s about it for the race. Once back in the Bay Area, my next two lunches were proper Mexican meals, and tonight I’m eating at Gordo Taqueria. My body is still trying to refuel itself and every night I dream about food. In summary, I highly recommend the Everest Challenge for anybody who takes eating, and suffering, seriously.