Overlooked Posts of 2023

Introduction

This evening I’ve been casting about for a post that would tie together the events of 2023 and kind of put this long and tiresome year to bed. In the process I discovered this fun article in the New York Times listing stories from this past year that their editors felt didn’t reach as many readers as they should have. That inspired me, and in this post I’ll go one better: I’ll not only list my least-viewed posts from 2023 but explain why you shouldn’t have missed them. (And if you did read these, this is your chance to feel all smug and validated.)

January

 “Ask a Fitness Dweeb” has so far received the fewest pageviews for January 2023. In fact, by my rough math, if I had ads turned on for this blog, this post wouldn’t have even earned me enough for a cup of coffee. And yet, doesn’t a fitness-themed post seem perfectly timely as readers ponder their New Year’s Resolutions?

Maybe it’s the “Dweeb” part. That was my daughter’s idea. Don’t worry, my persona in this post is no dweebier than ever. This (albeit contrived) advice column is particularly worthy if you check out the bit about gamification, and my description of the international training contest I run every year that is super easy, fun, and effective. (The Q4 contest just wrapped up today with, amazingly, a tie for first place!)

February

For this month, the most neglected post was “What We Should (and Will) Be Embarrassed By.” Ask yourself: has it ever seemed like people are more shameless than ever? Well, this post can be a useful guide for avoiding that. If you’re tired of the phrase “lean in,” and/or the promotion of cannabis as a “wellness” aid rather than what it is (i.e., a hedonistic drug that dudes like Jeff Spicoli use because they’re young and irresponsible and like to party), and/or you think Vitamin Water should be called “Stupid Water,” this post is for you.

March

I was pleased to see, in February, how well my (harsh) critiques of ChatGPT did. My two-part series, “A.I. Smackdown – English Major vs. ChatGPT,” garnered gobs of pageviews. I was a bit bothered, though, by a sense that the posts were slightly passive-aggressive, given that I was showcasing A.I.’s failings without exploring the potential upside. This led to curiosity about how ChatGPT would do if I tried to formally teach it, which I tried doing with the post Schooling ChatGPT. This was, for me, a fairly fascinating exercise, though also tedious as ChatGPT apologized constantly for its repeated errors. What I discovered is that (as it eventually admitted) it cannot learn in any formal way, by taking instruction from a knowledgeable person. It can only train itself by ingesting vast troves of data from across the Internet.

I’m not sure why this third post didn’t do as well as the other ones on this topic. Perhaps three posts in fairly rapid succession was just too much. Suffice to say, if you enjoyed the first two, you should definitely check this one out.

April

The loss-leader for this month was “Errata.” My jumping-off point was the policy of the Times copping to its various errors over time. Perhaps readers skipped this post because they don’t overmuch care to see my errors corrected, being more laid-back than that. But that would be missing the point: this is just a humor piece. Here’s an excerpt:

In “Everything You Wanted to Know About Getting a Vasectomy - But Were Afraid To Ask,” I wrote, “The nurse arranged towels around my groin until the entire area was reduced to the pink-red scrotum shrouded in white, like a sunburned toad poking out of a field of freshly fallen snow.” Upon reflection I realize that my freshly-shaved scrotum more closely resembled a frog than a toad.

Who doesn’t need a good laugh or two? Check it out!

May

Speaking of a good laugh, the post “More Tom Swifties” was my most unpopular for May (even though my original “Tom Swifties” post has done quite well). This post offers dozens of easy one-liners that ought to be a pleasant diversion for anyone. For example:

“Man, you really stink!” Tom fumed.
“I’ll just give my boss the finger,” Tom said flippantly.
“How do you feel about gay couples?” Tom queried.

In case you’re looking for something a little more sophisticated, this post also puts ChatGPT through its paces creating A.I. Tom Swifties. Spoiler: ChatGPT crashes and burns horribly; for example, “‘I’m terrible at baseball,’” Tom said bat-terly.” Huh?

June

Why did “Impromptu Commencement Address” do so poorly? Beats me. The premise—what speech would you give a college graduating class if given only twenty minutes to prepare?—seemed like a good one, and I’m frankly pleased with the result. I make fun of myself, of college grads, and of all the hand-wringing and anxiety saturating our culture these days. If nothing else this speech has some good stage directions (e.g., “[Wait for applause or maybe mostly silence, or the generalized murmur of people who have tuned out completely and are chattering away amongst themselves, and/or one or more people yelling things like ‘Get off the stage!’].” I also explore one of the pressing questions of our day: is it true the future is female?

July

Historically, my bike ride reports do quite well; for example, “Mount Baker (WA) with Brother & Nephew” has garnered over 2,000 pageviews. So why did “Gravel Riding in the Rockies” fizzle? It had the usual attractions: food descriptions, breathtaking landscape photos, and schadenfreude (e.g., “My rented helmet was designed, apparently, for Ernie, from ‘Sesame Street,’ but my head is evidently shaped more like Bert’s, so the helmet slid forward during the bumpy descents, mashing my sunglasses into the bridge of my nose, unless I tightened the bonnet hard enough to threaten a gradual concussion and/or some sanded-off forehead flesh”). So, if you’ve enjoyed my other ride reports, get over to this one and see what you think.

August

Okay, this next one isn’t just my biggest disappointment of the month, popularity-wise, but of the entire year: “If William Wordsworth Were Writing Today.” I get that Wordsworth is a moldy old British poet, and has likely been labeled “problematic” by modern scholars because he was white, male, etc. But trust me, this post is anything but stuffy. It presents a hypothetical instant-messaging dialogue that might take place if the great poet submitted a new work for review to a modern, sales-obsessed editor. It’s breezy, fun, and one of my shortest posts ever. Check it out!

September

I wasn’t able to cover the Vuelta a España on albertnet, but I wrote a special post, “Jumbo-Visma & the Kuss Conundrum,” about perhaps the most exciting thing in the race: an American, Sepp Kuss, had a couple of amazing days in the mountains and moved into first place overall, only to have his biggest challenge come from two of his own teammates. This was a major soap opera for anyone following the sport, and though I was perhaps a day or so late covering it, I was surprised how little traction this post got. To this day, YouTube is constantly offering me up more videos on the whole affair, even though I didn’t even use YouTube for my research.

This post advances ten theories on why a professional team would hamper their own star rider when he’s winning for them. My theories range from the quite plausible to the mildly facetious to the outright bogus, all in keeping with my primary goal, which is to entertain. Rereading it now, I think it’s held up well, long after the race itself has been decided.

October

I guess it’s not really fair to pick on one post in particular for October, since all four of them were on the same topic, that being my weeklong cycling trip in the French Alps. But the last installment, “Epic Trans Alps Cycling Trip – Part VI” has the fewest pageviews and doesn’t seem to be catching up. I guess six posts on the same topic might have pushed my readers’ patience. But if you missed this before, it’s a good one: lots of photos, with the best scenery of my entire trip, and perhaps the most potent Schadenfreude as I completely melted down on the legendary Alpe-d’Huez climb. Give it a whirl!

November

I am frankly offended by the notion that human beings don’t have free will. You can well imagine, therefore, that I’d be super annoyed when a vainglorious douchebag from Stanford, with a big dumb Karl Marx beard and long hair in ringlets, throws together a crappy book that pretends to prove, via neuroscience, that we don’t have free will. To make matters worse, the book is selling well, and a surprising number of intellectual types are apparently stroking their goatees and saying, “Yes, yes, this is all very compelling.” I bent over backwards with my critique, “Undeterred - A Critique of a Book About Life Without Free Will,” and even got my daughter to do a wonderful drawing of the douchebag in question, the bloviating, preening Robert Sapolksy. Naturally I’m disappointed more people didn’t read this post. Even if you never considered reading Sapolsky’s book, you should read this as a cautionary tale about academic types getting drunk on their own bathwater.

December

Okay, I’ll grant that it’s a little early to tell which post from this month is underperforming. It’s not like my posts open like Hollywood blockbusters. But I suppose I can feel a bit disappointed that “Cycling Smackdown – Small Cog Tale” hasn’t already gone viral and made me an overnight Internet celebrity, or at least racked up a really solid number of pageviews. This is a ripping yarn about an all-out cycling sprint on a cold, dark, rainy evening, depicting a classic confrontation between robust teenagers and a seasoned but middle-aged coach. I suffered horribly to produce this tale so you might as well honor that with a quick read.

See you next year!

Thank you for visiting albertnet. I look forward to another year of writing about, well, anything that amuses me, and I hope you’ll enjoy it too.

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Ride Report - Gravel Riding in the Rockies

Introduction

My friend Peter and I don’t race regularly anymore. This doesn’t mean we race oddly, or in a constipated way. I mean we might do a race but only once in a while, just to remind ourselves why we don’t race. And yet, we somehow like to suffer, or maybe do so out of duty. Thus, every year or so we get together for some brutal epic rides. This past week we did a five day stage-non-race we called Death Fest. It was no more deadly than it was a festival, but it was hard. This report details the best/hardest/worst day, representing 113 miles of the 269-mile total.

To make things extra hard this year, both physically and fiscally, we (mostly) eschewed asphalt and tackled dirt and gravel roads, with occasional single-track, on gravel bikes.

Executive summary

My $8,000 rented gravel bike (final use cost: a bit over $2/mile, ouch!) was brilliant other than its saddle, which was designed for a Big & Tall Man who has a keel descending from his bottom, and its handlebars, which were designed for a masochist with small hands. My rented helmet was designed, apparently, for Ernie, from “Sesame Street,” but my head is evidently shaped more like Bert’s, so the helmet slid forward on the bumpy descents, mashing my sunglasses into the bridge of my nose, unless I tightened the bonnet hard enough to threaten a gradual concussion and/or some sanded-off forehead flesh. The CamelBak that I borrowed, due to a dearth of bottle-filling opportunities, malfunctioned (due to user error) and became useless. The weather was hot enough that we’d have complained about it except that the terrain dwarfed its significance. We kept a stiff upper lip, which in my case meant a chapped, sunburnt, almost cracking upper lip since I’m not used to the dry air at this altitude (starting at about 8,500 and topping out at 10,400 feet). We ate like kings, or at least like kings who’d seen what happened to Henry VIII and decided to not eat very much.

Short version

This year, I did something novel: I decided to actually train for this. I knew that the back-to-back days of long rides, the increased rolling resistance of gravel roads, and my advanced age would make this an extra hard week, and I’m not stuppid. (I spelled it that way as a tribute to my brother Geoff, who in his first-grade “My Book About Me” assignment answered the prompt, “Something special about me is …” with “My name is Geoffrey, not Geoff, and I am not stuppid.”) So I went into the week confident, which proved a mistake. Our first ride, the day before this epic one, was only 45 miles, with only 4,340 feet of vertical gain, but it kicked my ass. There were loose dirt climbs with grades reaching 24%, where we’d lose traction and spin the rear wheel despite being in the saddle. By “we” I mean Pete. I had fatter tires, perhaps not as low a gear, and certainly less power, so my incremental progress on these grades was kind of like riding the clutch in an underpowered diesel Volkswagen Dasher. In other words, I wasn’t manly enough to peel out. After that brutal slogfest we dined on commercial (i.e., non-hand-cranked) pasta made with jarred sauce that was sexed up with hot Italian sausage. It hit the spot and would prove to be the only “homemade” meal we would have the energy to prepare during the week.

Breakfast on the big ride day was yogurt and Open Nature granola. This brand might be organic or something but it’s mainly just cloying. (I just fact-checked this and an Amazon reviewer wrote, “Bummer this is not organic. No taste, got mussy quickly.” I didn’t find it mussy, whatever that means, but it was way too sweet.) We ate breakfast merely to appease the ride gods, who might think fasting a cheeky move. During the ride I ate two or three energy bars (and probably expended most of their calories tonguing the bits of nut and flax and assorted shrapnel from my teeth) along with most of a big-ass Coke and my go-to Hostess Cupcakes, chocolate-flavored with polyunsatured sugar-flavored white filling. At the end of the ride I found myself with a leftover Hostess fruit pie, which has never happened before; during the ride, I just didn’t feel I had the mouth strength to eat it, and guessed (accurately) that I could make it home on nothing but fumes.

Hydration was achieved via one bottle of Gatorade, three bottles of water, plus whatever amount of water I was able to absorb through my skin after a freak CamelBak accident. For details you’ll have to read the long version of this report.

Dinner was at this little dive Mexican joint in or near Winter Park. It’s the first restaurant I’ve eaten at since COVID hit that’s not brutally expensive; I think my three-item combination plate was like $12. The menu even said, “First basket of chips is on us!” If I had a sharpie I’d have added, “Second basket is a really bad idea … think of your health, for god’s sake!” (If you’re a polytheist, feel free to move that last apostrophe.) The beef enchilada was generous, and the pork tamale had the right ratio of meat to cornmeal (sometimes a tamale is like 99% corn), and the chile relleno was made with won ton wrappers, which is fun. (I haven’t had such a Mexican/Chinese fusion relleno since The Original Mexican Café in Denver folded.) We ran out of salsa, and I didn’t have the energy or patience to summon the waiter, so for my handcrafted burritos (a side of tortillas was only fifty cents!) I just shook hundreds of drops of Tapatio hot sauce on there, which I almost couldn’t even taste. The food was all good, but the flavor was a bit metallic, which is surely on me. I might nevertheless post a one-star review: “My friend and I rode 113 miles and were parched and undergoing some kind of complicated fat-burning process involving ketones, so the food tasted odd, and the waiter didn’t have enough background in organic chemistry to understand, so I’m absolutely livid and will never eat here again. Oh, and you have to pay for your second, third, and fourth baskets of chips!”

Long version

We got a kind of late start, almost 10 a.m., but we’d wisely planned this ride for the longest day of the year so we wouldn’t be racing nightfall like last time. We started on some single-track which for me was kind of a (literally) rocky introduction to the gravel bike. Then we had asphalt for a mile or two through town until we reached a proper dirt road. Being off the main roads, away from cars, is of course the main joy of gravel riding (or “groading,” in MAMIL/hipster parlance). The scenery was particularly good all day, because Colorado (like northern California) had the wettest winter and spring on record (-ish). Very green hills and all the distant peaks were snow-covered. The first climb came almost right away but it wasn’t all that hard.

The scenery at the summit was brilliant. (This might have actually been the second summit … the ride was over a week ago, which already seems like the distant past.)

We turned at some point onto a paved highway and had to deal with cars and the rumble strip. We also had a pretty stiff headwind, and I sucked Pete’s wheel shamelessly. Serves him right for being a better cyclist (and frankly a better person).

There would be only one place to get water (etc.) the entire ride, so Pete had loaned me a CamelBak. I use a similar pack for mountain biking but without the bladder. The hose was whipping around all over unless I tucked it under some D-ring that seemed ill suited to the purpose, and on the first big descent it popped loose and started dribbling on me. (Looking back, I wonder if this was due to the increase in barometric pressure?) Pete had advised me that if this happens, you can blow a bit into the hose. This didn’t really work, so I tried something really stuppid. Have you ever seen a motorist losing traction in the snow when trying to get rolling, and he floors it and just spins the wheels uselessly, polishing the ice under the tires, making things worse? What I did was even stuppider: I blew really hard into the hose. This inflated the bladder so the water started to gush out. When I opened my mouth to cuss, the little valve blew off under the pressure and was lost, and I had a full-open hose on my hands. By the time I got the bike to a stop on the road shoulder, I was pretty wet and really pissed. It was a warm day but (as lamented here) that can change fast in the high mountains. Plus, I’d lost most of my water. I topped up my bottles from the bladder and drank the rest. (Note to self: quit cycling—Dad was right, I’m too stuppid for this.)

We passed a dam that was absolutely roaring with water.

We took a small detour to hit the only town of the entire route, the small and somewhat sparse burgh called Kremmling. On what I took to be the main drag we encountered a Dollar General, a Family Dollar, and a Down To Your Last Dollar. (Okay, I made up that last one.) We stopped at the Kum & Go (fondly known as the Jizz & Go among the locals, surely) where we got the requisite bottled tap water, cold Cokes, and cupcakes. Pete favors gummy bears for some reason; it’s probably just a flex, showing off how he has the jaw strength to chew the damn things even sixty miles into a gravel ride.

A short while later we were back on the dirt and making our way along a rolling bit towards our final climb. My hands hurt more than my back so the transition to sitting up—ouch!—was worth it.

There was a lake. I can’t be bothered to know the name. In fact, although I’d forwarded the route map to my wife via email before we set out (in case we went missing), I didn’t even look at it. I didn’t want to know any more than it would be a hella long ride with three big climbs. I mean, if vacation isn’t about giving up entirely on logistics, what is it for? I wanted to pedal dumbly for hours with no conception of navigation, expectation, execution, or anything else. I wanted to do this ride from the neck down.

We began to climb. I came to realize that my phone had made some noise at some point. The home screen indicated a work colleague had texted me. Wasn’t he paying attention? Didn’t I just say I didn’t want to think during this vacation? I tried to unlock my phone. The screen was too grubby for the fingerprint scanner to work. Over and over I tried to manually enter my passcode, until the phone indicated that it was getting ready to “brick” itself (i.e., wipe all data in case it had fallen into the hands of a thief or a moron). I took a little break from trying to unlock it, and a few miles later it dawned on me that I was so brain-dead, I’d been leaving out the first digit of the passcode. I finally unlocked the phone, answered the query, and resolved to stop thinking entirely for the rest of the day.

The road tilted up and clouds gathered, apparently conspiring to dump on us.

It was a long climb, something like 13 miles, and it was so scenic I felt it inappropriate to whine about how totally knackered I was, etc.

Damn, the climb just went on and on, and the pain in my body grew and radiated everywhere. Of course my legs hurt, and not just the standard lactic acid burn, but a strange combo of ache and poke, like they were injured. My hands were tired and painful and cross. All my toes felt broken. My neck and shoulders hurt. My ass hurt because the bike saddle, though overstuffed like an armchair, also felt like a two-by-four. The helmet was digging into my head and my sunglasses into my face. My eyes stung like they’d been scrubbed with powdered glass. My breathless panting, as we approached and passed the 10,000-foot mark, was completely out of touch with my relatively low heart rate (i.e., 120s), as though my legs and lungs were too overwhelmed to make the heart work hard. The climb was just a pure beat-down. At one point I felt overcome with despair, like I could not continue, but I ignored that little voice and recalled having felt this way before without it meaning anything, and within minutes I was back to pedaling away brainlessly, largely emotionlessly, like an automaton, which is to say riding (and suffering) properly. And eventually we crested the summit, at about 10,400 feet above sea level, with no fanfare. I don’t know what I’d been expecting—a ticker-tape parade? a sniper? a kiosk with some dumbass telling us to turn around?—but the big moment felt anticlimactic.

For some reason (in accordance with the willful ignorance mentioned above) I thought we had a short, maybe 8-mile descent, back to the condo, but that doesn’t make any sense as we were still in the middle of nowhere. In reality we had over 20 (albeit mostly downhill) miles to go. I love a good descent, but this is perhaps where gravel bikes shine the least: it’s not the smooth, swift rocketing around you get on a road bike, nor the joyous bashing along you get on a proper mountain bike with its plush suspension. You sort of get hammered, which can get old (particularly when your crappy helmet is trying its level best to collapse into your face). Eventually we made it back to the condo and—get this—we were so destroyed we didn’t even feel like drinking beer. The humanity!

Ride stats

• 113.16 miles
• 8:37:32 ride time (a full 15 seconds faster than last year’s slogfest!
• 13.11 mph avg (actually not that bad for groading)
• 8,051 feet vertical gain (from Pete’s more expensive and presumably more accurate bike computer)
• 112 bpm average heart rate
• 157 bpm max heart rate
• 3,488 kilocalories burned (supposedly)

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Ride Report - 2019 Markleeville Death Ride with Teenager

Introduction

I used to ride the Markleeville Death Ride every year, until the registration process became too cumbersome and I started racing the Everest Challenge instead. This year, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the Death Ride hadn’t filled up, so I signed up with my daughter Alexa. Read on for all the gory details. (Full disclosure: there is no actual gore.)

Executive summary

We ate like supermodels; we ate like kings. It was really hot. The scenery was gorgeous. My daughter set some new PRs. Verdict: EPIC PASS. (Any linguistic shimmer here involving mountain passes is involuntary.)

Here are the elevation profile, basic map, and Deluxe map (with numbers showing what order we rode the passes in).

Short version

Seemingly following my own bad example, my daughter Alexa went into this ride woefully undertrained, at least by the standards of anybody who takes preparation seriously. The Death Ride includes five high mountain passes, but our plan was to tackle just three of them: #1 (west side of Monitor); #3 (Ebbetts); and #5, Carson. We figured this would be about 100 miles with  ~10,000 feet of climbing … but this was just a guess based on nice round numbers.

Dinner the night before was at a somewhat pricey Italian joint in South Lake Tahoe. I had an appetizer of stuffed mushrooms and then chicken saltimbocca over homemade fettuccine. The portions were woefully small. I could picture Kate Moss across the table saying, “Oh my God. I can’t believe I ate the whole thing. I’m such a cow.” It was pretty tasty, though I could show their cook a thing or two about making hand-cranked pasta; theirs was a bit limp. I inherited some of my daughter’s entrée because she got tired of it … the spiciness pretty much overwhelmed everything else.

Breakfast was supposed to be instant oatmeal, but our morning went totally awry (details below). We ended up scarfing a Clif bar apiece instead. It was a new flavor I’d never tried: Apricot Lunacy. Wait, that’s a Luna bar flavor. Or should be. But it was apricot, anyway. Pretty yum, in a wow,-my-hundred-thousandth-lifetime-Clif-bar kind of way.

During the ride I ate a banana-and-trans-fat mini-muffin; hundreds of Kettle-style potato chips; gobs of orange slices; about a dozen really poor robot-made chocolate chip cookies; a cup of weak instant coffee, black; five Pepsis; an electrolyte placebo capsule; three V-8s; 1.5 Cups-O-Noodles; several gels; ice cream bars; blah blah blah (all the usual nonsense ride foods) and a couple big ham & cheese sandwiches.

The post-ride dinner, which did not come with our $160 (apiece!) entry fees, was supposed to be at a far-flung restaurant (out of spite), but in the end we caved and had the onsite $10-a-pop burger plates: two burgers each (replete with trimmings, though the patties were cold), some admirably non-vegan baked beans, and hella potato salad.

Full report

We camped on the ground at Turtle Rock Park, a Death Ride tradition. It was surprisingly—almost eerily—easy to find a spot compared to years past. I almost wondered if we had the right weekend.

We carpooled to the ride with Chris, a fellow Albany High mountain bike coach, who was also one of Alexa’s teachers last semester. (Alexa got an A- in the class; any lower and this coach/teacher would not have been welcome in our group. Just kidding. Actually, if she’d scored lower, he surely wouldn’t have deigned to go with us.) Chris asked if we should set an alarm for the morning, and I explained the Death Ride organizers’ tradition of blasting the Jimi Hendrix performance of “Star Spangled Banner” at party volumes at 4:30 a.m.; i.e., no alarm needed.

Not far (enough) from our tent was a large party of jackasses who decided to hit the road at 3 a.m., which meant waking up at 2 (or maybe they never went to bed) and making a big breakfast in their stadium-lit compound. They talked incredibly loudly, like a bunch of drunks, so I couldn’t sleep. Without any knowledge of their leave-at-3 strategy, I kept waiting in vain them to turn in, and finally gave up and went over to tell them to quiet down. Most of them were so immersed in their 100-dB chitchat they didn’t even see or hear me. What a bunch of tools. My take is, if you have until 8 p.m. to finish a 125-mile ride, and you still need to start at 3 a.m., you’re not a real cyclist and should go try some other sport, like cordless bungee-jumping. Fortunately, they did quiet down, because my Plan B was to send them home to Mother in a cardboard box.

At 5:30 a.m., Chris woke us up. Evidently the 4:30 a.m. Hendrix wake-up call is no longer a tradition. He was just heading out (for all five passes) and we eventually got going at 6:30. Here is the “before” shot.

The ride begins on a descent and we froze our asses off … a Death Ride tradition that will never change. As the sun made its way up past the ridge to the west, things warmed up a bit.

Monitor Pass is a bear. So is taking father/daughter selfies with my ice-cube-slippery phone, especially when a scorpion is crawling toward my neck.

The scenery was as breathtaking as the altitude, notwithstanding fire damage.

The first rest stop wasn’t nearly as mobbed as in years past, which was fine by me. They no longer have energy bars or gels available, and the energy drink is either weak or diabetic-friendly depending on which volunteer you overhear. But they have weak instant coffee now, which is a plus at least from the hydration standpoint. You can tell Monitor was a tough climb because my daughter is a bit surly here.

Here she’s a bit perkier, no doubt due to the dueling V-8 juices she quaffed. Chris took this photo; after descending the backside of Monitor and climbing back up, he encountered us at the rest stop.

Wondering what ebvc is, on our jerseys? It’s just another way of saying EBVC. Does that help? No? Okay, here.

Here’s the official summit marker. Monitor is the lowest of the Death Ride passes, but not by much.

Not shown: the descent of Monitor. I don’t own a GoPro, or even a StayAm. If that doesn’t strike you as funny, it’s because I’m trying to avoid amusing even myself, due to my sunburned lips. If I were to smile too much they’d crack. Maybe you’d think that’s funny.

It’s a long run-up to Ebbetts Pass, with the temperature climbing along with us. I would like to take a moment to point out that I have done this pass with individuals (whom I won’t name) who whined the whole time, and I didn’t exactly blame them: it’s a steep, long climb. But my daughter didn’t whine at all. I’m not sure why this is. Maybe because no hill climb could ever compare to Mount Evans, which she rode three summers ago. (Though come to think of it, she didn’t whine then, either. At the time I chalked this up to lack of available oxygen.)

There’s a lake. Actually it’s Kinney Reservoir. This is at 8,350 feet elevation—so we’d already broken the climb’s back. It’s it amazing how you, gentle reader, barely have to exert any energy to journey up these passes with us, and yet you still complain about how long and arduous my blog posts are. Man, you’re not just humorless … you’re downright grumpy.

Due to California’s modern all-precipitation-all-the-time winter/spring format, there was still snow up there. It’s not hard to spot the snow in this photo, but I’ll bet you can’t find Waldo.

To mark our progress I would tell Alexa how much vertical gain we had left to go, but expressed as Berkeley-area climbs. For example, “We have 1.5 Spruces to go” or “We have 1 Wildcat to go.” My bike computer was understating the elevation, though, so I’d just announced half a Spruce to go when suddenly we reached the summit. Surprise!

This next photo doesn’t perhaps look very interesting, but that’s only because my arm isn’t like eight feet long and my phone’s “lens” isn’t very wide-angle. The point is, Alexa was so knackered, she had to lean her back up against me for support. The position I had to sustain for this made my back hurt quite a bit, proving what many of you already know: parenting is even harder than cycling.

Amazingly, I didn’t get the song “Lean On Me” in my head after this little exercise. Sometimes life is surprisingly merciful.

Check out this bag of chips. I wonder how high you’d need to take it before it actually exploded?

In other news, what’s with the watermelon? I mean, why offer what’s essentially a calorie-free food to hungry cyclists? Frustratingly enough, this is almost all Alexa felt like eating. I had to plead with her to eat more food. This is one area where you can’t “listen to your body.” Your body is a freaking liar!

Here is the requisite elevation shot. For the second time, Chris made the summit—his fourth, our second—right around the time we did. Incidentally, Ebbetts Pass is 62 feet higher than the Col du Galibier, which is the highest point in this year’s Tour de France. Does this mean Ebbetts is harder than the Galibier? Ha. Ha ha ha ha ha. The Galibier is way, way harder. It’s a beast. But Ebbetts is hard enough.

We safely descended, had a nice lunch at the base (I grudgingly ate Alexa’s sandwich), and then the day got really, really hot: over 100 degrees for well over an hour! We tackled the seemingly endless Category 2 climb toward Carson Pass, and then it tackled us. It’s hard to describe how tedious and strenuous it was so I won’t bother. Eventually we arrived at the last full rest stop before the Carson summit. The Gu people were there handing out free product, which probably rescued Alexa from total blood sugar collapse. She loves herself some gels, especially their vanilla and their salted caramel. The Gu-sters also gave me some electrolyte capsules, which I took a) just to be nice, and b) as a placebo. I don’t doubt that these capsules are slightly useful, but potato chips have plenty of sodium, and orange slices have plenty of potassium, and that’s all there is to it.

While at this stop, some random woman came up to me and said, “Look at this! Somebody put his water bottle in my cage! What am I supposed to do with it?!” I was utterly perplexed. I mean, why tell me about it? Do I have a sign around my neck saying, “Come to me with all your problems”? Before I was able to come up with a response, I glanced at the bottle and discovered that, in fact, it happened to be mine. I have no idea how this happened; nor does Alexa.

Here is Alexa about to mount her bike for the final slog. If her expression is sanguine, that’s only because I hadn’t yet told her we had ten more miles to climb. On the map, we are at Picketts Junction where the boxed-in R is.

Beautiful meadow, snow-capped peaks, brisk headwind. Seconds after I snapped this, Alexa asked me to take the lead again. She certainly got to practice her drafting on this ride.

Up, up, and up.

Finally, finally we made the summit, then descended to the final rest stop, which shimmered like an oasis. (Full disclosure: it didn’t really shimmer, and I’ve never seen an actual oasis. But still.)

I knew there would be ice cream up there but I couldn’t find it. I looked around for somebody who had some. The first guy I saw was wearing a triathlon national champion jersey. He was eating a Drumstick. I pointed at the Drumstick and said, “Excuse me, but … where did you get that?” He replied (somewhat haughtily, I thought), “National championships.” As in, “This jersey you cannot buy.” I said, “No, I mean the ice cream.” Ouch … I felt a twinge of vicarious embarrassment. The champion pointed toward a huge truck with these vault-like doors on it which contained all manner of ice cream bar. You can imagine how tasty these were.

In the photo above, look at that little plastic strip bisecting the middle vent on my helmet. It gave me the stupidest tan lines of my life. No, I won’t be posting a photo of that. It sure sucks losing my hair.

And here’s the elevation photo. I suspect the height of the pole is to make the sign readable when the snow is incredibly deep … but if so, why is the Ebbetts Pass elevation sign so stubby? [Update: an alert reader has informed me that Ebbetts doesn’t need a tall sign because it’s closed in the winter.]

Descending Carson is an absolute blast. My brother Max, during a long-ago Death Ride, passed a cop car at over 60 mph. We took it a bit easier.

There’s one last uphill slog just before the finish, which is tolerable only because the excitement of being nearly done always gives you a final burst of energy. Alas, when we reached Turtle Rock we were at 96.6 miles with 9,750 feet of cumulative vertical gain. It goes without saying we had to keep riding, just so we could round out our ride at 100 miles and 10,000 feet of gain. Two miles of downhill, then two grueling miles back up. Here is Alexa stoically grinding out the last stretch.

I made a surprisingly unexciting video documenting the culmination of Alexa’s first full-on century ride.

Here is the “after” shot. I cannot account for my totally overblown expression. My only theory is that my crows’ feet are so deep they were causing me physical pain, and that my crazy grin is actually a grimace.

Here is our dinner. I cropped Alexa from the photo because the camera caught her mid-blink and you know how awful those shots can be. She didn’t touch the burger, by the way, so I got it. She was oddly un-hungry for someone who’d just conquered the longest bike ride of her life.

I’m sure there’s more I could write, but now it’s time to apply another coat of Carmex to my poor lips.

Ride stats

Here are the stats based on my old-fashioned bike computer. 

• 100.2 miles
• 8:49:47 ride time
• 11.4 mph average speed
• 10,249 feet cumulative elevation gain
• 40.1 miles total climbing
• 42.8 miles total descending

Further Death Ride reading

Death Ride Frequently Asked Questions

From the Archives – Death Ride ’99

Non-Death-Ride Non-Warmup

Ride Report – Sierra Nevada “Almost Death Ride”

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Ride Report - Sierra Nevada “Almost Death Ride”

NOTE:  This post is rated PG-13 for mild strong language and frontier violence.

Introduction

You might not have known this about me, but I’m one of those big-shot bike racers on an elite racing team. Wait, that’s not quite right. More of a shot, baggy-eyed bike geek in a book club. Wait, that’s too harsh. I’m somewhere in the middle: an ageing former racer on the East Bay Velo Club. EBVC is a group of classy old veterans, some of whom still race and make the podium regularly, and all of whom love big food, good coffee, biking, and race reports (roughly in that order).

Well, I did race once this year but that was off-road and probably doesn’t count. So in lieu of a glory-filled tale of my peloton-crushing exploits, here is my food-filled tale of crushing myself on an epic mountain ride in the Lake Tahoe region with my EBVC pals Craig and Ian.

Executive summary

It was brutally hot. The climbs were brutally hard. Ian, Craig, and I are brutally old. We ate brutally well. Hydration was a problem. Mother Nature treated us brutally. Verdict? Epic PASS. We got in touch with our inner brutes.

Short version 

• Ride stats: 117 miles; 8 hours 3 minutes ride time; 12,080 feet of climbing over 32 categorized climbs (at least, as categorized by Strava), including Monitor Pass (category 1) and Ebbetts Pass (HC)
• Pre-ride dinner: huge plate of pasta, BBQ chicken & peppers, French bread, salad, one “hydration” beer (Stella Artois)
• Breakfast: bowl of cereal that was organic but 90% sugar; bowl of fake Cheerios; 1% milk; banana; 1 NoDoz
• During ride: 2 or 3 energy bars, 1 gel (2x caffeine), 3 sleeves shot blox, 2 Hostess cupcakes, 1 20-oz. Coke, about 10 bottles of water
• After ride: 3 “Greek” wings, pita bread, baba ghanoush, ½-pound lamb burger with feta, big pile of seasoned fries with aioli, 3 huge glasses of water

To make the ride especially hard, we all failed to train properly. We also added on two more weekend rides as garnish: a 35-miler on Friday evening just to wear ourselves out, and a 67-mile “insult to injury” ride on Sunday. We modeled the main (Saturday) ride loosely on the Markleeville Death Ride, but did two trips over Luther Pass instead of the backsides of Monitor and Ebbetts so we wouldn’t run out of water.

The average temperature was 90 degrees. For long stretches, it was well over 100. The campground 2/3 of the way up Ebbetts Pass, where we’d planned to get water, was oddly dry. Nevertheless, we avoided heatstroke and completed the ride, though we were pretty well hobbled by the end. High spirits and sophomoric humor dominated the proceedings.

Long version

Who are Craig and Ian, anyway? (Since this post is destined to be a cult classic like Deliverance, The Osterman Weekend, and The Blair Witch Project, I suppose I should develop my characters.) Craig is a big friendly giant, who used to play football and now drags us around in his slipstream across the flats, never bothering to draft us because that would just slow things down and anyway he never needs to rest. Craig can climb like the dickens, which has never made sense to me given his size.

Ian, on the other hand, is not a giant, but he’s from England and has that cool accent that makes him sound all intellectual and authoritative, and he has that overseas vibe that makes you feel automatically inferior as a cyclist. Vague impressions aside, Ian holds a 5th-place Strava KOM—just behind four-time national champion Freddie Rodriguez—on the legendary Lomas Cantadas climb. Needless to say, I went into this ride very worried that my pals would hate me by the end for slowing them down so much.

I should also point out that my normal road bike was out of commission for this ride so I was riding my backup bike, which is pretty decent except the oversized aluminum tubes transmit all the road shock right the way up to make my ass and hands super sore, which causes whining. On the plus side, this bike has a really cool head badge. (I pointed it out to Craig, who said, “Oh, a photo of when your kids were younger and still loved you!”)

For a summary of our route consult Appendix A. The climb up Luther Pass was a decent warmup. It’s not that hard a climb, gaining 1,359 feet to a summit of 7,740. It was a beautiful day, with no rain forecast (a pleasant change from my last would-be epic ride).

After a short descent we made our way up Carson Pass, braving a headwind. I’m not complaining, mind you—the wind actually made it easier to suck Craig’s wheel.

It was weird doing Carson so early in the ride … every other time I’ve ridden it was toward the end of the Death Ride, when I was already worn out. The temperature was perfect at this point. Still a fair bit of snow at the higher elevations. In case you were wondering, this pass is named for Kit Carson, an illiterate trapper and frontiersman whose idea it was to pioneer this route through the snow (against the advice of local Washoe Indians), causing the expedition to have to eat their dogs, horses, and mules for lack of game.

At the summit we fared better than that expedition had. Though there was no running water, the visitor’s center sold us bottled water for the low, low price of $0.50. I feel bad for all the wasted plastic but I guess it’s better than eating our pets.

Here’s the requisite glamour shot. The real point of this photo is the elevation sign over my shoulder. It’s a little too small to read, but the summit elevation is 8,574 feet. I’d have liked to get a better shot of that sign, but Ian and Craig seem to have some problem with standing out in the middle of the road and getting run over. These signs meant a lot to me during the ride, because they were my only indicators of progress: my backup bike has no computer and I wasn’t even wearing my watch.

After Carson we descended for a glorious 15 miles, then had some rollers through Markleeville. Is there anything interesting to be said about this little town? Well, it’s named after Jacob Marklee who lived there for many years before dying in a gunfight. Also, according to Census data, 100% of Markleeville’s population live in households, 0% live in non-institutionalized group quarters, and 0% are institutionalized (at the moment). That photo of my bike (above) shows this town in the background. (Yes, that’s pretty much all there is to see.)

It started getting really hot as we headed south on Highway 89 towards Ebbetts Pass. Ian’s bike computer registered 104 degrees, Craig’s 106. I think we had a bit of a tailwind as well. My energy bar was sweating in its package and came out covered in a snot-like film. Melted frosting, maybe. Not that I minded. What I do mind is how so many modern energy bars are full of seeds. My kid has swiped all the basic flavors from our stash, leaving me with the weird ones, like “Berry Pomegranate Chia” which is mostly chia seeds.  Worse, I have all these “Nuts & Seeds” bars that have actual pumpkin seeds in them, as though people actually eat those other than after carving Jack-O-Lanterns (in which case most of the seeds end up on the floor anyway).  After eating one of these modern bars, I spend the next five miles running my tongue around dislodging all the seeds from my teeth.  A tired, sore  tongue is just that much more suffering I don’t need.

See that sign in the distance? That marks where Highway 89 heads east toward Monitor Pass, which we’d hit later. But first we went straight to take Highway 4 up Ebbetts Pass, our hardest climb of the day. Ebbetts Pass is named for John Ebbetts, another pioneer, who naively recommended this route for the transcontinental railroad because he mistakenly thought it didn’t get much snow, based on his one visit there. He planned a second trip but was killed in a steamboat explosion before he could go. I get the impression lives were more exciting, and shorter, in those days.

Ebbetts Pass is a beautiful and very hard climb. My backup bike lacks a compact crank; I thought the ensuing boost to my mojo would help me handle the grade, but it did not. (At least both my legs were working right … last time I did this climb, I was recovering from a broken femur and dealing with asymmetrical power delivery.) At times my gearing limited how easy I could take it on a steep pitch, thus this photo.

For the most part I couldn’t keep up with Ian and Craig, but could at least keep them in sight. Here, I’d planned a scenic photo with my pals in the distance, but by the time I got my camera out, they’d rounded the bend.

There’s a campground about 2/3 of the way up that we were counting on for water, but none of the spigots worked. We asked a couple of campers about it and they said, “We know nothing. We’re so stupid we don’t even know our own names. Please bother somebody else because we’re about to cry. We just don’t know what else to do.” (I’m not sure I heard this right, but it’s the gist of their response.) We found the camp host, who was hiding in a giant RV and pretended not to hear Ian’s salutations, despite his commanding accent. Finally the host mumbled, “No water, go away, I hate you,” or something to that effect. He had this giant water tank but offered us nothing because his misanthropy and selfishness were limitless. Note: we were not bitter.

Near the summit of this pass is a beautiful lake, Kinney Reservoir to be precise. This reservoir was dug in 1896 by frontiersman Joseph Kinney, who never got to see it filled, as he was fatally garroted with fishing line by his six-year-old nephew in a freak fishing accident. (Okay, I made that up.)

We thought about filling our bottles in the lake, but it’s full of filthy, drooling, peeing fish such as brook, rainbow, and cutthroat (!) trout.

At the summit of Ebbetts we encountered a friendly biking couple in their 60s who had parked their car at the intersection of Highway 4 and 89—that is, the start of Monitor Pass, our next big climb—and offered to meet us there (after we all descended Ebbetts) to give us water. The nice couple also snapped this photo.

Zoom in all you want, you still can’t read the elevation on that sign. It’s 8,730 feet, which is higher than the summit of the Col du Galibier, the highest point in this year’s Tour de France.

Ebbetts is a glorious descent. I must say, it was really nice riding these roads without all the Death Ride throngs: safer, and quieter, and less chaotic. Of course I wasn’t able to get many photos—just this one.

Along the way down we stopped to fill up bottles at a fast-running section of the creek. That is, Ian and Craig did. I am far too afraid of waterborne parasites to drink anything that doesn’t come from a tap. With creek water there’s a giardia risk, of course, and I particularly had in mind this description by Anthony Bourdain of the aftermath of ingesting an amoeba: 

It slammed me shut like a book, sent me crawling to the bathroom shitting like a mink, clutching my stomach and projectile vomiting. I prayed that night. For many hours. And, as you might assume, I’m the worst kind of atheist.

I should point out that when fact-checking this, I discovered that it was a bad mussel that made Bourdain sick, not an amoeba. But that doesn’t change the fact that during this ride I was more willing to risk dehydration than waterborne illness.

Monitor Pass was a mother. The heat, which had subsided somewhat on the higher elevations of Ebbetts, was back into triple digits. A long, straight section of 10% grade felt like it would never end. What with my tired legs and old school gearing, I had to weave quite a bit. Fortunately, there’s absolutely nobody up there, so you can hear a car coming from a mile away. (Okay, maybe not actually a mile, but a right fur piece anyway.)

This section of highway is one of the newest in the Sierra Nevada mountains, having been paved in 1954. According to Wikipedia, “The highway project was promoted by Robert M. Jackson of Markleeville, who worked for the Alpine County Public Works Department for more than 30 years until he perished in a grisly wood chipper accident.” (Yeah, I embellished that.)

The summit of this climb marked a milestone for at least two of us: we were now 80 miles into this ride, making it the longest we’d done since the 2014 Everest Challenge. This gave us a sense of accomplishment, sure, but also dread, as we had 37 miles left to go.

Craig got a front flat. His tire had developed a hernia. We had to boot it, using a rubber boot I had and a duct tape one from Ian. To be extra safe, Craig put only 70 or 80 PSI in his tire. The point of this photo, of course, is the sweat salt on Craig’s jersey.

Craig kept dragging us along. Even 90+ miles into the ride, I honestly don’t think he’d drafted either of us once. Drafting him all day must be what it’s like to be Chris Froome ensconced perpetually in the womblike slipstream of Team Sky (except I’m not jacked up on performance-enhancing drugs).

As we rolled along I had an in-my-body experience: this sudden full realization of living my life right now, moment by moment—that what I was seeing before me wasn’t a dream, a memory, a flashback, an illusion, or a vision of the future.  Gone was the sense that my life is all cerebral and abstract; I was aware during that moment of being a living organism processing and reacting to immediate stimulus. I know this all sounds obvious, but actually this real-life sensation, this sense of bearing real-time witness to my own currently unfolding experience, is for me the exception and not the rule.  I experience this feeling from time to time, and find it exhilarating. (I’ve talked to at least one person who finds it terrifying.)

We stopped in Markleeville again for water and goodies. At this point I still had an energy bar on me, but it was a “Cloves, Peppercorns, Grape Nuts & Gravel” variety and I couldn’t bring myself to eat it. I also had a gel, but it was an expired tangerine flavor that is the wrong kind of sour and should really be called “Tangerine & Stale Cigarette.” I was really craving a Hostess fruit pie (which packs like 600 calories) but the general store didn’t have any. Fortunately, I got something almost as good.

The first ingredient in these Hostess cupcakes is sugar, but don’t worry, they also contain high fructose corn syrup, along with “vegetable and/or animal shortening.” These cupcakes are sold as “Pingüinos” (i.e., penguins) in Mexico. Could these actually have penguin fat in them? Possibly. But the point is, they’re light and fluffy and really easy to eat, unlike a standard energy bar, which is hard to chew when you’re 100 miles into a ride and knackered.

Craig ate an energy bar and a small bag of potato chips, one or both of which, as we headed toward Luther Pass, started to mess up his stomach. (I momentarily wondered if it was the creek water, except Ian’s stomach was fine.) The upshot of this was that Craig no longer felt like dragging our asses along into the headwind we found ourselves facing. Fortunately, I finally started to feel pretty good. Clouds had appeared and it was a bit cooler, and I think I’d hit that perfect level of dehydration: not enough to affect my power, but enough to cut my weight by several pounds, improving my power/weight ratio.

My gearing still wasn’t as low as I’d have liked, so I had to dig pretty deep in the long run-up to Luther Pass.  Strava calls this stretch “Death Ride Carson Pass Part 1” and reckons it a category 2 climb. I guess that’s about right, especially since we had a headwind. It was a real slog, but my legs did this odd thing they sometimes do really far into a ride:  they just kept turning, as if unbidden, surprising me with their tenacity.  Their motion was utterly without pause, as if the turning of the rear wheel was dragging them along instead of the other way around. I was kind of mesmerized watching them go, wondering things like “How are you doing that?”  My legs didn’t even hurt that bad, though my butt, feet, and hands were in agony.

After a subdued final descent (subdued owing to the low pressure in Craig’s front tire) we reached the car, triumphant because we’d conquered a seriously hard ride without having really trained for it. Yeah, we’re fricking old, but maybe we’ve still got some heat left in our coals. Here I’d thought winging it was the privilege of the young ... but it turns out the cussedness of age is highly compatible with reckless ambition.

Here is the requisite “after” shot. The point of this photo, of course, is the pair of ridiculous dents in my forehead from my helmet.

Look , I know this report would be more exciting and fun if our ride had been a disaster, like this one, but things turned out really out well, especially when it was time for dinner. Due to poor planning, we had no bike lock for the car rack, so were restricted, when choosing a restaurant, to a place that looked out on the parking lot so could see our bikes. Fortunately there was a Mediterranean place with a picnic table out front, which was doubly handy because when Ian’s hamstring cramped and he cried out in pain he didn’t scare anyone. Check out these kind vittles:

On that note, I just realized I’m starving, having been on the South Beach diet for two weeks (excepting this Tahoe weekend, when I ate like a king). Time to go eat some squash and other assorted vegetable nonsense.

Appendix A – route and climb stats 

• Parked at the junction of Highway 50 and 89 (elevation 6,381 feet)
• Rode up the west side of Luther Pass (a category 3 climb, summit elevation 7,740 feet)
• Turned right on Highway 88 and headed up Carson Pass (cat 2, elevation 8,574)
• Turned around and descended to Woodfords, where we turned right to stay on 89 and headed to Markleeville (elevation 5,489)
• Continued on 89 and then Highway 4 and climbed Ebbetts Pass (huis categorie, aka HC; elevation 8,730), failing to get water along the way
• Turned around and dropped back down to the junction of 4 and 89, elevation 5,827 feet
• Turned right and headed east on 89, climbing the west side of Monitor Pass (cat 1, elevation 8,314)
• Turned around and descended back to Markleeville, then retraced our route along 88/89 to the Luther Pass junction (this bit is listed as a cat 2 climb)
• Turned right on 89 and climbed the east side of Luther Pass (cat 3, elevation 7,740)
• Descended back to the car

Appendix B – What does “Almost Death Ride” mean?

I say “almost” because our ride was almost as hard as the Death Ride. And it was better because we didn’t have to fork out $125, share the road with thousands of others, and endure all the fuss of registration, etc.

In case you haven’t heard of it, the Markleeville Death Ride is a popular century ride (not a race) that traverses five mountain passes over its 129-mile length. I’ve ridden it 12 or 13 times, and (as described here and here) always very much enjoyed it. These days, the main purpose of the Death Ride is to make people like me feel old. I first rode it in 1993, half my lifetime ago, and last rode it in 2005, a quarter of my lifetime ago. Where has all the time gone?

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