MAMILs in Action - a Big Ring Tale

Introduction

What is a “big ring tale,” you may ask? Well, you know about pickup games of basketball, where players head over to the court to shoot some hoops, encounter other players there, and have an impromptu game. This exists in cycling as well, when angry bikers happen upon others on the road and duke it out. (“Big ring,” as discussed here, refers to how the hero of such a tale, just before launching his final, devastating attack, “throws it in the big ring”—that is, shifts into his bike’s higher gear range.) This post recounts my latest showdown on the road, while also examining a fundamental question: is it lame to compete with road randos? Am I some sort of hothead?

MAMILs in Action – Wildcat Canyon Road, 10/13/2026

As our story begins, I’m ten minutes in to my standard road ride, a 20-mile loop with about 2,100 feet of climbing. I’m not feeling super hot, and I’m not warmed up, so I’m going pretty easy, or at least as easy as I can while climbing Los Angeles Avenue and Spruce Street. I’m maybe halfway up Spruce when I see this dude joining the road from a side street. He’s going pretty well so I figure he might overtake me. Which is fine. I’m not some guy who always has a chip on his shoulder. There are a lot of fast riders in the East Bay and there’s no shame in getting passed.

Still, I gauge this guy’s ability as I sense him approaching. I’m putting out a little over 250 watts, not too shabby, so I figure this isn’t some fred I’m dealing with. And sure enough, when he comes by, I note all the expected traits of a legit road cyclist: high-end bike (i.e., at least $8,000), roadie attire, shaved legs, good form, a flat back (though more ramrod-straight than relaxed), and an almost complete absence of body fat. He looks very fit despite being my age, possibly even a year or two older, so I won’t say it rankles that he’s overtaken me. But I’m not exactly impressed either, and cannot deny feeling a tiny but non-zero level of annoyance. Why? For a few reasons.

For one thing, he didn’t say hi. I don’t expect everybody to, but classy riders invariably will. It’s just friendly, and softens any sense of implied hierarchy, like I think I’m something special just because I’m going faster. (And since you asked, yes, I do in fact greet every single rider I overtake, even the one I see all the time who’s on a folding bike, with no helmet, who has only returned my greeting once, when I was with my wife.)

There’s also the matter of this guy’s clothing. I am not a snob and as detailed here I would like this sport to be more newbie-friendly and less elitist, and I am on the side of the 49% of my cycling community that feels inexpensive, even house-brand cycling clothing is perfectly acceptable. The problem is, this guy’s clothing is too expensive , and without being … how do I say it? Proper? Correct? If you’ve ever read the Jeeves books by P.G. Wodehouse, you’ll recall that the main character, Bertie Wooster, has more money than taste, and occasionally gets into a standoff where his butler Jeeves, the real brains of the operation, discourages him (albeit with almost infinite tact) from wearing this or that unfortunate outfit. If everybody had a Jeeves, there would be no Rapha clothing company. None of the veteran cyclists I know wears Rapha. The sleeves are too long, and the fit is, I don’t know, a bit too close, and it just has this yuppie-meets-hipster air about it. I am tempted to say Rapha is trying too hard, though I don’t like this expression since obviously we should all do our best. But Rapha is just too much. Too expensive, too idiosyncratic, somehow just douche-y. 

This guy is wearing sleek, racer-style Rapha shorts that happen to be tan, which just isn’t done. And his Rapha jersey is salmon-colored. There’s nothing tasteful about his combination, and yet it also lacks the devil-may-care look of somebody who can’t be bothered with matters of attire and would happily dress in the dark. It’s the sartorial equivalent of saying “whom,” to sound educated, when “who” would actually be the correct grammar. This guy is trying really hard to look cool, but he’s not cool, and trying and failing to be cool is even more uncool than what I do, which is to not bother trying to look cool because I know I’m not. (For the record, I’m wearing basic black Pearl Izumi shorts—a classic, tried-and-true garment that has never tried to make a statement—paired with the unassailable Albany High School Cougars team jersey I got for free because I’m a coach. It’s a Hyperthreads jersey, which says “good enough” instead of “only the best.”)

Another thing: this guy increased his pace as he approached, and then increased it a little more after passing me. Don’t get me wrong, I sometimes do this too, if I don’t want, say, a relative newcomer to the sport to latch on, draft for a while, and then pull alongside and engage me in conversation. It’s not that I never want this, but sometimes want to ride alone. And if I do increase my pace to discourage this latching-on, I make sure the change in speed is extremely gradual, so it’s basically undetectable. A rider with true class, in fact, can increase the pace while still appearing to actually slouch. Meanwhile, more often than not, particularly when the rider I pass is someone whose ability I perceive to be similar to my own, I don’t speed up at all … I overtake him or her simply because the speed I happen to be going is slightly higher than his or hers, and I say hi, and if I perceive he or she has subsequently latched on, the only difference in my behavior from that moment forward is that I’ll point out potholes, etc. as a courtesy. This is just the standard etiquette of a tried and true roadie.

But again, I couldn’t really care less that the guy has passed me. I’ve been in this sport a long time, and I know my place in it, and his, and any rando’s relative pace simply does not matter. The guy gradually pulls away, and I’m just doing my thing, and it’s a non-event … though there’s just this faint whisper of a voice in my head, but not even in words, it’s more of a nonverbal half-formed feeling that, if it were to be put into words, would be something like the musing of Pechorin, the character in Lermontov who, considering a poseur of his acquaintance, writes in his journal, “I feel that one day we shall meet on a narrow path, and one of us will fare ill.”

I hope I’ve made it clear that I don’t ride around looking for trouble, ready to lash out if I don’t like the cut of someone’s jib. So here’s the next thing that happens: after reaching the top of Spruce, and when beginning the flat-to-slightly-uphill section of Wildcat Canyon Road toward Inspiration Point (after which the road plunges downhill), and seeing the Rapha dude still ahead in the distance, I perceive another cyclist coming up from behind. He passes me too. No greeting from him either, but he gives a quick nod.

This guy is also on a high-end carbon road bike, an immaculate one in fact, and his non-Rapha clothing is impeccable. In fact it’s some kind of team kit, and the team has some funny name that I wish I could remember. It’s an odd phrase that suggests either something lost in translation, or an inside joke. Like the Rapha guy, this dude also has totally lean, ripped, shaved legs, and good form, but the big difference is, he appears to quite young, early twenties tops. He’s going at a fair clip and I quietly latch on. I give him some space, in case he’d rather be riding alone. (Is there a way to indicate this preference? Not that I can think of. Perhaps if he accelerated that would send a message, but his pace is unchanged.)

Now we’re going a fair bit faster than I would have by myself; after all, I don’t need to be warmed up to hold his wheel. (Drafting works, duh.) My legs are starting to wake up, and we’re cooking along at like 23 mph, up a 1-2% grade. The odd thing is, as fit as this kid is, he seems a little unsure carving through the curves. There’s just a bit of hesitation, suggesting he doesn’t have bike handling totally dialed, like maybe he’s come to cycling recently from another sport. There’s no particular value to this realization but I sense it being filed away as if for later use. Make no mistake, I have no opinion regarding my place in the roadie universe vis-à-vis this rider either; I’m happy enough just to be on his wheel, since going fast is more fun than not.

Well, I think you can guess where this is headed. Sure enough, after about a mile we’re bearing down on the Rapha dude. It would be perfectly reasonable to assume that Rapha would just hop aboard the train and we’d keep moving through space, like molecules that happened to form a bond until some other reaction reforms it. But I’ve got this feeling that something else will happen, that will create an interesting opportunity for me. It’s not that I have ambitions and am thus looking for opportunities; it’s just the race tactician that took up shop in my brain decades ago and never left.

The Rapha dude looks back and pours on more pace, and as we approach I note that his straight but stiff back has something aesthetically disturbing about it, the way we look at a hyena and cannot admire it as we would a tiger or wolf. Suddenly this guy is simply no longer acceptable to me. And here’s where everything seems to take on a familiar scripted quality for me: I can almost see in advance how this will play out. We will reach him right at the bottom of the short climb to the Brazil Building, following which the road plunges down a hill, around a curve, and climbs again. The short climb is probably where things will erupt, and I sense that the young guy is untested, and non-battle-hardened, and this will give me an opportunity. The downhill, meanwhile, will suit me perfectly. And when the climb resumes, the rest of it is shallow, and lumpy, and inconsistent—in short, complicated, thus favoring those like me who have ridden it a thousand times. Hell, I was probably hammering along Wildcat Canyon Road before this kid was born. Best of all, it’s still a mile and a half to Inspiration Point, where we’re all three likely headed, so it’s not like I’d be sucking the young guy’s wheel until the last second and then coming around. Randos do that with me from time to time, and there’s no valor in it. I need to give these guys the opportunity to bring their best counter-move; we need enough remaining road to let the best man win.

So tactically, everything seems to be shaping up perfectly, but there’s one problem: tactics only work if you actually have the athletic ability to execute. All the expertise in the world won’t matter if you’re weak, or old, or both. Weakness is all relative, of course, and I wouldn’t ever sincerely describe myself as weak per se, but then both these guys have already overtaken me. And when I think about how much stronger I was in my twenties … do you think I’d attack my twenty-year-old self? Forget about it. So as stoked as I’m starting to get, I don’t kid myself: this is pretty quixotic to even contemplate and chances are I’m headed for a spectacular defeat. My move might be impressive for a moment or two, but I have no delusion that fate will be on my side. My growing ambition is likely hubristic, except that this is ultimately just three guys on bicycles and nothing is at stake, ergo there can be no tragedy. It’ll be Hubris-Lite.

My only remaining hesitation, as we bear down on Rapha, is the inescapable sense that I might be being silly. Could it all be in my head that either of these guys even cares? It’s not like they’ve thrown down a gauntlet. It’s just guys going fast and guys going faster—no trash talk, no sudden accelerations, for all I know I could launch this huge attack and they might look at each other, puzzled, as if to say, “What’s his problem?” So I have the attack kind of coiled up but I’m still not sure I’ll use it. If everyone just keeps rolling along in some status quo way, I might just stay the course and channel my internal Gilda Radner: “Never mind!”

Ah, but right as we reach Rapha, he stands on the pedals and goes for broke. Excellent! And even better, the kid completely responds and launches a counter-attack, out of the saddle, thrashing the bike. So there you have it! Rapha has thrown the first punch! And the young guy has taken the bait! It is on! We’re hauling ass up the little climb and my lizard brain finally syncs with my neocortex, which issues the non-verbal equivalent of this executive dispatch: “Excessive use of force in overhauling the randos has been approved.”

And so: I make my move. This is the part of the story where literary convention would have me writing, “I put her in the big ring.” But of course I’ve been in the big ring practically since our story began. But I do launch as hellish an attack as I am capable of—no testing-the-waters nonsense, no looking over to see if it’s working, just an all-in, all-cards-on-the-table full-gas assault, not only on them, but on myself. I blast over the top of the hill with a lead of some kind, I dare not look back to see how large, and here’s the coup de grâce: I follow up the initial attack with a blistering sustained effort on the downhill, a stretch of road that I call the “I hate pain” hill (in reference to what it’s like climbing it). I shift all the way down the stack to my 11-tooth cog (in fact, I could call this a “Small Cog Tale”) and bomb the descent (watching like a  hawk for pedestrians because those who appreciate speed enjoy it responsibly). I generally figure I’m doing pretty good if I hit 35 mph on this stretch; today I hit 40. Around the bend I go, climbing again, still in the big ring, nursing all the speed I can out of my legs, shifting to larger rear cogs reluctantly, one at a time, fighting the loss of speed that’s demanded by physics—that is, the grade of the climb—and by biology, that being the age of my legs. I can’t believe how well my body is managing the effort. I’m almost incredulous. These legs!? These lungs? This heart? Seriously? Who knew I had this in me? It feels almost like a miracle. And of course experience figures strongly here: I know, by feel, exactly how hard I can push without going anaerobic. Whatever this best effort is, I can sustain it for the remaining mile-and-change to Inspiration Point where the blessed descent begins.

Paradoxically, the difficulty of sticking such an attack doesn’t lend itself very well to description. What can I say? It’s a savage effort. My respiratory system is turned up to 11, the kind of whooshing airflow that blows papers around a room. My legs burn like they drank habanero salsa. My entire body feels like an overextended rubber band I could expect to snap at any second. I’ve managed to instill that sense of actual crisis that tricks my body into delivering its best effort. And, pedal stroke by agonizing pedal stroke, it eventually works: I reach Inspiration Point without having been caught. So now I’ve got a really good hand.

Because of course it isn’t over; it is exceedingly rare that a legit roadie does an out-and-back to Inspiration Point. Where I’m headed, my opponents likely are, too. But descending is something I’m pretty decent at, and the young guy had showed some weakness at this discipline, and I know this road really well. I keep the heat on, and hope that I don’t catch up to a line of cars routed here from Highway 24, thanks to Google Maps. I hate the way that algorithm clogs up this park road just to save commuters a few minutes.  It would be anticlimactic for us all to get stuck in traffic.

Well, guess what: halfway down, there it is, the nose-to-tail commuter clump. Curses! I know from experience that getting stuck here will cost me about thirty seconds. (Not that the time is an issue; it’s just no fun inhaling exhaust fumes and riding the brakes.) So if I’ve managed to build a decent gap on the randos, I figure, I might just hang on to the end of Wildcat where it meets Camino Pablo where I’ll take a right. Sure enough, on the final stretch I look back, and here comes Rapha, barreling down toward me and the cars. I still have about fifty yards on him when I make the right turn. And guess what: I’m completely warmed up now, amped up on adrenaline, and newly inspired by the rando’s having in fact given chase. So I kick it in the guts and manage around 400 watts for the next half-mile. I never see him again.

Epilogue: who cares?

Of course this whole smackdown is literally a non-event. There are over 10,000 Masters 55+ racers in the United States, the vast majority of whom could kick my ass, and the time to distinguish myself as a bike racer is long past. And it’s not like I have this insatiable ego that constantly needs to be fed; if I did, I’d still race. But something about the absolute simplicity of this random tête-à-tête really satisfies. My career usually does not; it’s complicated and involves giant, months-long projects in which many dozens collaborate, so any sense of accomplishment tends to be so diluted as to essentially escape notice, often completely buried in the frustration it took to get there. And so something so elemental, so in-the-moment, a feat so inextricably wound up in pure will, is a rare and special treat that I can savor even as it burns. Reliving it through memory, and through this post, is also gratifying. I hope I’ve inspired you to let yourself take the bait should you find yourself facing a similar opportunity.

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From the Archives - Lake Tahoe & Mount Rose Epic Ride

Introduction

If I still raced, I’d file race reports with my bike club and then post them here. Since I don’t, I like to do epic rides instead, and report on them. Lately I’ve done nothing epic at all, so I’m running a very old ride report from my archives. You should treasure this as a rare glimpse into the exclusive inner sanctum of an elite cycling community. (Full disclosure: it’s not so different than my typical bloggage, but man, I gotta try to keep your attention lest you wander off to watch “reality” TV.)

Pre-Tour-of-California Lake Tahoe/Mount Rose Ride Report – May 18, 2011

Since I didn’t even race Mount San Bruno this year, much less anything else, I’ll have to make do with a ride report. Three of us (C—, N—, and I) did a fairly epic ride near Lake Tahoe the day before what would have been Stage 1 of the Tour of California had it not been abruptly canceled literally at the last minute, with all the pro racers staged at the start line. (Why was it canceled? You’ll just have to read on to find out.)

The tale begins, of course, with dinner the night before. On the way up to Tahoe our family dined at a rather good taqueria called Talavera Cocina Mexicana. It’s on Solano Ave. Yes, you read that correctly: the little place like half a mile from our house. We got such a late start, we ended up setting a new record for how soon into a road trip we stopped for food. I had a carnitas burrito with cheese and guac. It was big and, well, tasty enough. Alexa had the mushroom quesadilla which was really the star of the show. Happily, the mandatory Parental Tariff policy stood me in good stead.

The morning of the ride, at 6 a.m., I had a PBJ: Alvarado bread with Adams organic peanut butter, the salted kind of course—not like the heinous, inedible Deaf Smith unsalted brand I grew up with, which came in like a 5-gallon drum and was so runny we called it Quicksand because you’d lose knives in it, so every time you got to the bottom of the drum there would be like six knives—and my mom’s homemade apricot jam, which is nirvana.

It was pretty chilly when we started at seven, and the spray from riding through several large puddles got my leg warmers wet. So I was cranky (like Hank with his diaper from that old TV ad). We tooled clockwise around the lake for a while and then headed into Nevada and took a left on Highway 431 at Incline Village. This highway took us up over Mount Rose, the summit of which—at almost 9,000 feet—is the highest pass in the Sierras (and higher than the Col du Galibier in France, though you shouldn’t for a moment think that Mount Rose even deserves to lick the Galibier’s foothills). My form was, as we in the suffering industry say, “El Crappo Grande.” I think that’s partly because I never seem to ride at my best in the cold, and partly because I’d donated two units of red blood cells about two weeks before and my marrow hadn’t yet replaced them all. Also, I suck.

N— dropped us climbing Mount Rose, and his reward was to have to wait around in the cold wind for us, all the heat leaving his uninsulated body. C— and I added insult to injury by asking him hang out a bit longer to snap our photo. He seemed just a bit tetchy about this, which warmed me from the heart outward. I’m small like that. It was 41 degrees up there but at least it wasn’t raining. You can see it was windy, though: look how the wind is puffing out our jackets (I hasten to point this out so you won’t think we’re just fat).

Happily, it warmed up a bit as we descended. We stopped somewhere to take a leak and fill our bottles, and I asked a friendly-looking fellow traveler for directions. He looked strangely familiar, so I gave him a big smile just in case I’m supposed to know him, but he totally gave me the silent treatment. He seemed really distracted and in fact wouldn’t even look at me. I peered over his shoulder into his road atlas for a bit before realizing it was just a book.

Naw, I’m just messing with you, I never thought it was an atlas. Of course nobody would rely on me for directions; C— had mapped out the whole thing beforehand. He said to watch for Joy Lake Drive, onto which we hung a right. This was supposed to connect us to … well, I never actually got to find out how it was supposed to connect up, because at the gate to a, well, gated community we encountered a stubborn security guard who wouldn’t let us through. He had a walrus moustache and a walrus physique and immediately made me think of the Pink Floyd lyric, “It’s too late to lose the weight you used to need to throw around.” He gave an impassioned speech about how the filthy rich people living in the McMansion compound were so tired of the thousands of cyclists streaming through their community, burning their homes to the ground, enslaving their wives and children, and littering, that they closed the gates and won’t let any more of our kind through. He said there was a great bike trail, though, and gave us directions that showed him to be either dyslexic, stupid, right/left colorblind, or maliciously faux-helpful.

So we had to backtrack, up the No Joy road we’d come down, and then continued on to Highway 395, where we headed south into a brutal headwind (surpassed only by what C— dragged a few of you through last week). I would provide a map of our route but C— won’t grant me permission to follow him on Strava. [Note: over fourteen years later, he still hasn’t granted me access.]

My strength by this point had decayed from hopeless to lugubrious and it was all I could do to suck C—’s wheel, shamelessly and parasitically. It was inhumane how little work I did, but that’s okay because C— has been training a lot and seemed to be punching through the wind just fine. We got into Carson City and C— had a general idea there was some really cool bike route to take, but we couldn’t find it, and then we happened upon another cyclist. “Which way do we go?” C— asked him. The guy responded, “Where are you going?” If there’s a such thing as the polar opposite of a tautology, this was it … a notion I pondered stupidly for the next hour or so.

Thus, we ended up riding right through the main drag in Carson City, and a drag it was. The wind was ripping the flesh off our faces. As we passed a used car dealership with all its dumb balloons straining against their strings in the wind, I wondered if there were a convenient way to end my own life. Falling off C—’s wheel would have probably done the job, but not swiftly nor mercifully. Plus, I’d have died hating doing something I loved, which just seemed wrong, so I chose life. Life without parole, it seemed like. We stopped at a mini mart for water and some guy said, “You guys heading over 50? You got a long haul there.” We acknowledged that indeed we were totally screwed (though we used a more polite term). As the guy headed out the door he said, “Have fun in the race tomorrow.” As if.

So we headed west on Highway 50 over Spooner Pass, which those familiar with Spoonerisms might call Pooner Spass, thinking they’re funny or clever. It started off pretty badly because the wind still seemed to be in our faces, but then it shifted and we had a tailwind. Wow, what a relief. It didn’t help so much, but it left me free to drop off both N—’s and C—’s wheels without dire consequences. I’d have liked the company, of course, but at least I didn’t have to hear the squeaky chain that one of their bikes had, which was almost loud enough to drown out my wheezing. At one point I had to turn around because I accidently littered. Eventually I reached the top. Don’t we all? Here we are at the Spooner summit.

There’s not much else to say except the ride went on and on. I started to feel okay by the end, probably only because I knew I was almost done. I was barely coherent. When I tried to talk, often I would say the same word twice, like a strange form of stuttering. C— pointed out that on this bike path were painted instructions saying to ride right, walk left, which he felt was a very poor idea as it would lead to head-on collisions if heeded. At first I didn’t even know what he was talking about—I thought he was warning against slime in the puddles—but when I finally heard him right I thought his point was that it was backwards, that you should ride left and walk right, and only after several minutes did I finally grasp the lunacy of the instructions: it wasn’t a single rule applied to both directions, but actually one lane dedicated to riding and one two walking, regardless of direction. Dang. Anyhow, at 117 miles, with 8,400 feet of climbing, this was my hardest ride of the year.

During the ride I consumed four large bottles of energy drink, two energy bars, and four doughnut holes. The doughnut holes I bought on a whim at 7-Eleven at our last stop. By definition doughnut holes have zero calories, being nothing but a void, but I bought them anyway because they looked kind of tasty in a grotesque guilty-pleasure—nay, shameful-pleasure—kind of way. N— had totally bonked and actually looked sick (in fact his skin was slightly green, like a Vulcan’s) so I can’t tell if it was in the spirit of helpfulness or schadenfreude that I offered him some of the doughnut holes. He declined. I offered again. He declined again. I saved a couple for my daughters, along with the two Hostess fruit pies I’d bought but didn’t end up needing, probably because I’d just pounded a 20-ounce Coke.

Dinner was the gastronomic equivalent of an extended hip-hop mash-up where every single rapper on the planet jumps in to freestyle on the mic. While the men were out riding, the womenfolk had spent the entire day cooking. (This probably sounds sexist, and it’s an exaggeration, but after the beating I took on the road I need to take steps to rebuild my masculine dignity.) There was spinach lasagne, two kinds of enchiladas, salad (though I didn’t eat any), fruit salad (ditto), a big ham, and some other stuff. Then there were individual pumpkin pies with whipped cream, two kinds of ice cream, those weird cookies that have big chocolate disks pressed into them, and the mandatory parental tariffs I took of my kids’ Hostess fruit pies from earlier. I just sat there for like two hours straight eating plate after plate. (My wife has rightly pointed out that if I weren’t so thin, this kind of eating would be a truly disgusting spectacle.) As if C— hadn’t done enough work on the ride, he did the dishes while I just sat there. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank him for organizing the weekend and doing all the work.

The original point of this trip was to watch the opening stage of the Tour of California, but the strangest thing happened the night after our ride: it freaking snowed. As in, hard, and for a long time. In fact, Highway 80 was closed for a while. Look how much accumulated on my car, and how surly this has made my daughter. (Actually, this is her default expression. In fact she’s stoked because our cabin came equipped with sleds.)

The racers nevertheless assembled at the start line, but the snow showed no sign of letting up and they managed to organize a revolt. The organizers made noises about changing the start time and location, but ended up just canceling the stage entirely. Someone needs to remind Mother Nature that it’s May, and this is California. Oh well … at least my pals and I got a good ride in.

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Biking the White Rim Canyonlands Trail With Young Bucks

Introduction

Every year or so I get together with my friend Peter to do a monstrously difficult bike ride. This year would have been in celebration of forty years of friendship, except that neither of us actually noticed this milestone at the time. (I did just now.) Just to mix things up, we brought along Pete’s son H— and two of H—’s friends from the Colorado State University cross-country running team. This is a little bit like inviting Godzilla to your garden tea party with his pals  Megalon and King Kong, expecting them to sip daintily and take just a few cucumber sandwiches instead of trampling everything. If you like the idea of me suffering, well, read all about it right here.

This was a one-day assault on the Canyonlands White Rim Trail, which Strava says most riders complete in two to four days. Pete had done it in three days with H— a couple years back, and this spring H— decided it would be a pretty good idea to hammer it out in one. (So honestly, it was me being brought along as an afterthought.)

Executive summary

As I’ve mentioned before in these pages, I’m not a big astronomy fan. The old cliché about staring up at the stars and saying, “Kinda makes you feel insignificant, doesn’t it?” doesn’t seem that profound to me, because all kinds of things make me feel insignificant (like being middle-aged, and an empty nester, for starters). I don’t need to travel to some remote place where there’s no light pollution just so I can feel like a trivial little speck.

Meanwhile, I learned through this exercise that if you travel to a sufficiently isolated place—in this case Canyonlands National Park near Moab, Utah—you can be so dwarfed by giant reddish rock formations towering above you that you never need to see the celestial heavens again, if feeling insignificant is your thing. In the photo above, look how Peter (the farther-away dude, in black) is so diminutive compared to the rock wall next to him. (If you can’t even make him out, click the photo to enlarge, which goes for all the pictures in this post.)

And yet, this being by far the longest mountain bike ride of my life, I feel like my Man vs. Nature battle didn’t come out so very badly. Despite a protracted ordeal in an unforgiving landscape, I find myself “still alive and bitching” (to quote the philosopher king Marshall Mathers). You might be alarmed to know we were out for almost 11 hours with virtually no shade but I barely noticed … we had far bigger difficulties to surmount than that. For example: the CSU brat pack; the relentless pounding of our tires over unforgiving landscape; and the formidable Shafer climb (starting at mile 75). If all you care about is the fact of us pulling this off, congratulations, this Executive Summary is all you need, and you can click here for dessert. Otherwise, read on for the gory details!

Short version

Dinner the night before, at our AirBRB (a nickname I’ve just coined, I think), was De Cecco pasta with trailer-trash sauce. This sauce is made by sizzling some crumbly house-brand Italian sausage in a pan, glugging some jarred sauce in there, and heating it up. Since I drove like a thousand miles for this get-together, I splurged on some weirdly high-end sauce that’s like $10/jar. (Did I pay that? Of course not. I had a digital coupon or something.)

I slept poorly the night before because a) I’d eaten way too much pasta, and b) during the two-day drive out to Moab I adopted an all-taqueria-all-the-time approach to dining, so I had percussive flatulence all night, loud enough to wake myself up (and probably some of the 100 or so species of arthropods we can presume were sharing my room, if this dwelling was typical). Did I regret all that Mexican food? No. Not even considering the long hair I found in one of my burritos, which was from a forlorn taco truck in the middle of a giant dirt lot in a remote part of Provo. I kept pulling on that hair and it just kept coming, like a magic trick. And yes, I did finish that burrito. Think of how many hairs are discovered and removed just before restaurant food is served, or hairs that we actually ate, unawares, because we were eating too fast. (Or is that just me?)

My breakfast on ride day was a seriously overripe banana (peel almost black) with peanut butter, and coffee blacker than the banana peel. The AirBRB had a coffeemaker, but they’d stocked the wrong size filters, so it’s a good thing I brought my own pour-over cone and filters from home (along with my standard-issue ground Peets). These items had saved me at the motel the morning before as well, where the only teabag-style “coffee” they provided for their stupid coffeemaker was decaf. I’m strongly considering bringing ground coffee, my cone, and filters with me every time I leave the house from now on.

During the ride I ate an untold number of Clif and Kind bars, washed down with about nine  or ten bottles of water. Knowing the precise number of bars wouldn’t properly document the actual caloric intake, because there’s a lot of chocolate in a Kind bar, most of which melted due to the desert conditions and couldn’t be extricated from the wrapper. I felt kind of foolish eating these bars because all of my riding pals ate almost nothing but peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I really need to get in on that.

By the time we finished the ride, showered, limped back out to the cars, and drove into Moab for dinner, not much was open. We hit the Moab Grill which was still hopping. I knew as soon as we sat down that a) I wanted wings, real bad, and b) Pete would refuse to have anything to do with them. He’s above wings, apparently. We’ve argued bitterly over it in the past, sometimes after brutal bike rides such as this, and never order them. (It’s not that I couldn’t eat a whole plate of them by myself with no appreciable dent in my appetite; it’s that they’re meant to be shared. Solo winging would be like drinking alone.)

Of course we had the three young bucks at the table, but what if H— took after his old man with the buzzkill no-wings-ever policy? And what if the other two dudes, G— and T—, were, like, vegans or something? You never know with elite athletes. So I tentatively asked, “Would anyone be into getting an order of wings?” G— grinned and said, “That’s practically all I’ve thought about for the last two hours.” Score! God, those wings were good. Buffalo style, with ranch, of course. I miss them. I just love how you can shove an entire wing in your mouth and then zip the bones out in one motion, leaving all the delicious meat to be exuberantly chomped. I also had a Reuben that was pretty darn tasty, on marbled rye that the waiter specifically recommended, with hella fries dragged through mayonnaise. I also inherited like half of H—’s “Dyablo” burger (jack, bacon, jalapeños, roasted red peppers, hot sauce) that was super good despite the misspelling. I don’t know what is wrong with that kid that he doesn’t even finish his burger after a 105-mile mountain bike ride, but at least he likes wings. And it’s not like I’m complaining about the secondhand food.

The really messed up thing is that I’d brought a four-pack of Fieldwork IPA all the way from California to drink with Pete après-bike (or should I say après-vélo?), but we were so shattered from the ride, we just didn’t feel like drinking. And we didn’t. Okay … now are you getting a sense of how hard this ride was?

Long version

This long version is truly long, even for an albertnet post. What can I say? It was a long ride. If you think reading this is hard, go try riding White Rim sometime.

You may have noticed from the map above that there’s almost nothing on it but the crenulations representing topography, and one little actual paved road, that being Country Road 143 that we were on for a few miles. No towns, no trailheads, no warming huts, no bailout roads to civilization. Granted, if the map were more complete it would show the little visitor’s station we stopped at, ~80 miles into the ride. Other than that there was just nothing and almost nobody. But we had each other.

Wait, did I just imply that having each other was a good thing? Honestly, endeavoring to keep up with three NCAA Division I cross-country runners is one of the dumber things I’ve ever done. Yeah, sure, they were on bikes, which is more Pete’s and my thing, but then, fitness is fitness, and youth is youth. Plus, they had their inevitable rivalry, leading to irrationally exuberant accelerations. For the first 40 miles, it was more or less a death march hanging on for dear life behind them. It wasn’t just hard physically (I mean, duh) but psychologically too … I kept thinking, wait, we’re only 20 miles in  and the temperature is climbing and I’m already suffering and shouldn’t I be saving some energy for later, and specifically for that monster climb, instead of accepting this breakneck pace? I didn’t realize until I looked at the bike computer data afterward that these first 40 miles were almost all uphill. That’s because everything is so wide open, you can’t get a sense for gentle gradients. I just thought it was the rough terrain and the pace that were making it so hard.

Obviously it’s only the shallow climbing that’s invisible. It’s pretty hard to miss a steeper climb like this one:

That’s the Green River in the background there, BTW.

Climbing on a road bike, on asphalt, is hard enough, but at least that’s just a matter of turning the pedals. On a really rough trail—and I was surprised how legit and rocky and complicated a lot of this trail was, compared to the dirt road I’d naïvely imagined—you also need to steer around the bigger rocks, bumps, etc. because at such low speed, they can stop you cold. Sometimes you can’t avoid an obstacle and have to use body English to pop your bike over it, one wheel at a time. Meanwhile, the whole time you have to lean really far over the front wheel or else it’ll lift up off the ground (even if only slightly) at which point you lose the steering and your brain shuts the whole operation down so you unclip from the pedals and are dead stopped. Riding with your weight this far forward, you have barely enough traction on the rear tire, so it slips from time to time, costing you priceless forward momentum. Add in that you don’t know how long the climb goes on, and it’s hard to have faith you can make it to the top.

Sometimes we did give up and walk our bikes, which was a major letdown. For example, check out the pitch shown below, coming at the end of a prolonged section of brutally tough climbing. Pete almost made it. I was maybe 2/3 of the way before realizing (or at least imagining) that if I waited until the even steeper bit ahead to bail out, my shoes might slide out from under me. Pro tip: as you start to walk your bike, grab the rear brake to lock that wheel, or the bike will drag you backwards down the slope.

By the way, the shade you see in  the above pic is almost all we got the whole day.

We started getting some nice downhills. I don’t mean the super-steep technical ones where you’re hanging your ass over the rear wheel to keep from face-planting (though we did get those too, and they were glorious) but the more relaxing easy ones where all you have to do is steer around the larger rocks (because who wants a flat tire or other mechanical out in the middle of nowhere?). Unfortunately it’s really hard to take photos or make movies while doing these, but one of the young bucks somehow managed:

It was bumpy enough that I lost five bottles, only four of which I managed to retrieve. Three losses were from the side pockets of my CamelBak. I didn’t use the bladder with it, because I needed room for tools, the first aid kit, food, and five water bottles. (If you’re interested in everything a seasoned mountain biker has in his pack, click here.)

The trickiest part of these downhills was that you’d occasionally hit soft sand, which can sometimes seem to grab your wheel and twist it, so your bike starts to jackknife. Gave me the heebie-jeebies every time.

We stopped for rests periodically, especially in the more scenic places like this chasm we peered into.

Here is our lunch stop. (This happened to be around 1 p.m. but really, every food stop was lunch. It’s like when you’re in the grocery store checkout at like 4 p.m. and the manager says to your cashier, “Go take your lunch now.”) Look at H— peering at his PBJ. He’s probably thinking, “Come ‘ere, you.”

At around the southeastern-most point of the loop, at say 5 o’clock (i.e., the position of a hypothetical minute hand on a clock, not the actual time), several of our phones chirped because we randomly had a cell signal for the first time all day. We stopped and fired off some emails, because after all this was a workday. Kidding! But I did snap the below photo and texted it to my brother, and he actually got it!

By the time I tried to send the same pic to my daughter, the signal had evaporated. Probably it had been bounced off a passing jet, maybe even a spy plane, and was a flash in the pan.

I was about to type a thousand words about how majestic and architectural the landscape was, but instead here’s another photo.

If you’ve ever wondered how these formations got to be how they are, and especially if you’re a female reader, let me explain (or mansplain) it all from a geologic perspective. Wait! Come back! I was kidding! I have no idea how this land got to be this way. I’ve had it explained to me half a dozen times over the decades but I never listened. It’s complicated. Something about sedimentary, igneous (or is it Ignatius?) deposits, once submerged by an ancient ocean, or was it crushed by a glacier? I actually have no idea.

You might be wondering: does Canyonlands have anything to compete with the amazing pupfish of Death Valley? Well, not that I saw, but there were occasionally these darling little cactus flowers. (Bike tire included for scale.)

I count at least two or three species of insect in there. It’s like a big bug party in the desert!

While we were stopped for that photo and some chow, an SUV rumbled slowly by. A puffy middle-aged woman was in the front passenger seat and gave us a bored glance. She was wearing one of those ring-shaped neck pillows people use on long airline flights. Perhaps she was just doing this drive for the commemorative bumper sticker and couldn’t wait for it to be over (though that’s exactly what she was doing).

At around mile 60, an inventory of pain had assembled itself in my brain and my inner voice was whining. My back hurt (mainly from the strain of climbing). My right collarbone hurt where the strap of the (overloaded) CamelBak was pressing down, because of the heads of the screws holding the plate in there that fixed my once-broken collarbone. All my toes felt broken, which tends to happen on really long rides (despite my excellent footwear). Perhaps most of all, my hands hurt from my bike’s continuous impacts with rocks and hard-edged slabs we kept bumping up on and down off of. I’d brought long-finger cycling gloves and short-finger ones, the former without padding and the latter with gel, and ultimately opted for the long-finger. I don’t know what I was thinking … they’re just what I normally wear mountain biking, for protection against poison oak. But was I going to find that here? (I can sense you shaking your head.) I couldn’t switch to the padded gloves because G— had forgotten his gloves and was thrilled I had a spare pair. Would it be a dick move to demand that he trade with me now? Yeah, it would, dang it. So my palms were really raw. Have you ever gotten a little overexcited while tenderizing a pork chop, working out some demons perhaps, and you realize the meat has become so roughed up and soft it’s almost like moss? That’s how I imagined my hands had become.

Eventually we made it to the base of the dreaded Shafer climb. G— and H— took off ahead, ostensibly to make it to the ranger station before it closed. We didn’t actually know its hours, and it was already 4:30 p.m. with zero chance of getting there before 5 anyway, but the young bucks were out of water and thus desperate. Here’s Pete looking back at me as if to say, “Okay, they’ve got enough of a head start. I’m going hunting … see you at the summit.” The look I returned, as I snapped this photo, said, “Release the hounds!”

(Full disclosure: Pete’s look back surely meant nothing of the kind, nor did my return glance. I’m adding these subtexts only now, to give this report some drama and the shimmer of fiction.)

In the photo above, if you look straight up from the top of Pete’s head (zoom in!), you can see the switchbacks we would have to face.

Pete’s chase was swift and ruthless. The climb was ruthless but not swift, not for me. This next photo is from two minutes later. Not only has Pete caught H— but look how far ahead he is of me! I think I even used my camera’s zoom for this shot!

I rode my own pace, having released myself off the back on my own recognizance as I so often do. I know better than to try to run with the bulls. Here’s a little video documentary I made.

If you pause video that near the beginning to look at my bike computer readout, you’ll note I was going only 4 mph. Go ahead, mock me … but also consider the grade was 14%. (See what I mean about the wide open topography making the grade look shallower?)

Almost twenty years ago, my wife and I did a mountain bike vacation in Moab and, for shits and giggles, took a sunset river cruise narrated by a quasi-historian. The script he read from was cheesier than all-you-can-eat fondue. Our favorite line, delivered toward the end after a long pause (calculated to build suspense, I suppose), was, “And now, in the darkness of night, we ponder the legacy that is ours.” So pompous, and so meaningless! My wife and I like to trot out that utterance from time to time. And perhaps pondering our legacy is what G— was doing when I came around a bend to see him stopped.

Or maybe he was just enjoying the shade and taking a breather. I’d kind of been counting on these runners to eventually tire so they’d ease up on us. I’d asked beforehand how long their longest event is; it’s the 10K which takes them like half an hour. Obviously their training runs are longer, but then nobody runs for eight or nine hours at a stretch … and yet this kind of duration is typical for Pete and me on our monster rides. (Our 2022 slogfest took 8:37:47 and our 2023 gravel adventure took 8:37:32.) H— , T—, and G— are like greyhounds, whereas I’m more like a lobster lumbering across the ocean floor. As I distance cyclist I am kind of made for this, or more to the point I kind of made myself for this. We’d only ridden for six or so hours; I was just starting to find my groove.

I could still see Pete and H—, utterly dwarfed by the canyon wall.

The landscape was so literally awesome, so  sublime, that I kept trying—but always in vain—to  capture its grandeur with my phone camera. Perhaps my best effort is this accidental video, that was supposed to be a still photo. Though it’s obviously pretty sloppy camerawork, I think it captures the feeling of this climb better than any of my stills.

Switchback after switchback, the climb went on and on. Obviously I was suffering hugely, but at least the trail was smooth here and I settled in to a rhythm of sorts. If you read my posts from my epic French Alps cycling “vacation,” you’ll understand my point when I say this kind of suffering is the devil I know. (If you missed that series, cancel all your meetings and click here.) I felt like I could pedal like this all day, and probably would. At least it was easy to appreciate the progress I’d made, as shown by this photo. (SUV and T—, or maybe it’s G—, included for scale.)

Just before the summit of the climb, I caught Peter and H—. (The only explanation for this is that H— was hurting and had slowed down, and Peter hung back for some quality father/son time, to witness the lad’s suffering.) At the top, H— wobbled off the trail, set down his bike, and lay down on the ground to rest. Pete and I rode a couple miles to the Visitor’s Center to see about water. It was closed but had a spigot and we filled all our bottles. Bringing them back to the young bucks gave me a welcome paternal feeling, and I reconsidered my earlier plan to file charges of Elder Abuse against them.

We woke up H—, topped up everyone’s bottles, and set back out for what we thought would be a 20-mile descent, the first five miles or so being on actual asphalt. Instead it was rolling (if mostly downhill). That might not sound too bad, but each time the road tipped upward, it was like a slap in the face. Our group broke apart and regrouped a few times and over the last few miles I did some quality wheel-sucking behind T—, who’d caught a second wind at like mile 95. At one point I actually hallucinated and thought I saw buildings, like a small town, in the distance, indicating that we’d made a horrible navigational error and were screwed. “Do you see those buildings down there?” I asked T—. He looked at me as though I were crazy, which I suppose in the moment I almost was.

Eventually we reached the cars, our ride actually done, and busted out the cooler. There were only three Cokes, which were snapped up by the lads, but Pete and I were happy to make do with beers. Here is our official post-ride Beck’st:

Fortunately Mother Nature had put out some nice furniture to relax on. I love how, in this final photo, H— appears to be deep in thought, doubtless pondering his life choices and how he ended up here.

I can’t wait to return next year. With an SUV. And a neck pillow.

Stats

• 105.1 miles
• 8:44:05 ride time
• 12 mph average speed (really not bad for mountain biking…)
• 7,283 feet cumulative elevation gain (based on Pete’s Strava, presumably more accurate than the bike computer value shown above)
• 6,207 feet maximum elevation
• 120 bpm average heart rate
• 157 bpm max heart rate
• 4,316 kilocalories burned

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From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume XIX

Introduction

This is the nineteenth installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. Volume I of the series is here, Volume II is here, Volume III is here, Volume IV is here, Volume V is here, Volume VI is here, Volume VII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume IX is here, Volume X is here, Volume XI is here, Volume XII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume XIV is here, Volume XV is here, Volume XVI is here, Volume XVII is here, and Volume XVIII is here. This post holds the distinction of having the first palindromic volume number since Volume III. (Should you care? No. I don’t even care.) The different volumes have nothing to do with one another, and can be read in order, out of order, in pecking order, in good order, in court order, or in compliance with—or in defiance of—a restraining order.

What are albertnet Bits & Bobs? They’re the little bits of fascinating literary background that my biographer would be thrilled to discover, were I important enough and/or interesting enough to deserve a biography. These tidbits are like what magazines like Us or People Weekly would report on, vis-à-vis celebrities, if these periodicals employed text instead of just photos, and if I were really good looking. Most of these Bits & Bobs are snippets from personal correspondence. Others were written indelibly on my wrist or my psyche with a Sharpie.

The city where I was living at the time of each morsel is provided except where it’s Albany. Pay attention to the dates. Some of these dispatches are hella old. Others are just hecka old.

October 31, 1989 – Santa Barbara

I’ve had a bet with a bunch of guys on the cycling team since last year about the height of Australian cycling superstar Phil Anderson. [For context: this website ranks Phil the 40th best cyclist of all time; it ranks Greg LeMond only 67th.] Someone was trying to say Phil is only like 5’8” or 5’10” or something, which is absurd. I rode with him back to Boulder after the Coors Classic Morgul Bismark stage once, and he seemed a lot taller than that, giving me a great draft (though frankly he was a bit gassy). Anyway, Phil actually lives near here, and he went to a bike gear swap meet this past weekend to sell off some old clothing and such. My pals and I were all there so it was my chance to finally settle the argument. Just between you and me, Phil didn’t really look six feet tall after all. Nevertheless, I casually strolled over to him as though I hadn’t been a major fan for many years (ever since he was the first non-European to wear the yellow jersey in the Tour de France). My friends followed a small distance behind. I guess they were shy.

First, I tried to sell Phil an old Dura-Ace derailleur (just to see the look of pure incredulity on his face, which did not disappoint). Then I told him about the bet and asked him if he was in fact six feet tall. “Aye, I’m six one,” he said, in his cool Australian accent. I turned to J—, my main opponent in the debate, and said, “See! I told you so.” To my astonishment, J— actually tried to argue with Phil about it. That must have taken all the chutzpah he had, since if anything he’s an even bigger fan than I am. How do you simultaneously worship and refute such a vaunted celebrity? Phil told him, “Of course you look taller, mate, look at the thick shoes yer wearing!” J— was pissed (but not as pissed as he’ll eventually be after the tenth or twentieth time I tell this story). The victory could not have been sweeter, not even if Phil had indeed been six feet tall.

November 28, 1989 – Santa Barbara

I have a paper due in my Western History class and decided (based on a suggestion from the T.A.) to explain the Greek philosophy thread in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I’m not that interested in Greek philosophy, or even in history to be honest, but I wanted to read the Zen book anyway. So, I went to the library to get some reference books, and checked out two books on Plato’s Phaedrus character. I have to admit, I was in a rush and didn’t really vet them very thoroughly. So I got home, opened them up, and discovered that one of them is in Greek and another in Latin. Damn it!

March 9, 1996 – San Francisco

I was in my boss’s office when the regional director came in, and he invited us to go out for sushi after work, at a place near the office. (I assume I was invited because I happened to be in the room and it would’ve been rude to exclude me.) I don’t really know from good sushi but it all tasted pretty good. The director wanted to order sea urchin but wasn’t sure he wanted a full order to himself. Oddly, nobody seemed to want to share any with him. I’d never had it but thought well, how bad could it be? So I was like, “Yeah, I love sea urchin, let’s do it!” I mean, I just didn’t want the guy to not get his urchin, since we were all in such a festive and boisterous mood. Well, it turns out urchin is just this big glob of goo, kind of the consistency of a really bad mango, roughly the color of mustard. It was really disgusting—tastes like feet or something—but I had to play along, having pretended to be a fan. Well, I guess my acting was too good because the director was like, “Yeah, this is great, let’s get another round!”

The meal went on for a long time—we just kept ordering and ordering (must’ve cost a ton) and suddenly I realized I’d never called home and let E— know I wouldn’t be home for dinner. So I went to a pay phone and called. She was like, “Where are you, you need to get home! I got the job! We need to celebrate!” (She’d been interviewing for her first job as a full-on journalist.) So I went back out to the group and let them know I had to bail. My boss asked if everything was okay and I gave him the good news. “Wait … so you’re going out to celebrate, as in dinner?!” he asked, incredulous. I was like, “Well, yeah! We’re going to I Fratelli!” (That’s our favorite local Italian place). This didn’t seem like any big deal to me—as you know I’ve been duel-dinnering for many years—but the episode made me kind of a celebrity at work. My boss even clipped a cartoon of some bloated-looking guy fiddling with his belly, which had the caption, “Having forgotten to save room for dessert, Carl switches to his auxiliary stomach.” My boss changed “Carl” to “Dana” and “dessert” to “Italian dinner” and posted it in the break room.

August 4, 1996 – San Francisco

You should be able to find a used modem pretty easily, since the technology is improving all the time. Email doesn’t require a very fast modem, whereas veteran computer users like to download graphics, etc. which does. So, a lot of people have probably upgraded and have perfectly good, albeit slow, modems lying around gathering dust. See if you can find one, because I really think you’d like e-mail. It’s like letter writing but less formal (and of course doesn’t take 2-3 days to deliver).

August 22, 2009

Well, we’re back from London. You probably don’t want to hear about how great it was (and if you do, click here). So I’ll fill you in on what didn’t go so well. On the second night we should have made dinner at the house, for reasons of economy, but were still jet-lagged and didn’t feel like grocery shopping. So instead, we went to this cool pub to get fish-and-chips. We were staying in a very non-touristy area called Ealing (“Queen of the Suburbs,” declared a postcard), and the locals seem to have a distaste for tourists, or small children, or both. I guess we should have been grateful the pub even allowed kids. Well, ours were behaving badly, making too much noise and fighting, and I kept shushing them (amidst the glares of the other patrons), and finally I warned them that if they misbehaved one more time we’d leave and make PBJs at the house. I really hoped they’d take me seriously because I’d just spied Guinness Extra Cold* on draft, which I’d never even heard of and wanted to try, but the kids kept fighting and I had to show them I was serious. So I declared we were leaving. Both kids shrieked in protest, and L— flat-out refused to go. So I picked her up and threw her over my shoulder in the fireman-carry. We marched out of there, the kids literally kicking and screaming. From now on, whenever I need to emphasize that I mean business, I’m going to remind the girls about “the pub incident.”

*Come to think of it, what the Brits call “Guinness Extra Cold” is probably what we Americans would just call “Guinness.” That is, only in the UK do they normally serve beer cool instead of properly cold.

September 15, 2009

I had one of those random showdowns during my bike ride today, the equivalent of a pickup game of basketball with a stranger. I felt decent on the Claremont climb, but not great—I was sick yesterday and E— is sick as a dog (102 fever). So I was pedaling okay, but nothing special. About 2/3 of a mile from the end of my climb, some dude came zipping by me. He was on a really fancy Look, and had pretty good form, and I let him go—at first. But then I noticed that a) he had these deep-section carbon rims, which I’m obviously envious of, and these superlight brakes that Mark has, that don’t work for beans, meaning the guy’s a total weight weenie, and b) he was spinning this really, really high cadence. Like he’s one of these modern angry bikers, the scolds who are telling me I need lower gearing, and he was all “Look at me, I’m spinning, it’s so efficient and won’t hurt my knees!” Needless to say I was insulted. Oh, Mr. Modern, Mr. Latest Cycling Theory, Mr. Fancy-pants Superlight Bike ... well, how would you like a little old-fashioned whup-ass?! He was well ahead at this point, but that just meant I’d have an even bigger head of steam when I came by him.

At least, that’s how I figured it, but he must’ve been peeking back at me because as I approached, he accelerated too. I eventually caught on and latched onto his wheel, and I won’t kid you—I was dying. I decided I’d hang on there for a good while summoning the strength and will to come by him, but then I changed my mind and figured it would be a bigger statement to drop his ass right away and somehow hold him off. The grade got a bit shallower here, which I figured would favor me, being all heavy and angry and all. So I blasted right by him, upshifting several times as I did so to make sure my cadence was nice and low … to make my point. And here’s where I got a sudden inspiration: how better to snub his limp, ineffectual gearing choice than to throw her in the big ring (or the “good ring” as I called it back when I was the founder and president of the UC Santa Barbara Big Ring Club)? 

So throw-her-in-the-big-ring I did, and then had to fricking slay myself to turn it over. Boy, my heart rate really soared here ... during the throw-down it averaged 172 bpm, peaking at 178 (matching my highest for the year). I spanked that over-equipped, pansy-spinning wanker so hard he’s probably out shopping and crying right now. It was glorious. By the time I got to turn off, to go down South Park Drive, he was so far back he probably didn’t even see me turn, which means he probably wondered where I went ... probably figured I reached escape velocity and achieved low earth orbit. Boo-ya, spinnyman!

December 23, 2009

Alas, for some reason the photo attached to your email didn’t come through correctly, it’s just a big blank box. Could you jiggle the little wire and try again?

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