Race Report - Everest Challenge 2014 (Stage 2)

NOTE:  This post is rated R for mild strong language.

Introduction

Ideally, you’re reading this because you’ve already read my race report for Stage 1 of the 2014 Everest Challenge and are dying to find out what happened in Stage 2.  If, however, you stumbled upon this page by googling “pastrami not lean” or “Jennifer Lawrence nude cycling burrito race,” please don’t leave!  This post really is where you need to be … just go read about Stage 1 first.  That way, much of this report will make more sense (though, honestly, probably a lot of it still won’t).

Pre-race

On Saturday night, I was filled with near-absolute dread.  Given that Saturday’s race had featured dire cold, rain, sleet, and snow, you might assume that I dreaded a continuation of awful racing weather.  Well, not exactly.  In fact, I was dreading the prospect of the weather not being bad enough.  I was holding out some small hope that the cold and wet would be so grossly extreme that the race would be shortened in the name of safety, or my pals would say “Let’s bag it,” so I could shrug my shoulders and follow along, thus escaping both the race and the disgrace of cowardice.

I voiced this strategy when chatting with my daughter Alexa on the phone.  “Dad, you can’t quit!” she protested. “No matter what the weather’s like, you have to race!  If you drop out, you’ll never forgive yourself!”  Translation:  “I’ll never forgive you!”  And imagine the repercussions:  every time my daughter gives up on something, she could throw it in my face.  “Yeah, I’m a quitter!” she’ll say, “and I learned it from you!”

On Sunday morning I dressed in a long-sleeve Patagonia thermal top, shorts, jersey, leg warmers, arm warmers, Smartwool socks, a jacket, and Craig’s extra pair of full-finger gloves.  (Yes, I was humbled by his superior planning, just as I’m humbled by his greater strength every time we ride.)  

I confirmed at the check-in what I’d gathered the day before:  I was sitting eighth in the Masters 45+ category; in ninth was the Talented Mr. Ridley, some four minutes behind me; and in tenth was Marco, whom I’ve seen every year at the EC, another ten minutes behind.  So all I really had to do was finish this race without completely cracking and I could hold onto eighth.  Sounds simple, eh?  Well, considering I’d completely cracked two out of the last three times on this stage, and I hadn’t held anything back this year on Stage 1, things didn’t look so hot.

Stage 2 – 73 miles, 14,030 feet of climbing

There was a mile or two of neutral riding before we crossed the highway and started the real racing.  My teeth were chattering uncontrollably.  I hoped everybody would chill out (pun intended, sorry) for a  good long time before dropping the hammer; it takes enough energy just staying warm.  But as soon as we reached the end of the neutral section, a guy went to the front and laid down the smack.  This was Chris Walker, who had finished third the day before, and was obviously wanting to turn the tables.  I saw my heart rate go into the 150s and decided my legs weren’t complete shit as in years before, which was kind of nice.  On the other hand, this meant I had to actually try.  (You see what a frail ego I have to work with?  Go ahead, pity me.)

I hung in there for a couple miles, but this was all too much.  I let eight guys roll away.  I looked back; the peloton was shredded like confetti behind me.  As the front group continued to distance me, it shed another guy:  Bobby, who had finished four minutes ahead of me, in seventh, the day before.  I was soon joined from behind by Marco, his teammate Jaycee, and one other guy.  We eventually caught Bobby, to form a group of five.

I was stoked to have riders to work with, but they were going a bit too fast.  I couldn’t bear to let them ride away, so I just had to suffer.  Can a person get better at suffering?  Of course.  Does suffering ever become any less unpleasant?  Please.  Read my lips:  it sucked.  It’s kind of funny how I train hard for like ten weeks for this, and my reward is abject misery for six hours, two days in a row.  It’s kind of an odd thing to plan your summer around.  Maybe my kids are right (“Dad, you’re crazy!”).  I’m reminded of what my brother Max swears my dad said to me when he heard I’d ridden over Trail Ridge Road during a thunderstorm at fourteen:  “You’re not very bright, are you?”

At least we weren’t being rained on.  It was really wet at the top, though, enough that the spray got our legs and butts all wet.  There’s a distinctive squeaky sound a cyclist’s wet shorts make when, after climbing out of the saddle, he sits back down.  It’s like a windshield ice-scraper being dragged across ballistic nylon, and we were all making that sound.  At the Glacier Lodge turnaround I took a bottle of water, mainly as ballast.  A minute into the descent I saw the Talented Mr. Ridley heading up toward the turnaround.  I reckoned we had three minutes on him.  My group took the descent easy due to the wet, and he caught us just as the road leveled out at the bottom.

I needed more Cytomax, but as we came through the parking area before heading up Waucoba Canyon, I couldn’t find my team’s cooler. So I pulled a baggie from my jersey pocket and mixed up a bottle while riding in our paceline.  “Really?” someone said.  The Talented Mr. Ridley rode away from us.  Marco seemed surprised.  “He’s kind of a lone wolf,” I explained.  Some twenty minutes later, the guy reappeared ahead, gradually drifted back to us, rode next to us for awhile, and then fell off.  “There goes Lone Wolf,” Marco said.

I’ll get right to the point:  our group of five got to the second summit turnaround together.  It may seem like this took no time at all, the way I’m reporting it, but believe me, it took a good while.  The race organizers lengthened this climb a couple years back, and I’ve never adjusted.  Imagine going to the dentist and having the hygienist poke and scrape at your teeth and gums for the entire normal duration, and then—just when you think it’s all over and you can get your new toothbrush and leave—she starts all over again and goes another round with her poking tool.  That’s the new, improved Waucoba Canyon climb.

We worked well on the descent and were still together when we reached the cars again.  We’d all agreed to stop to refuel and shed some clothing (it had warmed up a bit).  A couple of the roving race volunteers gave us some encouragement.  “You’re our favorite racer!” one of them told me.  I must have looked as bewildered as I felt because she went on to explain, “You smile more than anybody else!”  Now I was more confused than ever.  Could I have actually smiled at any point during this race?  She must have mistaken my rictus of pain.  Still, as misguided as the statement was, it’s still the nicest thing anybody has ever said to me, and I suppose I was encouraged.

Good thing, too, because that last climb—over 20 miles long and gaining over 6,000 feet in elevation—is a monster. At least I wasn’t facing it alone—I was happy to be in this small group, with nobody in it a threat to my GC placing. Not that it was windy or anything, and drafting wouldn’t make much difference at such low speed, but the miles go faster when you have company. As the Coen brothers put it, “There’s a spirit of camaraderie that exists between the men, like you find only in combat maybe, or on a pro ball club in the heat of a pennant drive.” The Coen brothers were talking about prison, but it’s an apt comparison; indeed, when (just a couple miles into this final climb) I couldn’t hack the pace anymore, and I had to let the other guys go, and was distinctly bummed at the long, silent miles stretching out ahead of me, I wondered if this was like going from the prison yard to solitary confinement.

I toiled away solo, buried in my lowest gear, starting to actually get too warm for the first time all weekend. Paul and Ken drove by in the Intimidation Van. “Do you need anything?” they called out. I did—I needed a lot of things, starting with a higher VO2 max and improved lactate threshold—but I didn’t need anything they could provide. I hoped I didn’t look too pathetic, pedaling away like a girl scout fighting the fierce current of Lake Chabot in a crappy little paddle boat.

Paul drove ahead and parked so I could ditch my jacket and arm warmers as I came by. Ken was quick enough to snap a photo. Look carefully at my crow’s feet—which are actually longer than an actual crow’s actual feet—and Paul’s waiting hands at the right edge of the frame.

The group of four that I’d dropped from was still visible at various points, and it disgorged another of its riders, whom over a period of twenty minutes I caught and dropped. Then Jaycee fell off the pace, and I gradually made up ground on him for another thirty minutes until, along a straight, shallow section of road, I saw him off the side of the road peeing. It seemed a pity to pass him under such circumstances, but my supersized bladder is one of my only athletic talents and I suppose I should take advantage of it when I can.

Not long after thus moving into ninth on the road, I suddenly felt completely nauseated. This happens sometimes, particularly at altitude (I was at about 7,000 feet elevation), and I truly hoped I wouldn’t hurl. Barf is really caustic so even just a mouthful can make your throat burn for hours. Fortunately I only dry-heaved. I did this a number of times. You know things are bad when you “only” dry-heave and feel fortunate about it. I retched wretchedly for a couple of minutes, and then felt a bit better and soldiered on.

Paul and Ken drove by again. I’m sure they felt a bit awkward trying to say something encouraging to somebody locked in such a seemingly pointless struggle, with so far still to go. What could they say? “Almost there!” No, that’s not true. And “You’re doing great!” might come off as sarcastic. But these guys know what they’re doing. “Dana, there are two bearded riders behind you!” Paul called out. “You are leading the bearded division!”

The temperature steadily dropped. The next time I came upon the parked van I got my arm warmers and jacket back from the guys and put them back on. Riding on, I was aware of a rider gradually catching up to me, but knew by his form that it wasn’t the Talented Mr. Ridley. Eventually the guy caught me. It was one of the bearded guys, and he pulled level right at the 5-KM-to-go sign. I felt oddly demoralized: not because I was getting passed (this guy wasn’t even in my category), but by how tired this guy looked. I thought he’d just roll away from me, but he couldn’t; it was like catching me had taken all he had. He was a living reminder of how hard this was. And for the first time all weekend, I began to battle despair.

How could I, with just 5K to go? Well, they’re long kilometers. I had about 1,000 vertical feet yet to climb. And it just suddenly seemed as though I couldn’t do it anymore. My legs simply didn’t want to turn the pedals. What if I stop? I wondered. Just for a minute? Just a little rest? I knew, of course, that these were the crazed delusions of a madman. I was like a car with an almost-dead battery: if I shut off the engine, I’d never get it going again. But 5K? It couldn’t be done! I reminded myself what was at stake: Marco (in tenth) was surely only a couple minutes ahead, and The Talented Mr. Ridley was behind me and unlikely to catch up, much less drop me by four minutes. All I really needed to do was finish. But that made it worse: so close, yet so far.

And so: I just kept pedaling, somehow. And after a few minutes, the damnedest thing happened: I started to feel better. Not so much physically, but emotionally. My mind relaxed. Yes, I can do this, I realized. Perhaps the grade had let up a bit, or the energy drink was doing its thing. Whatever the case, the despair melted away and in fact now struck me as having been silly. This was an epiphany of sorts: the idea that despair can just be a passing mood, that goes away all by itself. I suppose I’ve heard words to this effect before, but now I’ve experienced it. I’m going to remember it.

I reached the finish, made sure the ref got my number, rolled down to the refreshment station, grabbed a couple Clif bars, got my medal and t-shirt, and rode immediately back to the van before my tired body could cool off.  Even still I froze my ass off before reaching the van.  Ian and Craig rode by after a bit, and made a quick turnaround after the finish themselves.  We didn’t even pause for a photo-op; this was the only shot I managed to get.

Post-race

We showered at the hot springs.  I had a beer stashed in the cooler and chugged it:  doctor’s orders.  We went to Erick Schat’s for sandwiches, where we encountered (at like 3 p.m., spang between lunch and dinner) a crazy mob of people.  We had to sit outside in the cold.  Here we are.

Here is my sandwich.  It became more glorious when I’d stuffed the tomatoes, pickle, and sauerkraut into it.

Not shown:  the crazy bird that attacked Paul, and then attacked Craig.  Also not shown:  the little kid who started crying when Craig violently shooed away the crazy bird.  Seriously weird goings-on.  At least there wasn’t a group of firemen seated next to us, as there had been at Astorga’s and then at the Italian joint the next night.  For them to have joined us a third time would have been too much.  Instead it just started to rain.  We finished our lunches standing under the eaves.

We got on the road earlier than ever before, only to see on a flashing roadside sign that Highway 120, through Yosemite, was closed, along with the next highway to the north over Sonora Pass.  Getting home looked like it would take forever, meaning our merry band would go the way of the Donner Party, or the guys in “Deliverance” or “The Osterman Weekend.”  Fortunately, Highway 120 was open when we reached it.  Look closely in this photo (taken at the park entrance where we stopped to pee) and you’ll see the blowing snow.

We stopped at the pizza place in Groveland.  The staff seemed really out of it, bickering over who had to make the pizzas.  Ken asked if we could get a basil and tomato pizza and the cashier said, “No, we can’t make that.”  He asked which ingredient they couldn’t do, and she absolutely could not parse the question.  When I described this to Ian (outside) he said, “But that’s a classic Margherita pizza!”  I replied, “If I tell her that, she’ll say they don’t have a liquor license.”

I think the pizza-making job finally went to this fat guy in a filthy t-shirt who was chewing on a toothpick.  The poor cashier took a long time miscalculating the check.  I asked for a receipt and she had to write it out by hand on a scrap of paper, misspelling the name of the restaurant.  We got the two pizzas to go and ate them in the dark (the dome light seeming unwise as Paul was driving us down Priest Grade).  Ken said, “Dana, I’m gonna be pissed if I come across that guy’s toothpick.”  The thing is, it was nevertheless pretty dang good pizza.  Or were we just insanely hungry?

Postscript

On my third (short) ride after the EC, I went to shift into my big ring and my front derailleur cable snapped.  Bizarre.  I can’t help but feel grateful that this hadn’t happened during the race, when—despite the awful weather and rote suffering—nothing major went wrong.  And now I’ve been clobbered by a virus, which so easily could have struck earlier.  I’m pretty jazzed about this race, really; on my sixth try, I feel like I pretty much finally got it right.

Race Report - Everest Challenge 2014 (Stage 1)

NOTE:  This post is rated R for mild strong language and mature themes.

Introduction

As I begin this report, it is the Wednesday evening after the Everest Challenge.  I was going to go for a bike ride—just because it’s so nice outside and I want to know again what warm sun feels like—but my wife put the kibosh on that.  “Your breathing still isn’t back to normal,” she says.  She’s right about that … it’s like I’m still trying to catch my breath.  I told her I’d already talked to my doctor about it.  She knows “my doctor” means my friend who’s a doctor who specializes in pulmonary problems.  She asked if he had any theories.  “Nope, he wasn’t concerned,” I told her.  “And I know what he’d say if pressed him:  ‘You’re a pussy!’”

This Everest Challenge, my sixth, was different from the others.  For one thing, I actually caught the names of a few of the leaders, including the guy who I think ended up winning.  But don’t worry, I won’t bore you with such details.  This report focuses on the food, the difficulties, and the deranged culture of the event.

This was also my first year in the Masters 45+ category.  But the biggest difference was that instead of being unbearably hot, the weather this year was unbearably cold.  So don your fuzzy slippers, grab a nice hot cup of joe, forward your phone, and prepare for some highly indulgent schadenfreude!

Pre-race

We met at Ken’s place, where we loaded up Paul’s kickass Endurance  team van, which—being all modern and sporting a custom paint job and a giant bike rack—is so pro that we’re vicariously intimidated by ourselves.  New for this year is that all five of our bikes were badass black.  (I guess that’s not such a coincidence when almost all road bikes, it seems, are now black.) 

I was a bit late meeting the others because I got held up performing an emergency Epley maneuver.  At least I had an excuse the guys probably hadn’t heard before.

Our group has only two rules regarding the Everest Challenge:  1) don’t talk about the Everest Challenge; and 2) bring baked goods for the drive.  I think as long as I obey the second rule, the guys will cut me some slack on the first.  My daughter Alexa baked us a bunch of butterscotch brownies.  They were so good.  So were the cookies and chocolate the other guys brang.  (Yeah, I know “brang” isn’t a word, but that sentence was getting boring.)

Lunch was at Priest’s Station again, though it almost wasn’t.  We got there unusually early and the host told us they weren’t serving lunch yet.  He seemed relieved to be turning us away.  We were on the brink of leaving until Paul, who’d been outside when we got the news, came up with the brilliant idea of finding out when they did start serving lunch, which turned out to be just ten minutes away.

I won’t go into everything everybody ate, but we did have some intrigue when Ken tried to order:

[Ken]  “I’d like to get the vegan sandwich, but can you add cheese?”

[Waitress]  “No, I can’t do that.”

[Ken]  “Why not?  Isn’t the customer always right?”

[Waitress]   “I’d like to, but that sandwich you describe … it cannot be.  It does not exist.”

[Ken]  “Look, I grasp that it wouldn’t be a vegan sandwich anymore.  But I want the cheese.”

[Waitress]  “The addition of cheese obliterates the very essence of the vegan sandwich.  Not being our vegan offering anymore, the sandwich thus vanishes from our menu so you’d be adding cheese to nothing, to a phantom, to a lack.”

[Ken]  “Seriously?”

[Waitress]  “Hey, I’m just a waitress … I cannot alter fundamental ontological laws.”

Okay, I confess that I’ve exaggerated that exchange a bit.  What really happened is that Ken wondered aloud beforehand about whether he’d get any flak for adding cheese to a vegan sandwich.  When he (almost sheepishly) asked, the waitress said something like “Of course!” which suggested that the word “vegan” meant no more to her than “cowboy” in the context of my cowboy burger (grass-fed beef, bacon, BBQ sauce, onion rings—very tasty though it made a mess in my beard, which may be why hipsters so often order non-messy things like tahini pita).

When we stopped for gas at the eastern edge of Yosemite, we couldn’t believe how windy it was.  The forecast was for unseasonably cooler weather, which started on a promising note (mid-‘70s) but become ominous, with some websites forecasting rain.  (We enjoyed a long discourse on the probable evolution of weather forecasting, which must have started with Ouija boards but evolved to include almanacs just to get predictions into a saner range.)  But when we got to Bishop and headed out for our traditional spin-the-legs ride, we enjoyed sun and temps in the mid-‘80s.

Dinner was at Astorga’s, the Mexican joint, again.  They seated us in a back room, away from the decent guests.  We were all clean and presentable .. .what gives?  Maybe we’re too thin.  Anyway, something big was going down in the kitchen and nothing was coming out.  We ate at least a basket or two of chips apiece while waiting.  I wanted the combo with a beef taco and chicken enchilada and Craig ordered the opposite, just to spleen me.  I was unfazed until I got a beef taco and beef enchilada and both of Craig’s items were chicken.  “Boo-ya, motherfrockles!” the waitress did not say.

When we left, it was significantly colder out.  At the motel we set about pinning our numbers and mixing up bottles.  This year I even got organized and put a little sticker on my handlebars telling the mileage of each summit so I could mark my progress.

Craig, knowing he’d be groggy in the morning, wrote a to-do list for the morning:

The order is important.  If you dress before shitting, you’ll have to take your jersey and jacket back off to drop the bib shorts.  If you eat before heating your food, your food will be raw.  Etc.

Stage 1 – 89.2 miles, hella climbing

I say “hella climbing” instead of the normal precise number because the course had a last-minute change due to road construction and/or an evil troll crouching near the roadway.  So we did the traditional first climb (to South Lake, elevation 9,835’), then the standard second climb (to Pine Creek, elevation 7,425’), and then the first climb again.

I woke up dark and early, full of butterflies, and groped for my smartphone to check the time.  I was pleased by neither the time nor the active-background weather update for Bishop:

Craig was using some fancy-pants Weather Underground app to predict the weather at the higher elevations, and the forecast for South Lake was for snow turning to rain and then back to snow.  D’oh.

We began our day.  I burst out laughing to see Craig’s oatmeal in the microwave:  a serving the size of a grapefruit.  I opened the door to snap a photo and the oatmeal sank.  It was mostly air, bubbling up as it cooked.  Still, a hearty helping.

I’m never eating Uncle Sam cereal pre-race again.  It’s just like cardboard and is like 30% flax seeds.  I also ate a tasty old-school granola bar 2-pack that had expired during the Clinton administration.

I fretted over whether to save my wool socks for Sunday (which had an even worse forecast) before discovering, to my delight, that I’d brought two pairs.  These were not only Smartwools but were a Christmas present from my mom, so you know I was super-stoked.  Alas, I only had one long-sleeve thermal base layer and saved it for Stage 2.  The rain had stopped before we mobilized but it was still plenty cold.  Less cold, of course, than what we’d be facing at South Lake.

When we got to the start line, my bowels asserted themselves again and I had to ride off to the comfort station and do one last purge.  It was farther away than I’d remembered, and I rolled up to the starting line about 15 seconds before the start.  The ref laughed.  “There’s one in every peloton,” Paul said.

The first climb was brutal.  Determined not to wuss out and over-conserve my energy as I had last year, I dug good and deep and was still with the leaders until about halfway to the summit.  Then some damn climber type got a little aggro, others responded, and eventually my heart rate got too high for too long and I had to let six guys roll away, lest I detonate 13 miles into an 89-mile race.  When the grade flattened a bit I eventually made it back to them, along with Ken and a couple big rolleur types.  We latched quietly on the back of the lead group and sat in.

A few more dropped riders got back on, and right about the time I was thinking, “Wow, this is kind of a big group for this far into the climb,” Ken said, “Wow, this is kind of a big group for this far into the climb!”  The climbers must have heard, because the hammer went down again.  Plus, the road pitched up with a vengeance.  It was freezing cold up there, there was snow on the side of the road, I was carrying 175 pounds of blood and guts and my solid penguin-style bones, and a gap started opening.  I saw the 0.2 KM sign and figured whatever gap the pocket climbers got, I’d be able to close it on the downhill.

Suddenly I heard this isk-isk-isk sound and looked at my rear brake.  The rim was hitting it!  Had I broken a spoke?  No wonder I was hurting so bad!  I turned around at the turnaround (as one does) and stopped to put on my jacket.  Craig (racing in the 35+ category with Ian) was there, zipping up his.  I asked him to check my wheel.   He said it was fine.  (I discovered later that one of the decals had started peeling, and that was all that was hitting the brake, which wasn’t centered right.) 

Seeing as to how the leaders we already underway, I said to Craig, “Let’s go!”  I couldn’t believe my luck:  descending behind Craig is a wonderful thing.  Encountering him here looked like the best thing to happen to me since I missed my transfer (by like a mile) riding a San Francisco city bus and the driver, having just finished her shift, actually drove me home.

But here I was deluding myself.  “Sorry dude, Ian’s taking a piss,” Craig said.  “You better get going—your leaders are down the road.”  He didn’t need to add, “You bozo!” because this was implicit.  I’d have hauled ass down the twisty, narrow road except I was afraid of frost and ice.  I took it easy for awhile.  When I got back into the sun I chased like a mofo and eventually caught the leaders.  In fact, after I passed them I accidentally dropped them all via my aerodynamic tuck and my penguin bones.  So  then I had to coast awhile, untucked like a slob’s shirt, and let them catch up.  I kind of missed the hammering I’d been doing … at least it had kept me a bit warmer.

Those poor climber bastards.  They’re even skinnier than I am and a few weren’t even wearing leg warmers.  A couple of these guys were shaking so badly they could barely control their bikes.  I gave them plenty of room.

(A note about my constant climber-bashing:  I actually have nothing against climbers and in fact hold them in high regard.  But their ability to roll away from me on pivotal uphills just isn’t something I can take sitting down.  Or standing up.  It rankles.  It would be dishonest not to share with you the feelings I had during the race, even if these feelings evaporated immediately afterward.)

On the flat section it was really windy and I was hoping to put more distance between our group of 11 and the couple dozen guys who’d been dropped.  But the climbers wouldn’t help.  Their attitude seemed to be, “Who cares how many guys latch back on?  I’m a climber and another climb is coming up and I’ll just drop them again, ha-ha!”  Fine.  But they don’t get to self-identify with draft horses or oxen … just little ponies or maybe lapdogs.  Ken and I did most of the work until the second climb.

Four miles from the summit the pace got too high and again I released myself from the leaders on my own recognizance.  Fortunately, two big guys decided to detach with me.  One of them, Marco, I’ve raced with pretty much every year at EC.  The other didn’t look familiar but he had a cool Belgian-themed bike and good form.  I later learned his name was Bobby.  So we suffered along together for awhile before Marco said, “Hey, welcome back” to this fourth dude.  This guy was particularly lean, with really veiny legs and a fancy Ridley bike.  But he didn’t hang around … he went by us and gradually pulled away.  This seemed kind of stupid to me.  I mean, he wasn’t going to catch the leaders, and we were bound to catch him on the descent or the flat section later, so what was the point of expending extra energy opening up a gap on us?  But hey, free country.

Sure enough, after reaching the summit together and sharing the wind on the descent and the flats for about ten miles, our trio caught the veiny-legged Ridley guy.  As we approached the road where all the cars were parked, I thought about stopping for a couple fresh bottles.  (The race-supplied energy drink tends to give me debilitating gas, along with others I know who have used it.  Paul said it once blew his belly up like a balloon, and when he was finally able to begin farting post-race, each passing of gas shrunk his belly visibly.)  Of course it’s a shame to break up a group, so I was contemplating suggesting to the other guys that we all stop at our cars and then sync back up.  At that moment the veiny/Ridley guy suggested exactly that.  So we all stopped at our cars—except him.  He just kept right on going!  “Aha,” he must have thought, “I tricked them!”  Bobby said mildly, “That wasn’t very sportsmanlike.”

We had a strong, cold crosswind on the final climb.  Marco must have fallen off at some point.  Bobby and I picked up a couple other good riders (from other categories) and were steaming along pretty well when I saw the Talented Mr. Ridley ahead in the distance.  I knew I wouldn’t last in this group for the whole climb, but hoped we’d pass and drop this guy before I had to back off.  When we went by him I didn’t even look back to see if he’d latched on.  I just settled in and suffered.  I know the road would turn eventually, so the wind might not be so bad.  When I finally eased off  and peeked over my shoulder, the Talented Mr. Ridley was way off the back.  This stoked my coals.  I don’t mind telling you, I hoped we’d completely crushed his morale.

Of course, he was not all I had to worry about.  Survival was very much on my mind.  It was getting ever colder as I gained altitude, and then it started to rain.  No, it wasn’t a deluge, but enough but enough to soak my chamois, which makes Hank cranky.  How much weight does a drenched jacket add?  Oh well.  Then the rain turned briefly to sleet before becoming snow.  Again, not a lot, but—snow!  Dang!  And there was that damn wind.  I won’t go into tedious detail about how long the next ten miles felt.  If you really want a taste of what it was like, read this paragraph repeatedly for the next hour while punching yourself with a bag of frozen peas.

Paul drove up next to me in the Intimidation van and called out encouragement.  He would go on to park it as far up the climb as he was allowed, so we wouldn’t have to descend the full twenty miles to the start area after the race.  HUGE.

I eventually made it to the finish, though this required some paperboy-style weaving on the steepest pitches.  (Despite having already disgraced myself with a compact crank maybe I’ll use a wussy 27-tooth cog next year—there, are you happy now!? )  In case you’re wondering, I reached the finish almost four minutes ahead of the Talented Mr. Ridley.

Fortunately it was dry at the top and the sun even managed to poke through a bit.  I was drying out nicely.  A volunteer handed me a cup of hot cocoa which was so perfectly appropriate, it almost brought me to tears.  It even had a few clumps of un-dissolved cocoa mix, like chocolate croutons.  Then I had a bowl of hot noodle soup or two and various sugary treats.  I found the sag vehicle  and my (sadly under-stocked) warm-clothing bag.

Steve Barnes, the race director, recognized me despite my beard (which is more than I can say for many people in my community, such as the shocked school mom who wondered who this dangerous-looking stranger was walking along with my daughter).  Steve asked how the beard was treating me, and I pointed out that not only did it keep my face warm, but the moustache traps snot, which can be harvested later for its valuable electrolytes.  He’d not been aware of this, perhaps because I’d just made it up (though I think it’s actually true).

Craig and Ian rolled in and had themselves some calories.  Here we are.

This next photo is intended to showcase the dusting of snow on the mountains, and I suppose it does (though such things never look as good in photos).  Bonus:  it also showcases two other bearded racers.

Post-race

We had just started our frigid descent to the van when I realized nobody had grabbed Ken’s clothing bag.  (He’d ended his race at the van on the way up, having suffered a moment of clarity about our absurd situation and an ominous tightness in his chest.)  So I screamed for Craig (ahead of me) to stop, and the three of us re-climbed the 200-meter 16% finishing wall.  That really hurt, in every way.  I felt like I should have something to show for such an effort, so while Ian fetched Ken’s bag I had Craig take my photo with a couple of local superheroes.  If you look closely at this photo you’ll see that the snow had started up again.

By the time we got to the van I was completely frozen.  Hanging around at the finish line and diverting all my blood to my stomach had serious consequences, as had neglecting to bring full-finger gloves.  Craig reported that my lips were purple.

Dinner was at our old standby, the Upper Crust Pizza Company.  For some reason I listened to Ian and Craig, who thought that last year’s strategy—splitting an XL pizza among the three of us as an appetizer—was overkill, and that we should just get two smalls.  That place has seriously good ‘za and (though I say this every year) next time I swear I’m going to get my very own pizza appetizer.  But the ‘za, some bread, a bowl of soup, and the yummy chicken marsala pasta did a good-enough job of replacing my lost calories.

To be continued…

I was pretty happy with how I rode on the first stage.  (I was 8th in a good-sized M45+ field.)  I was less happy with the weather, and with the forecast for Sunday.  In fact, the wimp in my brain was half-hoping the weather would be so bad for Stage 2 that we’d be able to bag the whole thing without completely sacrificing our dignity. 

But I’ll tell you right now, Stage 2 did happen.  And as I’ve pointed out many times before, recovery is my greatest weakness:  the better I go on Stage 1, the more I pay for it on Stage 2.  So if you’re not satisfied with the level of misery I’ve described above, check back because believe me, there’s more to come.

Bicycling in the Rain, or How To Be an Idiot

Introduction

With rain finally upon us (relieving for now a terrible drought here in the Bay Area), it’s time to talk about this ridiculous practice of riding a bicycle in the rain for fun and fitness.  I don’t mean getting caught in the rain, which can happen to any cyclist, or commuting in the rain, which is a noble activity that can involve fenders and such.  I’m talking about making a conscious decision to ride in the rain, which I did last Sunday, to my great misery.

This post should appeal to those with a yen for schadenfreude (look, two words—almost in a row— borrowed from another language!).  You can also read here about the strange notion of the "Reverse Murphy," and about why a cyclist who braves bad weather should never, ever begin to believe he's tough or something.  At the end I even have a surprising get-warm-quick recipe.

The idiocy of riding in crummy weather

For an amateur cyclist to train in bad weather is an affectation, like when a Master's racer dopes.  I mean, if you’re doing this sport as a hobby, and you’re not trying to make a living at it, there’s no point making yourself more miserable than necessary just to be better prepared for racing in crummy weather (which you should also avoid). I doubt you get better at tolerating cold with practice anyway. And, you’ll get a better workout on an indoor trainer, if you can handle the tedium. (Click here for motivational and logistical trips on training indoors.)

Besides, there’s the bike to think about.  Brake pads will usually last years if you only ride in dry weather, but in one or two wet rides (especially if your terrain is hilly, like mine) you can burn halfway through a pair.  Then there’s the time spent cleaning up your drivetrain; if you have that much time to kill, you should be training more, or—better yet—doing something truly worthwhile.  And if you go mountain biking in the rain, you severely damage the trail and basically sand away your drivetrain with all that grit.

So why did I ride?

Last Saturday night, I gave my bike a tune-up.  I filed the shellac off my new brake pads, cleaned everything up, and got my chain and cogs clean enough to eat off of.  I mixed up a couple bottles of energy drink for a Mount Diablo assault the next morning.  All this, even though I was certain it was going to rain.

Why was I certain?  After all, Accuweather said there was only a 25% chance of rain.  Well, it was simple Murphy’s Law:  whatever can go wrong, will go wrong.  And since I’d done such a nice job tuning up my bike, it had to rain.

Okay, so why didn’t I bail in advance, like the smartest of us four guys who had planned to ride together?  It’s because of this terrible drought we’ve been having.  It’s only rained once since last spring, and just barely.  All the liberals around here have been self-flagellating about it for two months.  So I figured I’d pull a Reverse-Murphy.  That is, I would cause it to rain—much as you’d do with a rain dance or cloud seeding—by tuning up my bike.  If I backed out of the ride, the drought would continue.

Being stupid in the rain

I woke up at 5:45 a.m. and went out on my porch.  No rain yet, but the wind in the trees was making a very specific sound, a slightly clattery whir that always means rain is imminent.  At about 6:30 I checked my e-mail; Todd had written, “My rain dance didn’t work (again), so Northside here I come.”  I figured he’d only looked out the window, and hadn’t noticed the special pre-rain breeze.

Fifteen minutes later I checked my e-mail again.  “Whoops,” Todd wrote.  “My rain dance worked after all.  Back to bed.”  Classic last-minute flakage but it wasn’t inappropriate … he’d signed on for this ride at the last minute anyway.  What I was looking for was an e-mail from Craig, who lives on the other side of the hills, an hour away from the coffee shop where we met.  Had he written, “It’s raining and frigid so I’m turning around,” I’d have probably bailed.  But no e-mail from Craig, meaning he was evidently well underway and toughing it out.  To stand him up and make him spend another miserable solo hour getting home while the rest of us slept … I couldn’t do that to a pal. 

I almost left on time, but when I got outside and found myself pummeled by some very big, very cold raindrops, I suddenly felt the urge to, uh, take care of post-digestive matters one more time.  You know about OCD; have you heard of its cousin, OCB?  Obsessive-Compulsive Bowels?  By the time I’d stripped off all my layers, done my business, and suited back up, I was running good and late.

I held out some hope that I’d roll up to the coffee shop and Craig wouldn’t be there.  I’d had this same hope on a similar winter morning in the early ‘90s when meeting up with my friend Trevor; when I saw him there, shivering in the rain, I thought, “Damn you to hell!”  He was, as he freely admitted, no happier to see me.

Of course Craig did show.  We steamed up Spruce Street, a nice uphill, and weren’t too cold then, but by the time we finished descending the east side of Wildcat Canyon Road to Orinda, we were completely drenched and miserable.  It was about 40 degrees out.  (I know, to most of the U.S. that’s downright balmy, but we Californians are a bunch of pansies.  Our routinely great weather makes us soft.) 

My shins felt like they’d been encased in ice.  I told Craig I’d escort him home but Mount Diablo was out of the question.  (A ten-mile descent in such weather would be the end of me.)  He suggested we ride out on the flats to Danville and then he could drive me home.  Drive me home?!  What would come next?  Aromatherapy and a subscription to “O, The Oprah Magazine”?  No way.

Riding home—the second hour of my ride—I just got colder and colder.  My feet felt like they were big blocks of ice.  The fingers of my fleece gloves became grotesquely distended with the wet, and when I wiped my nose I could taste all the salt the gloves had absorbed from sweat over the years, now carried away by the water.  Same with my helmet pads, though the water dripping from them also had a chemical taste.  My hands barely worked; shifting to a bigger cog was easy (swinging the palm of my hand like a hammer) but I could hardly click the smaller lever.  Most of all, I was too cold to even pedal hard, perhaps because my very spirit was waterlogged , soggy, and saggy.

I am not a hard man

When I was a teenager, I had this Coors Classic poster on my wall.  The cyclist pictured had thighs that literally gleamed.  Look, here it is now:

I’m going to admit something now.  In those years, riding in the mountains west of Boulder meant getting caught in thunderstorms not infrequently, and when I did, my legs—being wet—would gleam, and I would pretend I was the guy in the poster.  Laugh all you want, but haven’t you also fallen prey to mild narcissism at some point in your life?  It helped me brave some storms, anyway.  I wasn’t yet wise enough to be humble.

Well, I am now.   Slogging home through that incessant rain, I was too miserable, and feeling too sorry for myself, to feel like a badass.  I just felt stupid and lame.  I think it’s funny when some cycling fan bags on Cadel Evans for seeming a bit whiny during post-race interviews.  Did you see Evans in the Giro d’Italia last year?  (If not, click here or here for a blow-by-blow recap.)  Throughout the Giro it was raining most of the time, and snowing the rest of the time, and those poor guys had to not only brave the weather, but endure all the normal stress and strain of racing all-out.  I’d be bawling like a little girl after just one day of that, to say nothing of doing it for three weeks.  So I cut Evans plenty of slack.

And yet, even pro bike racers are nothing compared to 19th century sailors.   I’ve been reading Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana Jr., about his voyage around Cape Horn back in the early 1830s, in a ~100-foot merchant brig, and man, those guys knew how to suffer.  After all, they never had a choice.  Whenever the wind changed, which was pretty much a constant thing, they had to take in one sail or another, doing all kinds of complicated stuff with the rigging in all kinds of weather, day and night. 

For example, on one particularly stormy winter night near Cape Horn, the wind 

came on to blow worse and worse, with hail and snow beating like so many furies upon the ship, it being as dark and thick as night could make it.  The mainsail was blowing and slatting with a noise like thunder....  The yard over which we lay was cased with ice ... the sail itself about as pliable as though it had been made of sheets of sheathing copper.  It blew a perfect hurricane, with alternate blasts of snow, hail, and rain.  We had to fist the sail with bare hands.  No one could trust himself to mittens, for if he slipped, he was a gone man....  Frequently we were obliged to leave off altogether and take to beating our hands upon the sail, to keep them from freezing.

As cold as I was on my stupid little ride, I knew I’d be home in an hour or so, and the furnace would be going, and I’d have a hot shower and plenty to eat.  These guys?  They didn’t have a hot shower for over two years.  They’d go days or even weeks without dry clothes.  To eat they got nothing but salt beef, hard bread, and (on Sundays) a bit of duff (basically a steamed flour/water pudding).

At least last year’s luckless Giro riders didn’t have to worry about scurvy:  

The scurvy had begun to show itself on board.  One man had it so badly as to be disabled and off duty, and the English lad, Ben, was in a dreadful state, and was daily growing worse.  His legs swelled and pained him so that he could not walk; his flesh lost its elasticity, so that if it was pressed in, it would not return to its shape; and his gums swelled until he could not open his mouth.  His breath, too, became very offensive; he lost all strength and spirit; could eat nothing; grew worse every day; and, in fact, unless something was done for him, would be a dead man in a week, at the rate at which he was sinking.  [After encountering another ship, and being given a whole bunch of onions], we carried them forward, stowed them away in the forecastle, refusing to have them cooked, and ate them raw, with our beef and bread.... It was like a scent of blood to a hound.  We ate them at every meal, by the dozen; and filled our pockets with them, to eat in our watch on deck.

Imagine sharing a tiny forecastle with a bunch of unwashed sailors, and getting diseased breath so awful that the constant eating of raw onions is actually an improvement.  What a place to return to after slaving away with frozen rigging on an iced-over deck for four hours at a time.  Needless to say, absolutely nothing involving a white collar middle-aged man in Lycra doing a winter bicycle ride in California could possibly compare.

How to warm up

I got home, dragged my bike up the steps to the porch, and stood there a moment wondering how I was going to manage to dig past the gels, the tool kit, and the bags of drink mix in my jersey pocket to fish out my house key.  Fortunately my wife heard me from inside and opened the door.  A blast of warm air hit me.  It took me a few minutes to remove my shoes and I rolled my bike, which was dripping black filth, down to the garage.  I couldn’t shower right away for fear of chilblains on my lily white feet.  You can see my feet weren’t doing very well:

I huddled over a heater vent for at least twenty minutes before my teeth stopped chattering.  I don’t remember what I ate but it wasn’t hot cocoa; I wasn’t in the mood.  I guess I’d have felt like a girl scout or something.  Once, after getting stuck in the rain and snow on a Diablo ride, I came home and ate some rollmops, just to embrace my northern European heritage.  (What?  You haven’t heard of  rollmops?  It’s raw herring wrapped around a dill pickle.)  But on this morning I was too dejected by the futility of it all to play games with food and we didn’t have any herring anyway.

What I didn’t consider until much later, when my brain had thawed out, was that to warm up properly I should have done what the sailors in Dana’s book did: 

Throughout the night it stormed violently—rain, hail, and snow, and the sleet beating upon the vessel—the wind continuing ahead, and the sea running high.  At day-break (about three, A.M.) the deck was covered with snow.  The captain sent up the steward with a glass of grog to each of the watch; and all the time that we were off the Cape, grog was given to the morning watch, and to all hands whenever we reefed topsails.

What is grog?  It’s basically watered-down rum, named after Admiral Vernon of the Royal Navy, who was nicknamed Old Grog after the grogram fabric of his coat.  (The word “groggy” stems from “grog.”) 

So, when I had some friends over a few nights later, I found a few (widely divergent) grog recipes, did some improvising, and made up some good grog—so good, in fact, I had to make a second batch.  Here’s the grog recipe I worked out (this makes one generous serving):

1½ to 2 oz. dark rum

½ ounce lime juice

1 tsp sugar

1 small dollop of molasses

4 oz. water

In a pot on the stove, heat the water to a boil.  Kill the heat.  Stir in the sugar until it dissolves.  (You could use brown sugar instead of sugar and molasses.)  Put in everything else and stir well.  Serve hot.  Do not garnish with an orange slice or a cinnamon stick, because do you think those totally badass sailors ever went in for fricking garnish?

The best part of this (admittedly inauthentic) grog?  Due to the lime juice, you won’t get scurvy!

Postscript

If we’d stuck to our original plan and ridden up Mount Diablo, we’d have been snowed on.  Look! 

Winter Storm

Introduction

We’ve had some real weather in the Berkeley area lately, including a crazy thunderstorm last Friday. This post concerns weather, weather forecasts, and that amazing winter storm. Guest commentary is provided by my daughter Alexa.

Weather

If I were marketing The Weather, I’d tout it as “America’s favorite conversational topic!” It’s hard to go wrong with it—who doesn’t care about the weather?—unless it strays into political territory (e.g., climate change). There’s little risk, when discussing weather, that you’ll broach the other forbidden topics, sex and religion. But it has often occurred to me that discussing the weather can be a little awkward because it’s such an obviously safe topic for light conversation. Bringing it up can suggest you’re deliberately tiptoeing around some taboo subject.

I was very glad about this last storm, because the narrow range of weather in this area has become my latest source of parental guilt. Where my family lives we almost never get a proper thunderstorm, and certainly never the thrill of waking up to see the whole neighborhood buried in fresh snow. If the American Dream is to give your kids more than you had, I’m letting my daughters down, because growing up in Colorado I enjoyed a great many summer thunderstorms and overnight snowfall.

Weather forecasting

Forecasting the weather must be a really easy job. Not that it isn’t complicated, of course, but the customer has no recourse when the forecast is wrong—which it so frequently is. Weather.com forecasts the temperature hour by hour, but every single morning when I check the temperature (on their website) it’s a few degrees cooler than they said it would be. If all they did for a forecast was to measure the temperature once per hour and use these values as their predictions for the next several weeks, they’d do a better job.

Do weather forecasters use a Ouija board? I suspect not. They probably just steal their weather information from somebody else. After all, who could possibly catch them in the act? Meteorology seems pretty precise, especially with the satellite images we all nod at on TV or online, but of course we’re not really capable of extracting meaning from the images. They’re just something for the weatherman to gesture at.

Twice this year my family has made bold outings in defiance of the forecasts. A few weeks ago we took a two-day trip to hang out on the beaches south of here, despite an emphatic prediction of nothing but rain for both days. Here’s what we got:

The other trip was to ski up near Lake Tahoe. The forecast for Sunday was rain all day, which of course would have made for lousy skiing. Instead, it only snowed a bit, and we enjoyed sparsely populated slopes and no lift lines.

Even the basic weather forecasting terminology is a bit of a farce. The weatherman loves to talk about “high pressure systems,” which we all studied and halfway grasped in junior high, but it’s basically a throwaway phrase. Even the difference between “rain” and “showers” is a bit of a mystery. My wife asked me about this this morning I replied, “A shower is when water falls from the sky—in fact, when water actually rains down on you from the sky—but it isn’t actually rain.”

The weather forecast in the UC Santa Barbara student paper, the Daily Nexus, was never wrong. This wasn’t because the weather down there was totally predictable (though it was), but because the person who did the weather section never so much as mentioned the weather. The “forecast” was more like a snapshot of whatever was on the person’s mind. I see that the format hasn’t changed:

Back in the day, these “forecasts” were much wittier than this, and I don’t remember seeing typos. Or am I just becoming bitter as I age?

Movie night

The big storm I mentioned earlier happened when my family was at Movie Night at the elementary school. Though there had been rain on and off during the day, the sky had cleared up by evening and we didn’t expect much more rain. We’d have walked to the school but we were running late. We wore light jackets and normal shoes.

At a fundraising auction I’d won the VIP Movie Night Extravaganza Package, meaning my kids got to bring a friend “for free,” and we got special seating, and got to come in through an exclusive side door, were given a big bucket of candy, and got a whole pizza instead of just buying slices à la carte. We even got wine masquerading as juice boxes. No, none of this has anything to do with the storm. I’m just bragging.

So I sat there with an entire pizze box on my lap, feeling like royalty, the kids distracted by candy, watching "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory," a movie that had terrified me as a kid. Occasionally a younger child would start bawling or try to flee the place, which gave me a strange satisfaction that the world hasn’t really changed. Soon I became drowsy as the starchy pizza crust worked its magic. During the scene where a chocolate bar, and then Mike Teavee, are turned into TV signals, all the characters are dressed in white suits from head to toe (like in Intel ads), and my foggy brain began making incongruous connections with the scene in Woody Allen’s “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex *But Were Afraid To Ask” where a bunch of spermatozoa, also dressed in white from head to toe, prepare for their kamikaze one-way journey. The mental pairing must have been too much for my brain because the next thing I knew, I awoke with a sore neck to the sound of thunder outside. The movie was winding down but a storm was gathering momentum.

The storm

As soon as the movie ended, lots of kids ran to the doorway to watch. The thunder had been getting progressively louder during the film and we had been catching flashes of lightning through the windows. As my daughter Alexa recounted, “All of the kids started screaming when there was thunder and it was shocking how loud it was. I [once] went to a drum performance and they had an eight-hundred pound drum but the thunder was louder. The lightning lit up the sky and the scary part was the fact that it could have hit us.” (The day after the storm I asked Alexa to write down her recollections so I could quote from them, which is why I have this verbatim.)

Right as we came out the door and were standing under the overhang of the roof, it started pounding down hail. This hail persisted and began to accumulate in vast amounts like shag carpet over the playground. Alexa recalls, “The hail was almost the size of marbles and the ground was completely covered with a sheet of it. There was so much hail on the ground that it looked like snow.” Dozens of kids just stood there staring.

Then came a thunderclap of Colorado proportions. Instead of just a rumble, it was a boom you could almost feel, coupled with a distinct CRACK! sound. My younger daughter, Lindsay, shrieked and jumped up into my arms. I carried her back into the school auditorium where she began wriggling in my arms, trying to break free. Was I too close to the door? Did she want to crawl under something? No, she ran right back outside to watch some more!

I figured it was only a matter of time before the first kid ran out into the playground and started dancing around in the ankle-deep hail. No more hail was falling but frigid rain was still hammering down, and for at least a couple minutes nobody moved. But then, sure enough, some kid ran out there, and then everybody followed, shrieking and dancing around and making snowballs out of the hail to hurl at each other. “The hail was like quicksand,” Alexa recounted, “a layer of ice floating on top of water.” Lindsay ran back to me and gave me her popcorn, to free up her hands, so I had a snack for the second show.

Eventually the adults got tired of being beaten by giant icy raindrops and we started for home. We’d had to park several blocks from the school and the sidewalks were completely flooded. In Alexa’s words, “As the hail melted, rivers of water ran across the ice.” The water gushed along, running over the tops of our shoes. The rain reactivated my hair gel. Our thin jackets were soaked through. We got to the car. The hail had turned to a soggy mush of snow, like if Kix cereal were left in milk too long, so my wife had me drive. (As a teenager, most of the driving I did was in the snow, just for fun. My brother Bryan and our friends and I practiced power-slides, parking-brake slides, and doughnuts in a parking lot until we were skilled enough to take our chances in Boulder’s nicer neighborhoods, fishtailing with great aplomb, doing 180-degree skid turns around medians and such. Now, having become a responsible adult while maintaining my slippery-driving skills and relative sang-froid, I’m the family’s designated snow driver.)

It took several minutes for the windshield defogger to clear things up enough to even see. The windshield wipers were working overtime, pushing piles of sleety snow, or snowy sleet, out of the way. I gave the car a little extra gas pulling away from the curb to test the slipperiness of the roads. The car squirmed around a bit before straightening out: the roads were perfect for snow tricks (and skeetching, if the kids here knew anything about that). But, I restrained myself and drove carefully. The kids were delighted to watch giant congealed raindrops hitting the moonroof. The white road had sections of brilliant color: the hail had driven thousands of non-dead (undead? living?) leaves from the trees and they carpeted the snowslush.

We got to our house and the low point of the property down at the street intersection was completely flooded. It was a lake. Alexa begged me to find her a ruler, and while I raked masses of leaves from the drain grate, she measured the depth. (“The water was 5 inches deep in the shallow end,” she wrote later.) When I finished clearing the leaves from the street drain, water whooshed into it like a fire hydrant.

Photos

I wish I had some. It was dark. It was wet. I don’t bring a camera to the movies, and after the flood measurements and abatement we were pretty busy with hot baths, pajamas, and the debriefing and calming down operations. Oh well. If a picture is worth a thousand words, perhaps this post is worth 1.8 pictures.

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