From the Archives - Levi’s GranFondo Ride Report

NOTE: This post is rated R for mild vulgarity and drug and alcohol references.

Introduction

It’s that time of year again: when I start getting constant e-mails from the outfit that puts on Levi’s Granfondo, which is a big organized bike ride. You could argue that this ride is too well organized: does every participant need to get regular newsletter updates for the six weeks leading up to it?

Conversely, you could argue that this ride is not well-organized enough: why am I still getting all the newsletters—which share logistical minutiae, tips & tricks, and encouragement—even though it’s been five years since I actually participated in the event and am not signed up for this one?

Anyway, this year’s e-mails reminded me of the ride, and of the report I’d filed with my bike club, which I present here for your amusement. This post’s target audience is actually even broader than Levi’s. Never heard of Levi Leipheimer?  He was a pro American cyclist who achieved spectacular results, with a little help from his team doctor.  Here is a photo of the two of us at a fund-raising dinner some years ago.

What?  You don’t care who Levi is?  No problem.  To enjoy this post, you don’t even have to care about cycling, so long you’re interested in food, violence, teenaged hooligans, live music, and/or booze.

(Coming next week:  my 2014 Everest Challenge race report, assuming I’ve recovered sufficiently to write it.)

Ride Report: Levi’s GranFondo – October 6, 2009

I had some feedback after my [2009] Everest Challenge report that I needed to mention the riding itself, not just the food. So I’ll try to remedy that in this report.

Dinner the night before was at Mary’s, a pizza/pasta chain. I had the veggie calzone; it looked like it had been run over by a car, and then vandalized with a cleaver. The goopy ricotta filling caused the inner wall of crust to be slimily uncooked. To top it off, the whole thing was way over-garlicked, like at that crummy restaurant on Columbus Ave in SF that the tourists love, the Crappy Rose or whatever. I would like to take this opportunity to apologize to Gary and Lisa, whose house I probably polluted horribly with my overpowering breathstench when I dropped by there to buy a Fizik saddle off Gary. My breath was still bothering me at bedtime; even my extensive dental hygiene regimen, topped off with a bunch of mouthwash, didn’t help.

That garlic really messed with my sleep. All night I dreamed I was smoking cigarettes. By morning my breath was worse than ever; I wanted to tear my mouth out and bury it. Breakfast was a 65-degree wedge of this weird ring-shaped coffee cake I found at the GranFondo breakfast table. Maybe it was a pound cake. It was eerily heavy and kind of damp, and it cost Levi’s people a mere $2.99 (assuming they’re Safeway club members). Sugar was the first of about 150 ingredients, printed on a long label that ran all the way past the clamshell opening of the plastic package and down the lower side, in a really tiny font. Not surprisingly, the cake was exceedingly sweet, and had these weird lemon-flavored crystals in it. It kind of squished in my teeth. The amazing thing, though, was that it instantly and completely wiped the garlic breath from my system. Some kind of crazy chemical reaction, I think. I was ecstatic.

The community center, where the GranFondo started, was teeming with people. There were 3,500 riders, 650 volunteers, 8 spectators, and about 3,400 Trek bicycles. I found Tim right away, but Mark was lost in the vast hordes. I tried to look for him, but it was like finding a speck of plankton within a blizzard of krill. I gave up just in time for the official start. In the first five minutes, we progressed 0.01 miles according to my bike computer. Fortunately, the announcer, Todd Gogulski, managed to keep us entertained. It was pretty chaotic, like a slow-motion stampede. I found it pointless trying to move up, because angry bikers extended all the way to the horizon. It was like a mass treadmill.

Once we were finally rolling, there was this self-appointed den mother in the group who was policing everybody’s behavior. She even chastised me: “Ride well to the right of the double yellow please, thank you,” and “Both hands on the bars please, thank you,” and “Put down the middle finger please, thank you.” (Okay, I made up that last part.) We shed a bunch of riders at the first rest stop by not stopping; I ate a couple of thick, chewy, tasty Powerbar gels instead.

We got into a decent group after that, making pretty good time to the second rest stop. Here, tech support found me futzing with my rear wheel, which sounded like it had a cracked rim when I applied the brakes. I feared the worst, but it was just a deep scratch in the rim, probably made by an angry Santa Rosa teen with a switchblade. The tech support guy sanded it down quick-fast-in-a-hurry. Presently Mark arrived; he’d been time-trialing flat-out for the whole ride to catch us.

The energy drink they gave us was pretty awful. So were the climbs, in the best possible way. At the second rest stop I ate a bunch of real Oreos, and a bunch of PBJs that were showcased by dozens of happy bees. I also had a turkey and cheese sandwich, not because it makes sense to eat such a thing during a ride, but because hey, free sandwich. I had potato chips too, and a cold Coke. Tech support gave me a 4mm allen for my cleats, which some angry Santa Rosa teen must have loosened up to try to ruin my GranFondo. There was a woman riding a single-speed, and I heard some crusty old veteran tell his pal, “She’s crazier than a pet raccoon.” (Later, upon seeing her again, we brainstormed other ways to made the ride needlessly harder, like slamming a hand in a car door first, or squirting Tabasco into our eyes.) Another interesting thing we saw at the rest stop was this bamboo bike. Its owner said it rides really well, but unfortunately grows like an inch a day.

During the first big descent, I thought, “Wow, this is pretty technical—these angry bikers better know what they’re doing.” Seconds later, I was about ten or fifteen feet behind this dude as we carved through a curve, and I don’t know what happened—his line was fine, his outside foot weighted to maintain rear wheel traction, etc.—but his front wheel suddenly washed out and he went down. The crash made that horrible indefinable grinding noise that crashes always make. I had front-row seats. I yelled out and braked to a stop and yelled for other riders to stop. (I always wish there was a guy like in “Mad Max” who, unfettered by a bike, could run up the road waving his arms and pleading, plaintively, “STOP! ... STOP!” but there never is.) But the guy scrambled off the road pretty quickly. He looked okay. I asked if he was okay, and he said, “I think so.” Others had stopped and I frankly wanted to start rolling again, so I took him at his word and continued on.

Moments later I remembered the little chart of translations: “I’m not okay” means “I’m really messed up,” and “I think I’m okay” means “I’m probably pretty messed up,” and “I’m okay” means “I might be really messed up but I won’t know until this supersize load of adrenaline wears off.” A minute or two later a fire truck roared by us toward the scene, sirens blaring. I felt bad, but hey—am I my brother’s keeper? Later, Mark proposed that I had crashed the guy. He probably still thinks this, or wishes it were the case. I found it hard to defend myself without offering an alternate explanation. The best I can do is that the guy hit a patch of black ice. I know it was too warm for that, but that’s sure what it looked like.

There was a bunch more climbing. Then we hit the coast, where the wind picked up mightily. The wind was mostly behind us, which a volunteer had predicted, yelling out to us, “There’s an 18% downhill, and then the wind is going to push you down the coast like a bat out of hell!” This led to an enthusiastic EBVC forum on the topic, “Will Hell eventually run out of bats?” We ultimately concluded that there must be bats continually slinking back into Hell. I invite you to coin and propagate a new expression based on this phenomenon. Anyhow, that was some wind. When it was behind us it was glorious, but when it came in from the side it was chilling, and made it hard to keep the rubber side down. Once, it actually blew me hard enough that my front wheel came off the ground and I almost went down. That’s never happened before.

At the penultimate rest stop (we skipped the last one) I had more chips and PBJs. I consumed nothing else during the ride except more energy drink, which was the worst I’ve ever had at any time or any place. It tasted like a cross between a variety of flavors: dog-hair-soiled lollipop; vinegar; urea; and bong water. Every drag from my bottle had me cussing like a really angry and profane sailor. (Yes, I have drunk bong water. An old roommate left some out and, having never seen it before, I thought it was tea and took a drink. And no, I have not drunk urea; that part was a joke.)

At the finish we couldn’t find the Fat Tire stall that would honor our coupons, so we settled on the cash stall where Matt bought us beers. If I ever race a crit with him, I’ll lead him out for every prime and at the end, even if I’m off the back. We sat on some hay bales, which were set up like bleachers, and drank. We were just in time for the live band, which I was dreading.

Most live bands suck; it’s like a law of physics. This one started up a cappella with this black guy belting out “Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone,” and the thing was, his voice was great. So I willed the band not to spoil the music with their instruments. But to my amazement, they played really well, too. Then this white guy came up to the mike. (Note: I’m not trying to suggest anything about black vs. white. These are simple descriptors to help you keep the two singers straight.) I thought, “No, white dude, this song sounds great, don’t wreck it with your crappy voice!” But you know what? He sounded great, too! It was good times. Even the hay bales felt really comfortable after 6+ hours of the bike saddle. (Okay, I wasn’t technically seated for the whole ride, but wasn’t standing on the pedals enough to really air things out.)

Then we went to the Mexican food station, where darling little kids took our orders and presented our plates: rice, beans, and chicken soft tacos. I’ve had a lot of post-century-ride food, and this ranks way up there at the top. Problem was, I needed more. I went back and begged for seconds; perhaps the kids would have been amenable but an adult intervened, and he looked skeptical. I pleaded, “Even if it’s just more rice and beans.” He weighed the negligible cost of the rice and beans against the moral hazard (Mark’s phrase) of setting a precedent about seconds, and ultimately did give me more of the coveted sides. This simple fare, doused with salsa and graced with fresh cilantro, made a worthy second plate. Before I could quite finish the rice a big gust of wind flipped up my plate and I lost everything. But it was enough calories to get me home, where my mom, who was visiting, had made chicken enchiladas with homemade tomatillo sauce. My heart soared like a hawk.

In summary, Levi’s crew put on a good GranFondo ... just remember to BYOED.

Ride Report - 2014 Tour of California Mount Diablo Stage

Introduction

This tale, written for my bike club pals but also for you and your closest confidants, concerns a very special journey up Mount Diablo to watch real professional cyclists tackle the “queen stage” of the Tour of California.

Due to the soporific effect of hackneyed phrases like “chess game on wheels,” “burned too many of their/my matches,” “a picture of pain,” “riding like a man possessed,” and “turning himself/myself inside out,” I will not describe the riding (mine or the racers’) in much detail, but—in keeping with my club’s fine literary tradition—will focus mainly on the food.

Short version 

• Breakfast #1:  Rigatoni alla Bolognese with zested Parmesan
• Breakfast #2:  Blueberry pancakes, real maple syrup, sausage, and bacon (chez Ian)
• Lunch:  Three bottles Cytomax, fruit punch flavor/color; two Powerbar gels, 1X caffeine
• Glycogen-window Treats:  organic strawberries, berry yogurt, vanilla Greek yogurt, dried apricots, chocolate chips, fruit popsicle, half a Dos Equis Special Lager, one Heineken
• Dinner:  Homemade spinach-and-meat lasagne, Brassica oleracea var. gemmifera, bottomless glass of water
• Ride report:  Epic pass
• Race report (witnessed):  Professional racers are really fast, and sometimes funny

Long version

Two words into the short version of this tale, I may have already ruffled some feathers:  Ian, who hosted a glorious breakfast for our group, must be wondering why anybody, even a glutton like me, would have a pre-breakfast.  After all, in an e-mail to the group he’d written, “I will of course be making a separate batch just for Dana.”  So it’s not like I had to worry about the food running out.  Besides, as I mentioned in my 2012 Tour of California Mount Diablo report, I don’t normally eat breakfast at all.  So:  why two breakfasts?  Well, it’s complicated.

First, there was the matter of the Bolognese left over from Mother’s Day, when I spent four hours making a triple-batch as a peace offering after a) having neglected to make any restaurant reservations, and b) having suggested to my wife a restaurant that wouldn’t be packed on Mother’s Day (i.e., Hooters).  Now, if you’ve ever had a proper Bolognese (i.e., one that is a solid once refrigerated), you know that this sauce is almost impossible to resist under any circumstances, even with the knowledge of an imminent pancake breakfast.  Even when bacon is involved.

Second, there was the personal challenge of seeing if I could heat up some leftovers for my daughter’s thermos, to make her the most stoked kid at her entire school, without eating any of it myself.  You know those well-trained dogs that can balance a dog biscuit on their snout without eating it until given the go-ahead from their owner?  I aspired to match that level of pointless discipline.  Alas, I ended up nuking more than would fit in the thermos, so I had no choice but to eat the rest, which—though being only perhaps a cup of food—was the equivalent of a good-sized meal, because my non-heart-healthy Bolognese is the second most caloric food on Earth.  (First place is eggnog.)

What is “zested Parmesan,” you might ask?  It’s Parmesan grated with a zester (see above photo) so it melts like snowflakes on your pasta.

The plan was for me to meet Sean and Ryan at the coffee shop, and then we’d ride to Lafayette to meet Craig, who knew the way to Ian’s.  Well, I was so late getting to the coffee shop, I got angry voice-mails on both my mobile and home phones.  I didn’t want to add insult to injury so I didn’t even explain myself at the time.  So I will now.

Dana’s Top Ten Reasons for Quasi-Flakage on Tuesday 

1. Spent too much time photographing rigatoni alla Bolognese
2. Could only find Water Babies sunscreen from 2002 and didn’t want to end up with Moroccan-leather-red skin
3. Having eventually found Sport Performance SPF 50 sunscreen, took too long applying it to hairy legs
4. Took forever finding SPF 50 lip balm but refused to endure burnt lips yet again
5. Decided at last minute to find darker sunglasses
6. “Shut up, bowels!”
7. Being frazzled by already running late, struggled with recently-replaced Boa dials on my cycling shoes, because both shoes now (oddly) have right-hand dials so left-shoe dials are backwards
8. Had to charge camera battery and phone to hold my own against any Millennials I might encounter en route
9. Took too long indulging my daughter in a long goodbye (her cuteness = entrapment)
10. Didn’t allow for so much traffic, especially when riding past junior high school right when all the able-bodied students were being dropped off by their overprotective parent/chauffeurs

I was actually only six minutes late to the coffee shop, but Sean and Ryan seemed pretty stressed.  I guess that’s because I alone knew how to get to the trefpunt, and I alone knew what “trefpunt” meant.  (In English it’s “rendezvous.”  Wait.  French.  Whatever.)  So after I assured them we had plenty of time, we moseyed socially along until we actually were running late, so then we got to do some real hammering.  Man, I love real hammering, especially on the flats, because I never do anything but climb and seldom have anybody to draft.  We ended up reaching the trefpunt six minutes late, which was fine because Craig was running late himself.  We rolled in to Ian’s unfashionably early.  It was already getting hot.

Ian had the blueberry pancakes already made and keeping warm in the oven while he cooked the bacon and sausages.  Ian is from England, and—knowing what I know about the superior bacon over there—I was very impressed that, while he did comment on the high fat content of American bacon, he did so non-pejoratively.  Perhaps he knew I’d be blogging about this and was worried about the NSA questioning his loyalty.  I think this NSA flap has frightened all of us.  (Note to NSA readers:  when I say “flap” I’m not saying it’s your fault.  Thank you for keeping us safe!)

Due to Ian’s brilliant pancake breakfast concept I changed my fueling strategy radically.  That is, I didn’t bother bringing any food on the ride, foregoing the sandwiches etc. I’d schlepped in a backpack last year.  You might think this is foolish since pancakes have a pretty high glycemic index (i.e., they burn rapidly), so my blood sugar could crash after just a couple of hours.  But bacon and sausage, being high in the right kind of fat (i.e., the chewy kind) have a very low glycemic index.  In fact, gristle probably has a G.I. of about 1.  And low-G.I. foods slow down your burning of high-G.I. foods.  This is why a big carnitas burrito obviates the need to eat for at least twelve hours.  Dang it, I’m making myself hungry here!  Anyway, I tried to keep track of the number of sausages I ate, but could not (though it was at least ten).  Ditto the bacon and hotcakes.

I tried to spam that last photo out to all my followers on Twitter, Facebook, etc. and it probably would have worked fine except I decided to get fancy.  I figured, hey, Ian’s great food will probably get me a whole bunch of Likes, but couldn’t I get even more Likes with a really nice stock Getty image of a visually perfect stack of pancakes?  Alas, between my fingers being greasy from the bacon, my smartphone touch-screen being fogged up, and my skills being rather poor to begin with, all I managed to do was send the photo to my Paypal account, which they’ve now frozen.

That whole last paragraph?  Yep—pure fiction.  I’m not on social media, beyond this blog.

So, yeah, no lunch needed after that bodacious spread.  Of course, not bringing a backpack meant I couldn’t bring a hat or sandals for our long wait, on the mountain, for the racers.  But Ian, who is apparently going for Man Of The Year, chucked some extras in his pack for me.  (If I hadn’t taken my boys out of the game, I’d try for a son and name him Ian.)

The ride was very hot—temperatures in the 90s by the time we left Ian’s—but not all that hard due to our conversational pace.  Full disclosure:  I was technically blood-doping for this ride.  Last week I donated blood, which normally is okay from a sporting perspective, but in this case it was platelets and plasma, so I got my red cells back.  Since having blood return to my body is technically a transfusion, I guess I was technically in breach of the rules and I really wonder what my blood passport would look like if the UCI did one for me.  But I’m not going to be one of those riders who, when finally admitting guilt, takes down a lot of other guys with me.  So from this point forward all the names of my fellow biker/spectators will be redacted in my report, following the example of the USADA rider affidavits.  Otherwise you might think them complicit in my transgression.

We headed up North Gate road, which is the harder approach of Mount Diablo, just so we could lord that over the racers later.  On the lower slopes my bike computer registered 103 degrees Fahrenheit.  It’s a good thing nobody asked me to spell “Fahrenheit” because my brain was being cooked.  We chatted the whole way up, of course.  [Spectator 3] extolled the virtues of base layers, because they hide his massive pelt of chest hair (which frightens other men and lures in women, creating marital friction) and when I tried to respond my poor brain got stuck.  I started out, “Your chest hair makes Austin Powers look like—” but here I couldn’t come up with the name of Austin Powers’ hairless cat.  Fortunately, some random cyclist within earshot called out, “Mr. Bigglesworth,” thus saving me from acute embarrassment.  (Actually, [Spectator 2] and [Spectator 3] had probably stopped listening to me anyway.)

That wasn’t the only time a complete stranger joined our conversation.  Another time, we were trying to remember at what elevation the officials closed the road to VUPs (Very Unimportant People), and someone helpfully said, “It’s at 3,848 feet.”  Wait, did I just say “helpfully”?  Well, I lied.  This comment wasn’t that helpful because that’s the elevation of the summit, as we already knew, not the info we actually needed.  But it was very nice of the fellow to try to help and I wish him well.

We finally found a great viewing spot a little past the 3-KM-To-Go banner.  There were a few trees, and though people were already massed below them, the gradual setting of the sun would thrust that shadow in our direction (as [Spectator 2] cleverly realized).  We’d refilled our bottles at around the halfway point but were still running pretty low.  I asked if I’d get lice from the loaner hat, and its owner said, “That hat hasn’t been worn since the Tour of California Mount Diablo stage last year.” 

Here we are maxin’ out while the racers made their advance toward the mountain.

Look at the big “E” on my jersey.  See that insect?  It’s an earwig.  There were flying earwigs all over the place up there, and they bit!  Not just “bit” as in “man, that totally bites!” but as in, they kept actually biting us.  So we had to keep brushing them off each other, sometimes a bit violently.  At one point [Spectator 5] told me, “There’s one on your groin but you’re on your own.”

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, two more pals, [Spectator 4] and [Spectator 5] arrived, separately, one having dropped the other en route.  [Spectator 5] rode all the way from San Jose, even though he has a newborn at home.  The fathers among us chastised him at length.  “I did a whole load of dishes before I left!” he protested.  [Spectator 4] said, “Look , did you have an episiotomy?  No?  Well then shut the hell up.”  I tried to explain to [Spectator 5] that housework and other methods of helping out are not fungible, but my sun-baked brain couldn’t come up with “fungible” so it took a lot more words to convey that you can’t just bank goodwill by doing housework in advance.  You have to hang around the house in case your wife says, “Please take your shrieking demon-infant away from me before I do something I regret.”

Nobody was giving out popsicles or drinks this year, but a guy did hand up some official Tour of California gas-station-grade sunglasses, and a woman gave us miniature Champion Systems jerseys.  You may not know this, but it’s against the law for a blogger to praise a consumer product if he received any perk from its manufacturer.  So it would be illegal for me to say anything nice about Champion Systems products.  That’s okay, though, because I already had my say on the topic of their dangerously undersized clothing.  Anyway, it was nice of them to give handouts, and it was in a good-natured spirit that  [Spectator 3] quipped (once the CrampSys rep was out of earshot), “Is that their size medium?”

At least half a dozen big vans drove by, toward the summit, with absolutely nobody in them.  I’m sure there was a point to this but I’ll be damned if I know what it was.  And damned if I don’t.

After a very long wait in the open-air sauna, we finally saw the official vehicles, then some motos, and  the leader of the race.  We had no idea who he was but it didn’t matter.  Half a dozen seconds later came the lead group, with Sir Bradley Wiggins right on the front.  Despite setting a blistering pace, Wiggo looked not only more comfortable than we had pedaling our casual way up the mountain, but more comfortable than we felt just watching the race.  I think he was breathing only through his nose.  Note to self:  abandon tentative plan to turn pro.

The peloton was in pieces.  Lone riders came by here and there, and small and large groups.  Tom Danielson rode by, well off the back, and [Spectator 4] yelled, “Hang in there, Tom!  I know it’s not easy when you’re clean!”  Indeed, he did look a lot, uh, cleaner than in past years.  Then [Spectator 4] set up an empty water bottle with a $5 bill sticking out the top, as an ad hoc crowd prime.  If the cyclingnews start list is correct, it was the Dutch rider Danny Van Poppel who wheel-thwacked the bottle off the road, to our great delight.

The final racers trickled by, then the broom wagon, and then the show was over and we made our way down the mountain.  It wasn’t nearly as clogged with biker-spectators as last year, perhaps due to the heat.  I rode hard all the way home, part of the time with [Spectator 2] and [Spectator 3], and though I didn’t tackle my beloved Lomas Cantadas (the heat was still in the upper 90s and it had been a long day) I did feel a moment of pride when I made it over the so-called “I hate pain” hill (on Wildcat Canyon Road, by the Brazil Building) in the big chainring.  It was only a moment of pride, though, because then I remembered that my so-called “big ring” is actually only a 50-tooth because, uh, well, I’m riding a compact these days.

When I got home I presented the sunglasses and micro-jersey to my daughters, and instantly achieved hero status.  Lindsay knew right away what to do with the jersey.

The jersey could use some tailoring but I think Ken looks great in it.  All those Barbies are going to be fighting over him!  Note how closely he’s shaved his legs.

I’ve already listed off my assortment of post-ride sugary snacks.  After those I did some cheese grating duty as my wife put the finishing touches on the aforementioned spinach-and-meat lasagne.  The Brassica oleracea var. gemmifera weren’t quite done yet so they came out as a second course.

What?  You haven’t heard of Brassica oleracea var. gemmifera?  Yeah, I’m using a code name there.  It’s a vegetable that is so unpopular among Alberts that its name must not be uttered.  My dad made an exception once, when he composed a bit of verse on the topic:  “It takes more than a muscled lout/ To make me eat a [Vegetable 1].”

Anyway, even that course was pretty tasty.  It was a great dinner after a great day, and my lips, for once, hadn’t even gotten sunburned.  Life is good!

Ride Report - Tour of California Mount Diablo Stage

Introduction

This is a tale I wrote for my bike club, but also for you, about riding out to the "saddle" (i.e., halfway-point) of Mount Diablo to watch the Tour of California professional peloton race up it.  I have worked long and hard to set the right literary example regarding rides and races:  that is, to focus almost solely on the food.

Diablo Saddle – Tour of California Spectator Edition

For a two-sentence summary, go to the end.

Breakfast was a bowl of cereal.  Not surprised?  You should be.  I don’t eat breakfast.  It’s stupid and pointless.  You can tell me all you want how important it is and I won’t listen.  Same with yoga, “visualization,” and sleeping with a rolled-up towel under your neck (which some lecturing chiropractor said to do back in ’83).  “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day!”  That’s the breakfast cereal industry talking.  The same guys who should be put in jail for marketing cereals to kids that are like 60% sugar.

The breakfast was Weetabix  shrapnel.  I love the spelling.  They’re not going to tell you it has wheat in it (i.e., call it “Wheatabix”) because they figure you don’t care.  This is a British cereal and you should be bloody happy just to have something to eat.  I’ll tell you something though:  as a coddled American I was totally displeased with it.  Weetabix shrapnel is what’s left over after your greedy kids have eaten all the biscuits.  Though the British wouldn’t call them biscuits because that’s what they call cookies.  (Note that many American breakfast cereals, and probably some British ones, have 95% of the DNA of crummy store-bought cookies.  But I digress.)  Anyway, the shrapnel just gets soggy and makes your milk taste like cardboard.  I added some Cheerios and the shrapnel ruined them.  Nothing about this meal made me want to become a regular breakfast eater.  In fact, I followed it up with a mini-French-bread pizza, and my taste buds were so pissed off from the cereal I didn’t even enjoy it.  It tasted like aluminum.

I guess I’d have been happier if my stomach were in better shape.  I don’t know if it’s due to the sheer nervousness of knowing I had a Diablo saddle ride with the boys ahead of me, or due to the iffy green chiles I’d eaten the day before, but my lower digestive tract was in an uproar.  (Erin warned me not to eat the chiles, which were rotting and had become slimy, but I didn’t listen.  The way I figure it, wasting food is a crime, and it’s easy to eat something that’s spoiled if you douse it with hot salsa.  Which I did.)  I’m not going to go into too much detail, but suffice to say I was serially detained and thus found myself running late heading to Royal to meet the guys.

So, I called Sean at 9:25 from the intersection of Ashby and College.  He didn’t pick up, but I discovered a voice-mail from him, saying “It’s 9:17 and we’re rolling out.  You should head directly up Tunnel and we’ll catch you.”   Well, needless to say I was pretty far behind that schedule and my days of actually chasing and catching the group on Tunnel are long over.  But I figured if I totally hammered, and they stopped to pee etc. at the top, I could still catch up.  So I slayed myself all the way up, and when I got to the top  I was shocked—shocked!—to find like a hundred Ewoks flattened on the ground, like what would happen on South Park if they didn’t close the road during newt mating season.  It was just carnage, vultures feasting and the whole bit.  Ritual mass suicide?  I hope so.  Okay, I didn’t see any such thing but I see a few of you napping in the back there and want you to pay attention.

I waited five minutes and nobody showed so I was certain they were well ahead of me.  Oh well.  This didn’t bother me too much because I happen to believe that sociability is a sliding scale and though I never get very close to the Dale Carnegie end of the scale, I do sometimes slide down toward the Captain Ahab end.  It’s almost a shame I already named my bike (“Platino”) because “Pequod” would be a fitting name.  If you accept Hemingway’s metaphor of “hills like white elephants,” perhaps thinking of Mt. Diablo as a white whale isn’t that far-fetched.  I was determined to get to the saddle in time to watch the racers.  I couldn’t remember what time the road was supposed to close—my plan had been to leave the logistics to my EBVC teammates who possess the lobes of the brain required for such a function—and now found myself lunging blindly at the challenge.

Being late and solo meant not stopping anywhere to pick up lunch food.  This bothered me very little.  A sub sandwich (the proposed food) is about the most useless cycling food I can imagine.  The white-flour bun probably burns up faster than pure glucose, and has fewer calories than like half a gel.  The “meat” (who knows what they actually press into that gross ribbony stuff they call turkey or ham, the fruit leather of the protein world) isn’t a source of energy and the protein won’t help until it’s too late and you’ve already bonked.  And mustard, to me, is like spackle:  it has exactly one real use (putting on a hot dog) and pretty much no other.  Mayo?  Please.  My dad and I were talking about cycling food once and he said, “You know, in terms of calories per unit volume you probably couldn’t do better than mayonnaise.”  He loves mayonnaise.  I don’t.  He’s never been the kind of cyclist to hammer along mile after mile (he’s more the bike-picnicking sort) so I don’t think he has any idea how nauseating it would be to eat packets of mayo like they were gels.  Plus, they’re not carbs.  I’m starting to get angry ... not at my dad, but at the memory of how little I had on this ride in the way of carbs.  I still haven’t recovered and my blood sugar is low, making me dangerously grumpy.  More on this later.

So I hammered and hammered and discovered along the way that the giant handful of gels I’d hastily grabbed somehow numbered only two.  I had two bottles of energy drink but no mix.  By the time I reached the ranger’s station on Diablo I’d gone through 1 2/3 bottles of the drink and both gels.  I had money but no plan.  The guys found me immediately and we had a very strange sort of conversation about how we’d managed to miss each other.  The conversation veered wildly between apology and accusation from both sides.  They’d actually waited for me at Royal though I’d been given the impression they were rolling.  I blame these smartphones.  I’ve had mine for three years and have missed like 90% of the calls made to it (including a work-related one today so I guess it’s not all bad).  Suffice to say, mistakes were made.

We hung around for like two hours waiting for the racers.  It was a mob scene up there.  A happy, friendly mob of angry bikers.  My brother Geoff coined the term “angry biker” and it simply refers to somebody who dresses all in Lycra and uses words like “efforts”—e.g., “we did some efforts today”— and spends a lot of money on bike stuff and is real fit and all that.  So I’m not saying this was a dangerous scene, like the fans at a British soccer match or something.  American cycling fans don’t get unruly because they all do yoga and Pilates and eat sprouted wheat and brewer’s yeast.  If we ate bangers and mash, and crisps, and if our ancestors had loved to pack a picnic to go watch an execution on Tower Hill, we’d be more macho and hot-blooded and riot-prone.

There was a guy up there, a couple of them actually, hauling around rolling coolers with popsicles in them.  They were from a gelato place in Berkeley and I’d love to give you the name, but it’s actually against the law for bloggers to promote products for which they’ve received free samples.  Advertisers get away with fricking murder, but bloggers are basically told, “Down dog, and kennel!” (to return to my Ahab metaphor from earlier).  Anyway, the product was called “gelato on a stick” and although it was fairly tasty (I’m allowed to say that because I’m not telling you the brand) it had nothing to do with gelato.  It was a pretty mainstream popsicle product, though a bit more authentic in its flavor than a normal popsicle; I knew the pink one was something other than strawberry or cherry, and when I heard somebody say it was pomegranate that didn’t seem obviously wrong.  The white one had some fancy name designed to convey the highfalutinness of green tea, like it was a “concept” flavor, but I just can’t remember what it was called.  It tasted like lotion, that expensive lotion you get at spas.  Frankly I didn’t care for it whatsoever except it was free, it had 140 calories, and as I said before I had no plan for feeding myself. 

Another bit of luck:  some friend of Lucas’s gave me some beef jerky.  Jerky must have the absolute dregs of the cow in it.  Prions are pretty much guaranteed in that stuff, but I didn’t want to be rude, plus couldn’t afford to be selective about my calories.  It tasted like a scrap of gristle that had been sprinkled with that weird red stuff they put on Buffalo wings, run over by a car a few times, and then left out in the sun.  But good.

The Tour of California breakaway came by and I took ten photos a second in burst mode.  Exactly one photo came out (the others were of motorcycles and some spectator’s back). 

Here's a rider in the four-man breakaway.

I decided to shoot video when the peloton came by.  That was like nine minutes later.  We had all visibly aged by that point.  I got the video rolling, zoomed in like 16x, and then kind of forgot to un-zoom as the racers got closer.  Fortunately this made them look like they were a lot closer to running me over than they really were, which made up for my poor response time.  I managed to shuffle backward into the dirt without getting run over or messing up my filming, other than getting footage of the rider’s pores instead of their bikes and bodies.  At some point I must have un-zoomed because I did get some okay footage I’ve lifted some photos from.

Here's the front of the pack:

The Rabobank rider below is Laurens ten Dam, from Holland:

Here's Tom Boonen, the Belgian champ (ranked #1 in the world right now if I'm not mistaken):

Now I’ve had dinner, between that last paragraph and this one.  This means I’ll probably start to get all woozy (you’ll understand when you find out what I ate) so now I’m in an even bigger rush to finish this report before I pass out.  (If you couldn’t tell, I have been in a rush this whole time.)  So after the racers went by in a ten-second blur, we had to get home.  By four.  Or else.  I was pretty worried about making it 36 miles with only a third of a water bottle and no other calories, especially since I’d burned all my matches and the book getting to the Diablo saddle. 

We headed down South Gate among the myriad riders.  Before dinner I’d have probably said “shitloads,” as in “out here in the sticks, things are measured in shitloads,” to quote a great writer whose name I’m sure you don’t care to learn.  Some of the riders were Fredtastic descenders, like this mountain bike guy who passed me who must have been pushing his knobby tires to the limit.  At Danville Sean and Lucas, and presently a couple of their pals from Morgan Stanley and Berkeley Bike Club and some guy in an expensive blank jersey dragged me along at a good clip, rescuing me from the wind and my own frailty.  I would have loved to take off my leg warmers, stop for some food and water, etc. but didn’t dare derail the train.  So there I was, going harder than I thought possible, getting a sweet draft, and being way overdressed and way underfed.

At the bottom of Wildcat, Sean announced his intention to do the climb slowly.  Lucas, seeing his opportunity, dropped the hammer.  (He probably would have dropped it anyway, come to think of it.)  I told Sean I was glad for the company but that he’d surely drop me soon because I was about to bonk.  Now, I’m not above begging for food, and surely would have done so had the thought occurred to me, but I’d become oddly fatalistic by this point in the ride.  It seemed that bonking was simply inevitable.  Normally I try to be more existential, embracing my radical freedom (though never to the extent Lucas does, whenever he realizes “I have the physical ability to go faster than this, so I should do that starting now!”).  Sean offered me a gel.  What a guy.  His gesture seemed not only generous but frankly genius.  It was a vanilla Powerbar gel and it was very liquid-y, which was a good thing because I had nothing to wash it down with:  my mouth, probably due to dehydration, had completely run out of saliva.  Somehow, that gel carried me all the way home.  It was a glorious ride, and at 72 miles was my longest of the year.

Post ride I had Greek Gods yogurt (which is da bomb, by the way, which I can tell you because they’ve never given me free samples) with organic strawberries.  If you are defiantly avoiding organic strawberries, as a safeguard against  the kind of tree-hugging local-this-local-that NPR-addicted Prius-driving Berkeley dogma that pervades us, go pick another battle.  (Like, eat Oreos once in awhile even though they’re RJR-Nabisco.)  Organic strawberries are small, sometimes weird, tend to rot suddenly, and can have insects milling around, but they’re so much better than the Squire of Gothos non-organic ones that are the size of your fist, tend to be mealy and oddly pale inside, and are totally flavorless (hence the Squire of Gothos reference—look it up).  That little parfait was glorious.  I had a banana too but it was on the firm side, like only Ian likes it.  I had to compost the peel but I’ve gotten rid of the bin because it was a breeding ground for annoying tiny flying insects so that was a problem that stymied me for several minutes in my exhausted state.  Then it was time to shower, take Alexa to violin, take her to soccer, and fetch Lindsay from a play-date.  After that, I had time to start this report, but not enough time to cook, before picking up Alexa from soccer. 

You guessed it:  no post-ride meal at all.  For the rest of the evening I was this close to just losing it.  (Erin was off taking a CPR class; I couldn’t exactly tell her, “Could you forgo the opportunity to save human lives so I can run off to a taqueria, or ideally the taco truck behind the Hotsy Totsy club, and come back at like 2 a.m., because I rode today?”)

Finally I had time to make my family-famous Southwestern Corn Goo, a pasta dish with cream style corn, oil, and gobs of cheese.  It’s probably more calorically dense even than mayonnaise.  It’s so far from the South Beach diet it’s probably against the law in Taos, Boulder, and Aspen.  The “Southwestern” bit refers to the green chiles I put in it (don’t worry, not the rotting ones) as a way to gradually make my kids embrace spicy food.  They love Corn Goo passionately so they’ll tolerate the spiciness (which actually comes from cayenne pepper) and also the semblance of spiciness, which comes from the green chiles (which are all bark and no bite, unless slimy and rotting as I learned this morning).  To keep from getting in too much trouble with Erin and with my conscience, I served the kids a giant portion of spinach with their Corn Goo.  I’d like to say they love spinach, but I won’t lie:  they hate it.  But they can’t even think about having seconds on pasta until they’ve eaten all their spinach.  This is called “parenting.”

Myself, I ate a hypocrisy-preventing portion of spinach (drizzled with a bit of olive oil and some lemon juice—actually quite good) and a breathtaking quantity of Corn Goo, perhaps a few thousand calories worth.  I can feel it in my bloodstream, like a mild anesthetic gradually infiltrating my body.  It feels so good.  My legs have even stopped hurting.  I feel a growing love of all mankind, so different from what I was feeling earlier.  Riding is fun and all, but nothing compared to the sweet dopamine binge I’m on right now.  In fact, I’m not going to ruin it by continuing to type.

Summary:  Epic pass/fail.  I failed to rendezvous with my EBVC brethren until the Diablo saddle, shot some iffy video of the racers, and made it home without bonking.