From the Archives - Haircut Gone Wrong

Introduction

I’ve always lacked a vocabulary for hair styles. When the barber asks what I want, I never know what to say. Directions like “take off an inch” seem meaningless—I have no real sense of how long my average hair shaft is, nor how much they vary. Today at Supercuts I went through the normal struggle before the hair stylist brought out a visual aid: photos of six men, none of whose hair looked anything like mine. They were swarthy men with curly hair and names like “Rado” and “Moose.” I pointed essentially at random and let the hair stylist use her discretion. The haircut came out fine.

That isn’t to say my haircuts have always come out fine. The worst one? Well, right before I moved from Colorado to California in 1987, my buddy Pete offered to cut my hair. He’d never cut hair before, but I gave him a shot. He snipped away for awhile with what seemed like great confidence, but then stepped back, frowned, and said, “Dude, it’s all screwed up. I better buzz it.” So I started my California life with a sub-Sinead buzz-cut. (Adding insult to injury, Pete then had the nerve to nickname me “Curious,” as in “Curious George.”)

After that buzz cut finally grew out, I experimented a lot, letting my hair get pretty long at times and having fun with hair gel. During my freewheeling late-‘80s SoCal years, my ‘do often looked something like this: 

When I moved to the Bay Area in summer of 1990, I wanted to get a high-paying office job so I decided to get a nice short haircut. (With hindsight, I should have gone native and grown my hair even longer, since I ended up with yet another bike shop job anyway.)

Below is the tale of my first Berkeley haircut experience, which didn’t go at all as I’d expected.

Haircut Gone Wrong - July 27, 1990

The hair stylist I used to go to in Boulder always told me, “Women should not cut hair. They’re too emotional, too unpredictable. They’ll screw up another woman’s hair if they’re jealous of her looks. And when they’re in a bad mood, no customer is safe.” Or something to that effect; I forget exactly what he said or just how he put it. I wasn’t ever sure how much stock to put in this judgment. I once got a haircut from this Italian woman who seemed to have her own ideas about what would look good, and did exactly the opposite of what I asked for. Thing is, it grew out really well and became one of the best haircuts I’ve ever had.

Maybe that’s why I didn’t immediately leave the other day when, during my first week living in Berkeley, I went to get my hair cut at a hair salon on Bancroft Ave and found only female stylists. I was looking for a little trim (I mean a haircut—get your mind out of the gutter!), because it had been awhile since my last haircut, from my brother Geoff, and it was growing out really unevenly. Ordinarily I wouldn’t really care, but I’m trying to get a job right now and if I can’t dress as nicely as the next guy for these interviews I might as well not look too scraggly.

Besides, there’s something so right about having your hair cut as soon as you land in a new place. All the old cowboys always went straight to the barber as soon as they hit a town, right after they’d had a good meal and a drink at the saloon. You’ve seen it in the movies. Of course, if it was a Clint Eastwood western, the hero also wasted no time in shooting half a dozen people and bedding down some fine woman. Well, I’m no Eastwood but at least I can have the old hair evened out a little bit.

So here’s what transpired. I sit down in the barber chair and right off the woman with the scissors is fuming mad about something. “Whaddya want,” she scowls as she spins me around in the chair. I start to tell her but I don’t think she’s listening. Instead, she’s muttering furiously: “Every day it’s that damn radio: first this station, then that, why don’t they just find a station and leave it instead of always switching around, all day long. It’s making me sick.” I almost decide to make a run for the door, but it’s too late, she’s already begun.

I can’t even see the carnage because she has me turned away from the mirror. Usually a barber will keep you facing the mirror so you can watch him or her work, but throughout this haircut the chair faces away. Every time my hair stylist finishes a strafing run of snip‑snip‑ snip‑snip‑snip she exhales briskly, the exhaust phase of her constant seething. I look at the other two women working there, and they seem to be the overly cheerful type that always rankle grumpy women like the one who is attacking my head.

I look at the guy in the next chair, who looks something like a fat Stephen Roche. He’s cheerfully chatting away with the youngish woman cutting his hair and constantly asking technical questions. I’d hate to be in her shoes, because his is the kind of hair that just can’t really be made to look good. I don’t mean to hack on the guy, but his hair is so thick and has such tight little curls that all I can see in its future is that trimmed hedge look—his hair is doomed to be a big cube or melon‑ball unless shaped creatively, like Grace Jones’ anvil‑shaped job or the strange skewed‑plane look sported by rap artists. I met a black guy with such a hairdo at the optometrist’s, and he was getting mismatched contact lenses: one magenta, one green. But that’s another story.

Anyhow, I’m pondering the futility of this other guy’s hair, and the increasingly tragic plight of my own, when one of the bubbly women looks right at me and says, “What’s your name?” I tell her and she says, “Well, Dana, you look angry. Why is that?” The only thing I can think to say is “I just ran over my cat in my parents’ Blazer.” This response has popped into my head, and won’t go away, and I can’t think of any other. I’m tempted to actually utter it, but being bitter or sarcastic with people is no way to conduct yourself in a strange city, even if it’s Berkeley.

So while I’m trying to assemble a nice, safe response to this really stupid question, Jackie the Ripper snorts in my ear, “Don’t even listen to her. Just don’t pay any attention.” Now a new response to the question has rooted in my head: “I’m not angry, I’m just really concerned about the unstable and obviously upset woman cutting my hair.” I can’t really use this response either because I feel like somehow I’ve created a bond with the psycho woman in our mutual dislike for ol’ Mary Lou Retton over there … a bond which I don’t want to disturb because the snip‑snip‑snip sound is now slowing down somewhat, and the terrible nasal fuming sound has gotten a bit quieter.

In time, the breathing in my ear begins to sound pretty normal and the snipping is at a higher pitch, indicating that only the very tips of the scissors are being used. This is a very slow, deliberate cutting now. So slow, in fact, that cutting the back of my hair takes about twice as long as the top and sides combined. An eternity later she’s done, but instead of turning me around to face the mirror she gives me a hand mirror and asks, “How do you like the back?” I am shocked to see a graceful semicircle where the hair ends on my neck. She’s obviously very proud of it. And geometrically, it’s perfect. Aesthetically, I really don’t know what to say. I’ve really never seen anything like it. It’s so short and precise . . . truly bizarre.

Without another word, she takes off my little poncho cape deal and starts putting away her stuff. Paddling with my feet, I sort of walk my chair around to where I can see the mirror, and as soon as my reflection comes into my field of vision, I stop dead. The horror! What’s left of my hair is running down my forehead in miserable little wet strands. I’ve never been one to be obsessed with my appearance, but this is really serious. I feel a strange sort of detachment from the whole thing, like it’s too horrible to really be me. It’s the same sense of withdrawn awe I felt when I once severely cut the knuckle of my ring finger on some glass and could clearly see the full depth of the incision and the massive flap of skin, only a second before spraying blood brought me back to reality.

The haircutting woman must notice the strange look on my face because she hands me a comb and says, “Oh, here. Style it.” How? There’s nothing to style! And my head is so . . . so round! It’s not that every strand is uniformly short; it’s that most of the strands are just plain gone. But the detached feeling continues and I’m oddly calm. I have this inexplicable faith that by the time I’ve paid my eight bucks and gone home, my hair will look different. It’ll be dry then, maybe, and . . . aw, who cares anyhow.

Besides, there are two reasons I should be happy with this haircut. First, like I said earlier, I’m trying to get a job right now, and I’ll bet employers just love dorky, Young‑Republican haircuts. Secondly, this will be a very durable haircut: it’ll be a long, long time before I let anybody with scissors near my hair again.

Race Report - Everest Challenge 2012 (Stage 2)

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

Introduction

In last week’s post I described the exploits, particularly the gastronomic ones, of my friends and me as we tackled Stage 1 of the 2012 Everest Challenge stage race.  Now, with the professional sport of cycling collapsing around us—Lance Armstrong’s team, his maid, and even his pet hamster have confessed to participation in his doping ring—I offer the sorry tale of my un-drug un-fueled assault on Stage 2 of the 2012 EC.

Pre-race

I slept unusually well for an EC second night; that is to say, I slept some.  As my roommate John pointed out, the AC unit had a continuous fan feature, as opposed to those enemy-of-sleep versions that turn on and off all night.  Still, as the chilled air compressor periodically cycled on and off, its low, deep groaning came and went.  (Or was that John?)

The Uncle Sam cereal was even harder going the second day, because I was at the end of the box and all the heavy stuff—various kinds of seeds and, I think, gravel—had settled to the bottom.  John and I ate in silence, which frightened me.  Normally, the EC motel room banter is the giddy, profanity-laced stuff of locker rooms, but this was almost gloomy, like a wake.  John and I could be accused of having a poor attitude, but as you shall see, prescience would be the better description.

We got to the start line as the sun was rising and the moon was setting.  I think there was even an occultation of Venus in progress, but I was a bit distracted and didn’t look for it.

The main source of my distraction was my bowels.  You may be rolling your eyes and groaning:  “This again?!”  Well, remember, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”  The fact is, evacuation is a critical part of this sport, and is too often swept under the carpet.  Now.  Don’t get me wrong, the organization of EC is excellent overall, but they need more San-O-Lets (aka Port-A-Potties).  On this day there were only two, and what’s worse, they were still atop a trailer.  Not only did I not have time to wait in line, but I feared, albeit irrationally, that somebody would drive off while I was in there.

Fortunately, I took a lesson from last year when a guy coming out of a San-O-Let told me, “That thing’s out of toilet paper.  I had to use my arm warmers.”  So I’d brought a roll of TP from the motel.  I found a good bush off the side of the road that would provide excellent cover from most vantage points—but not including, alas, that of the van.  And that’s where the setting moon came into play.  All the guys were about to photograph the moon over the jagged saw blade mountains when I entered the frame.  There was nothing I could do—I had to go.  You will not be seeing this “double moon” shot on this blog, though I hear it’ll be on the cover of “Forbes” next month.

Stage 2 – 76 miles, 14,030 feet of climbing

During the race, I drank four bottles of Cytomax, two bottles of Gatorade, a bottle of Heed, and two bottles of water.  I ate four gels.  I swallowed enough pride to produce a glut of bile, which tasted only a bit better than the Gatorade (which was lemon-lime, a flavor I burned out on during my 1994 bike tour and have wisely avoided ever since).

The first climb went pretty well, except for a) knowing that I was in 10th place and should defend that, while b) knowing I should pace myself, which meant watching twenty of my competitors ride away as soon as the road went uphill.  It was sort of the “presidential primary” strategy:  don’t do anything bold that might backfire; and, hope my opponents do. 

John and I did the first climb and about half of the second climb together.  It was hot and dry and my legs were heavy and I plinked along in my lowest gear a lot of the time, remembering how I’d cracked on the third climb the previous year.  The idea was to save up my strength and finish strong, but I couldn’t find much strength to save.  Paul, racing in the 45+ category that started ten minutes behind, blew by us, inspiring me to … well, to train better next year, or race smarter, or switch to an activity I’m better suited to, like typing.

The race promoters lengthened the second climb this year.  They’d announced this on Friday evening, but didn’t say how much longer it would be.  Looking back, I think we were all unknowing subjects in some kind of cruel psychological experiment.  I kept expecting to see the leaders of my race coming down the other side, and the longer I went not seeing them, the closer to despair I came.  (A more foolhardy rider would have supposed he was simply not that far behind.  I knew better.) 

I spent much of the climb trying to work out how I might calculate how far behind I was, based on when and where the leaders passed me on their way down.  Doing math during bike races is notoriously hard, but I had plenty of time to think.  By the time I finally saw Craig coming down, I had it worked out:  I held in my head the current altitude at that moment (a better landmark than anything visual in this stark, Road Runner terrain) and the clock time.  When, an eternity later (the climb having been, finally, four miles longer this year), I crossed that altitude again on my way down, I checked the new clock time and subtracted.  Craig, it turned out, was twelve minutes ahead of me at that point.  Pretty amazing, since he was still as sick as a dog, breathing raspily and almost unable to talk.

I couldn’t be bothered to pedal or get in an aerodynamic tuck during that descent.  I just sat there, coasting, and waited for it to be over.  I finally reached the van, which was parked at the base of the third and final climb, and saw Craig there, off his bike and in street clothes.  As well as he’d’ been riding, he was still sick, and the heat and altitude made it impossible for him to breathe well enough to continue.  He and Ian gave me some drink, gels, and encouragement, and I struck out for the final climb.

I was feeling pretty close to despondent.  Where was all that energy I’d been saving up?  Where was the enthusiasm I’d had on this climb the first couple times I raced EC?  I couldn’t face the reality of what I had left to do:  over two hours of climbing, with over 6,000 feet of elevation gain, in the baking heat.  In previous years I had a teammate or two to ride with; this time I was off the back and oddly, breathtakingly alone.  No rider in sight, anywhere.  I could be anybody out here, on any day, in any era.

I couldn’t use my mileage to measure my progress because I hadn’t worked out how much longer that second climb had been.  Meanwhile, the thought of slowly ticking off the altitude benchmarks—4000 feet, 5000 feet, 6000 feet, 7000 feet, 8000 feet, 9000 feet, and, yes, even 10000 feet—was far too demoralizing to face.  (Plus, as often as I wiped the sweat off my bike computer, I couldn’t keep the screen clear enough to read it anyway.) 

I devised a plan:  instead of looking around me at the terrain to figure my progress, I’d just keep my eyes on the road ten feet ahead.  That created the illusion of speed, at least.  And I decided to “play” the entire double-album “Pink Floyd The Wall” in my head, including all the background sounds, TV snippets, the schoolteacher yelling “wrong, do it again!”, etc.  Because I knew my frazzled brain would get caught in endless loops of certain songs, I could be confident that by the time I got to “Outside the Wall,” I’d have been climbing for at least 90 minutes.  Then I’d be close enough to the end to monitor my progress without sliding into despair.

(The other benefit of this strategy was preventing the random songs that sometimes pop into my head while I’m riding.  All the way up Alpe d’Huez during the 2003 La Marmotte, I had Ravel’s “Bolero” in my head, which was the musical equivalent of a prison sentence.  John had had it even worse during the final EC climb of Stage 1:  pondering that he had such a long way to go, he suddenly got “Ride Like the Wind” by Christopher Cross stuck in his head, and couldn’t get rid of it.  Poor bastard.)

Around the time my brain got to “Goodbye Cruel World” I was actually doing a little better.  At the higher elevation the heat had subsided a bit and I had a decent rhythm.  I passed a couple of fellow Masters who had dropped me at the base of the second climb, well over an hour before.  They were really crawling.  “Dude, you’re a fucking stud!” one of them said.  I have to admit, that encouragement felt pretty good.

There’s a descent about 2/3 of the way up this climb.  The road drops some 200 feet, erasing your progress toward the finish.  It’s totally demoralizing.  I took the opportunity to eat a gel.  Hunting in my jersey pocket I came upon a sleeve of Clif Shot Blocks that Craig had given me.  My hand groped it, trying to figure out what it was.  Once I’d identified it, my brain tried to comprehend what Shot Blocks were and what they did.  You eat them, right?  But what are they?  And how do you get into the package?  Is it like Pez?  I give up trying to fathom this great Shot Block mystery and managed to find a gel.

I ran out of head-music.  The last lyric, “Banging your heart against some mad bugger’s wall,” was eerily apropos.  My own heart was working far better than my poor legs; in fact, the heart’s foreman had sent half the chambers home.  On the shallower pitches my heart rate wasn’t even in the 130s.  My breathing was strangely, unsettlingly slow at times.  I kept pushing on the right shift lever, hoping in vain that I actually had one lower gear.  The final few miles were like slow motion.  The guy I’d passed earlier, who’d called me a stud, now passed me back; if I’d had the energy I’d have said, “Do you care to rescind your earlier statement?”  Worst of all, I was starting to feel lightheaded.  Stretches of the climb appeared that I don’t recall ever having seen before.  It was like when something familiar, looked at too closely, starts to look odd and strange.

Finally I reached a terribly steep ramp with a couple spectators on it, and someone said, “200 feet to go!”  I couldn’t believe it.  I didn’t dare.  But then, why would he lie?  I saw race officials sitting on lawn chairs.  I saw a line painted across the road labeled “FINIS.”  Still I couldn’t believe it (even though the finish line seemed long overdue).  “Is this the finish?  Am I done?” I cried out desperately.  The officials laughed.  “Yeah, you’re done.”  Normally I would coast a few hundred feet down the other side to where the food was, but I couldn’t manage it.  I clipped out and stopped.  “Did you get my number, 802?” I asked half a dozen times.  They had.  “Can I borrow that empty chair?”  Yes, I could.  I sat there at the finish line for a good ten minutes, watching other riders come across.  Two or three of them cried out desperately, “Is this the finish?  Am I done?”

Finally I made it to the rest area.  Jamie, 4th overall in the Masters 55+, greeted me enthusiastically and took my bike.  I found a chair and re-slumped.  I could smell the spinach-and-feta quesadillas the volunteers were cooking up, and I was hungry, but I literally lacked the energy to stand up and walk over there.  For a whole hour I just sat.  I couldn’t even bring myself to hunt for my bag of warm clothes.  I’ve never been so shattered after a race. 

Eventually I made it to the food tables, drank some Coke, drank some chocolate milk, drank some ginger ale, and then spied a big bottle of V-8 juice—the only real electrolyte replacement drink.  I asked if I could pour myself some.  “Yeah, please finish it up because it’s our last bottle.”  I followed this with infinity quesadilla slices, then had to sit again.  The chairs were all taken.  I sat on a tarp.  I found my bag, spent five minutes stretching my arm warmers over my squeaky, sticky arms, and got out my camera.

Paul sat down too.

At some point John showed up.  As with Stage 1, he suffered terrible cramps during the last climb.  (All my photos of the Stage 2 summit are from the seated vantage point.)

John made his pilgrimage to the food tent.  He came back after awhile asking, “Could you guys find any V-8 juice over there?”  Oops. 

Eventually we found the energy to begin the descent.  Normally I love this descent, but I really didn’t feel like being on my bike anymore.  A short way down we stopped at a scenic overlook to snap some photos.  Here’s one.

Unfortunately, the effort of descending that short distance overwhelmed me and I needed to lie down for a bit.  The sun beating down on my face was intolerable.  I was really in bad shape.

Miraculously, Ian and Craig showed up with the van.  Here’s our whole crew, stoked to be done with riding for the day.  (The exception was Paul, who manned up and rode the descent, just for fun.)

For the data nerds among you, here are my climbing stats (power and heart rate):

- 248 watts at 142 bpm on the first climb;

- 220 watts at 133 bpm on the second climb;

- 220 watts at 136 bpm on the last climb (my cadence was 61, so you can see my 39/27 gearing was actually plenty low enough, at least for a mosher like me)

Note that these are “dog-watts”—that is, they’re based on my rate of vertical gain, my speed, and my weight (f=mgh) without considering wind resistance, etc.

Post-race

We stopped at a little hot springs resort to shower.  (I won’t tell you where it is; it’s great that no other cyclists have discovered it.)  One of the guys complained that his coin-op shower had been ice-cold.  Craig went to investigate and determined, to his great mirth, that the rider in question had only turned the Cold handle, not the Hot.  This is how shattered an EC rider can be.

A member of our bike club, Mary Beth, had been in Bishop a few weeks before and recommended Astorga’s Mexican restaurant.  We gave it a shot.  The salsa was good and hot, I had my first beer in many weeks, and someone ingeniously ordered guacamole.  It was fantastic.  I was starting to feel normal.  But then things got really dicey because there wasn’t enough guac to go around.  The only fistfight I’ve ever seen in a restaurant was at Juan’s Place in Berkeley and I had the feeling I was about to witness, if not participate in, another.  Fortunately somebody had a cool head and simply ordered more guac.

My dinner was the giant combo plate:  chile relleno, chicken enchilada verde, beef taco, beans, rice, and—just for the empty calories—a side of flour tortillas.  It was a serious plate of food and I attacked it with a severity I only wish I could bring to bike racing.  It has been said of my eating, “Sometimes I can’t bear to look.”  I know Ken had a chile relleno burrito because I recommended it; other than that, I had tunnel vision and the rest of the table became peripheral blur, their speech a low drone.  I was in The Zone.  I should have been stuffed by the time we got out of there, but I was only just sated.

As we drove by the pizza place in Groveland, too late at night to stop, I looked longingly out the window.  I got some potato chips from a convenience store when we stopped for gas.  By the time we made the Bay Area I was more tired than hungry, and had to figure out how to get home from Rockridge.  Ken loaned John and me his old van.

“It’s been totaled and the chassis is bent, so I had to remove the gear shift template, but I made a diagram of it,” he told me.  Actually, that quote might bear no resemblance to what he said; I was barely coherent by this point.  It was surreal driving that van across Berkeley at 1:30 a.m.  Sometimes I was able to work the gears just fine; other times I couldn’t find first and just sat there, idling, hunting.  As Vladimir Nabokov wrote, “The last long lap is the hardest.”

Race Report - Everest Challenge 2012 (Stage 1)

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

Introduction

In a perfect world, I’d have written this report in the van on the way home from the Everest Challenge, or I’d have stayed another night in Bishop and written this after a long soak in a hot tub.  But instead, it’s four days later, my sunburned lips have only just finished molting, and I still just barely have enough energy to sit up in a chair for long enough to write this.

What follows is my report of the 2012 Everest Challenge California-Nevada Climbing Championship (Stage 1).  If you’re looking for a blow-by-blow of the Masters 35+ race, you’re in the wrong place:  I don’t even know (nor do I care) who won.  If Upton Sinclair, in writing The Jungle, “aimed for the public’s heart and by accident hit it in the stomach,” I am aiming for the stomach and might nick your heart, possibly even your brain.

Pre-Race

I highly recommend using a checklist when packing for such events.  Here is mine, notable mainly for the non-checked-off items I didn’t manage to scrounge up.  I sorely missed a few of those items.

This year I decided I wasn’t messing around and actually had a pasta breakfast.  Then I headed out to meet the rest of our crew—Paul, Craig, John, Mark (a friend of Paul’s), and Ian—at Ken’s house.  Imagine my surprise when I arrived at Ken’s to find that the van Paul scored for us wasn’t nearly as huge and awesome as I’d expected:

But that didn’t matter because Paul immediately produced a giant Ziploc bag of chocolate chip cookies that his girlfriend Tammy made.  One bite and I could tell these were the classic Nestle Toll-House recipe.  Delicious.  My wife, bless her heart, always sneaks in wheat germ and flaxseed and other nutritious elements, but these were the more basic, and classic, butter delivery mechanism.  You might think the cookies were just a treat, but actually they fit right into the very scientific “caloric density” strategy that obsessive Everest Challengers must embrace.  Polar explorers are known to bring sticks of butter to eat; we’re just slightly more recreational and hedonistic.  “Tammy actually asked if she should make a double-batch,” Paul said.  That got a good laugh.

We stopped for gas and Ian bought a giant bag of potato chips.  Not those super-fancy Kettle Chips, and not some fancy modern flavor like “sea salt and fresh ground pepper” or “roast cumin and Echinacea,” but your classic Lays:  plain, salty, and greasy.  Ian was nice enough to share them around, and I must confess, I surely took more than my share.  I couldn’t help it.  Maybe this rankled Ian, because for much of the drive he complained about my concussive flatulence on the Friday night of last year’s EC.  He contends that only pure intent could have made my flatches so loud.  (“Flatch” is my kids’ verb form of “flatulence,” as they’re not allowed to say “fart.”)  I promise you, as I promised Ian, that I wasn’t even awake to have such intent.  Each blast had startled me from sleep.  Some of them actually frightened me.

Imagine if we were the kind of über-modern multi-sport athletes who dabble in Yoga and Pilates and such, and drink soy milk with our lattés.  That would mean snacks like tabouleh (with its requisite raw onion) and hummus (full of garlic), and the stench in the van would be immediate—nothing would even need to work its way through our digestive tracts before starting to reek.  Plus we’d be all Zen and kind and everything and would have to keep our complaints to ourselves.  Surely that would be harder on our hearts than saturated fat.

Lunch was at Priest Station, at the same burger place as last year.  When something works, you don’t mess with it, especially when it’s delicious.  We paid extra for grass-fed beef.  All burger places should offer this.  Some of the guys got all fancy and ordered sweet potato fries.  You know, the same kind of guys that had compacts on their bikes.  I didn’t say anything; superciliousness is best savored silently.  (Sibilant enough for you?)

I never got my side of mayonnaise, nor my side of barbecue sauce.  I decided not to wait for them, because the staff was trying to rush us through.  “We’re expecting some decent people at 1,” the hostess had said, when she intercepted our van in the parking lot.  (I’m paraphrasing.)  The deal was, a bunch of old people driving vintage Mercedes Benzes was expected.  Why would anybody expect these people to tip as well as us?  We drove out, on-time, just as they started to roll in.  I hope they weren’t too tired after their long drive.  Huh.

The rest of the drive was uneventful, with beautiful scenery out the window.  As we approached Bishop, one of the guys said, “I can tell we’re getting close because I’m starting to get an erection.”

Sticking closely to our script, we did a 9-mile spin-the-legs ride in Bishop.  It’s useful to have a fresh memory of the bicycle being something fun to ride, not just a torture rack.  Amazing how fast such a memory can be obliterated—but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Dinner, needless to say, was the free pasta feed at the fairgrounds.  Plenty of food this time (which was a relief), but no water.  Just iced tea (which would have kept me up all night) and Country Time lemonade.  I don’t know why anybody drinks that stuff.  Don’t get me wrong, frozen concentrated lemonade with all the corn syrup and such is fine by me, but that vulcanized powdered stuff is just revolting.  It’s especially wrong for this crowd.  I mean, if we were a bunch of kids trying to get high, and fat, off the sugar, that would be one thing.  But we were all facing two days of guzzling energy drink in the 90-degree heat … could we really be expected to want this stuff now?  I realize I’m being kind of negative here; after all, we did get free pasta, and it was pretty good.  I guess I’m still just too shattered from the race to be looking at the bright side of everything.

Stage 1 – 88.5 miles, 14,965 feet of climbing

Breakfast was Uncle Sam cereal, like last year.  I’d almost grabbed the Weetabix—we had a box—but I thought I might be rooming with Ian and, it being British, I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction.  Besides, that stuff gets mushy.  The milk, which we’d bought at Smart & Final the night before (another EC tradition) didn’t say anything about “no rBST,” which I took to mean it does have it, and probably rBGH too.  What are these hormones?  Could they be similar to HGH?  I poured some more.  Dammit!  I should have been drinking this Monsanto milk all along!

 My roommate, in the event, was John Lynch, my old pal from Boulder.  He and I were teammates on the Leisure Time Products squad for the 1981 Red Zinger Mini Classic.  I was close to dead last in that race, but he was around tenth, and I’ll never forget what happened in the first stage:  his plastic bike-mounted number wasn’t attached at the down tube, and swung out and sliced his leg.  He just shrugged it off.  I was in awe.  So imagine my distress on this morning when he stared at his cereal like he was facing down a foe.  Sure, Uncle Sam is hard to eat, but moreover I think John was worried about the race, his first-ever EC.  He lives in Ithaca, NY these days, and though he has plenty of hills to train on, there are no proper mountains.

The motel was pretty nice this year.  It even had a Trimline phone mounted in the bathroom, right next to the toilet.  A nice touch, for those who don’t want to worry about dropping their smartphones during a heated moment.  But then, you can’t really talk with the fan going, and with no window in the bathroom that fan worked overtime.  My biggest complaint was with the toilet, which, plumbing-wise, was an underachiever.  It was really touch-and-go there, several times, especially on Saturday morning.  I found myself cheering on the toilet.  “C’mon, buddy!  You can do it!”  It was like the Little Toilet That Could:  I think I can, I think I can!  Nobody wants to run late because he’s plunging, or mopping up.

Okay, I lied earlier about the van.  That flowery thing above did come into play, but not until much later.  The actual van, to quote Ice-T, was “the flyest new shit rollin’ off gasoline,” the “ultimate super-fly ride.”  We were almost intimidated by ourselves, rolling up in that thing.  It even had platforms on the roof to walk on while attaching bikes.

During the race, I ate four gels and drank six bottles of Cytomax, two bottles of Heed, a bottle of water, and a Coke.  New for this year was the dedicated soigneur, Ian.  That’s right, he drove up with us just to provide support.  I only wish I’d thought harder, ahead of time, about how to best equip him.  He had coolers and ice and I brought plenty of drink mix, but (being cheap) I didn’t bring enough bottles.  Ian had two fresh bottles for me at the beginning of the second climb, and another two after that, but then he was out of bullets so I gave him a baggie of drink mix I’d been carrying to mix up myself somewhere.  That made sense; he’d turned it into a nice bottle by the next—and last—time I saw him, and so I tried again, handing him my last baggie of drink mix as I went by.  He stared at it, like, “What did you give me this for?”

It was at this final water stop—something like 70 miles into the race, with one minor and one major climb still to come—that Craig decided to wait for me.  Despite being sick as a dog (he’d caught a nasty virus earlier in the week), he’d been off ahead of me all day, but often visible on the horizon like a blue-and-orange mirage.  On the first two climbs he’d distanced me by a fair bit, but I’d had better luck finding riders to descend with and had made up time.  On the flat sections he’d had particularly bad luck.  The problem was, by the time he decided to wait, I was pretty well knackered and would have been content to dink along at a humble pace.  Instead, I was determined to make good on his strategy.  Perhaps he foresaw all this, in which case you could say he dropped back to make a man out of me—to give me a chance to do something bold, like he’s the respected Indian brave and I’m the unproven upstart, with a humiliating name like Dribbles Down Leg or something, and after this heroic ride I’d get a cool new name, like Mans Up For Once.

For most of the (ironically named) Paradise section, up Old Sherwin Grade, Craig dragged me along.  I could just barely hang.  It wasn’t until Highway 395, which the race traverses for a short section to Tom’s Place, the beginning of the final climb, that I first put my nose in the wind.  We stopped briefly at the bottom (he got some water, I got a Coke—actually, it was a cup of Shasta, the volunteers volunteered) and then struck out for the final climb to Mosquito Flat.  (Why is “Flat” part of the name of so many peaks?)  Perhaps a third of the way up this, I started to feel strong for the first time in the race, just as the heat and altitude started to get to Craig.  I struck off alone (a hostage to my not-so-low gearing, to be honest).

After I had suffered for a great deal of time, a car came down the road toward me.  It was the race director, Steve Barnes, and he called out, “Three and a half miles to go!”  At this moment, it dawned on me that I was actually going to finish.  Sure, I’ve finished this race before, but this year was different:  after breaking my femur ten months ago, and having to re-learn how to walk, I wasn’t even sure EC was a realistic objective.  This race has been my singular goal for so many months, it was overwhelming to suddenly realize I was going to achieve it.  The memory of my long suffering, through countless physical therapy sessions and humbling training rides, was suddenly distilled into this moment.  I started crying.

So long as it doesn’t interfere with your breathing, crying is just fine during a race.  In fact, I think it gave me a boost.  After all, cycling legend Eddy Merckx was known for crying during races—a great many of them, in fact.  Perhaps I’d finally arrived as a suffering cyclist.  The tears didn’t last long and then, in the last couple miles, I passed two or three other Masters 35+ riders.  I made sure to pick it up a bit and blow by them good and fast, looking as composed as possible, to crush their morale and make sure they didn’t try to latch on.  Not very nice, I know, but this was a race.

At the finish, the food was a bit humbler than in previous years.  The Oreos were fake and there weren’t any quesadillas.  I did have a whole bunch of V-8 juice and Cokes, which hit the spot.  Thinking back, I really didn’t eat enough up there.  Maybe I was too knackered.  Or maybe too giddy:  though I didn’t confirm this until later, I was pretty sure I’d done the course faster than the year before.  (As it turns out, my time—6:09:26—was almost 6½ minutes faster.  That’s the good news.  The bad news is coming.)

I used the outhouse up there.  As outhouses go, it was brilliant.  Not stinky at all, and plenty of TP.  Something dawned on me in there:  you never have to worry about dodgy plumbing with an outhouse—there isn’t any.  You can do whatever damage you want and it just sits there, a seat over a hole over a pit, and takes it all.  (This is where EC is much more humane than La Marmotte:  the outhouse at the base of the Col du Galibier doesn’t even have a commode.  It’s just a hole in the floor with a couple of clown footprints to show you where to squat.)

John arrived after awhile, having endured terrible muscle cramps that stopped him cold, again and again.  He probably suffered more than any of us, and for longer.  Here are some snapshots of our gang maxin’ out at the summit.

At the pre-race meeting the race director had pointed out that support vehicles are allowed for all but the last climb of the race, to shuttle racers back to Bishop (saving us a pretty long and, under the circumstances, unpleasant schlep along Highway 395).  As we prepared to make the short descent to the van, John overheard somebody complaining about this.  “What?  People are getting rides back in cars?!  I can’t believe that!  What a bunch of limp dicks!” the dude cried.  I didn’t think of the proper comeback until much later:  “What … descending in the heat after an 89-mile race actually gives you a hard-on?”

For the data nerds among you, here are my climbing stats (power and heart rate):

- 285 watts at 154 bpm on the first climb;

- 260 watts at 153 bpm on the second climb;

- 240 watts at 148 bpm on the last climb.

Note that these are “dog-watts”—that is, they’re based on my rate of vertical gain, my speed, and my weight (f=mgh) without considering wind resistance, etc.

Post-race

I won’t pretend there’s anything novel to report about our dinner at the Upper Crust Pizza Company.  This was our fourth year of dining there after Stage 1, and we followed the same strategy:  pizza appetizer, ultra-rich pasta entrée.  However, I would like to point out, mainly to my EC brethren (hi guys) that I worked really hard to be polite at that meal, though it may not have shown.  You all might think you know how much I eat, but in truth, you have no idea.  It almost killed me to eat only two slices of that pizza (and yes, I do feel guilty for that second slice, especially after watching guys cut slices in half).  If I were an asocial predatory beast, like my housecat, I’d have eaten the whole damn thing.  Then, after my entrée, which I’d easily have polished off, I’d have gone after your plates.  You see, even after eating some of Ken’s surplus lasagne and that basket of bread, I was far from truly full.  Imagine if you’d only been served a couple of Saltines:  that’s about how I felt.  Next year, I’m bringing an extra $20, and I’m going to order a whole damn appetizer pizza for myself.  Then you’ll see what I can really do.

To be continued...

That’s really enough for now, isn’t it?  Keep an eye on albertnet because the next installment of the 2012 EC saga is where things get dark.  If you can’t stand the smurfiness of this post and are developing a real appetite for Schadenfreude, I think you’ll enjoy reading about Stage 2.

Everest Challenge "Pep Talk"

Introduction

The Everest Challenge is this weekend.  This fills me with a combination of excitement and dread.  Mostly dread.  It’s kind of like that back-to-school feeling all the kiddies went through this month, except EC is more intense.  Imagine packing all the trials and difficulties of a school year into one weekend.

I had my best week of training recently:  29,000 feet of vertical gain.  Well, EC has that much climbing in just two days.  Cyclists are, by and large, an analytical bunch, and I could easily find all kinds of statistics to support the notion that I’m doomed.  And yet, having finished this race three times already (click here, here, here, and here for details), I’m actually pretty confident.  (Not entirely, though—more on that later.)

My friend John is coming out from upstate New York to do this race for the first time.  He’s a bit nervous because there aren’t that many hills to train on there.  He lived in Berkeley for awhile, so he knows how good the riding is here.  (Mount Diablo, a 10-mile climb reaching 3,800 feet, is particularly good EC preparation, as is Lomas Cantadas, a two mile climb with an average grade of 11%.)  John e-mailed me with some misgivings, and I replied with a little pep talk which I’ve decided to embellish a bit and post here, for two reasons:  a) some of my readers may be doing EC or something similar at some point, and b) the gist of my pep talk could apply to all kinds of difficult undertakings, not just sport.

Here is a photo of John from the last time we did an epic ride, which was the Markleeville Death Ride in 2000.  He’s on the right; my brother Bryan is in the middle.  We’re wearing garbage bags because it was chilly and we didn’t bring warm clothing for the final descent.

Jitters

I’m more nervous about this race than I’ve been before, probably because I’m coming back from a major injury.  For me, more is at stake this year:  this isn’t just a race, but proof that I’m back (or that I’m not).  I’ve spent this week in an elevated state, something like a continuous fight-or-flight reflex.  It feels like I have a cold as well, though I felt the same way last year and a few other times before major events.  Perhaps my body is faking illness to make sure its master (i.e., my brain) gives it all the rest it needs.  Meanwhile, I’ve become obsessive about my bike, wanting to fix everything but not touch anything. 

The truth is, everything could go perfectly and still it would be absolutely grueling.  My friend Craig (who’s also doing EC) remarked, “Perhaps it’s a curse that your specialty is being good after 100 miles and 10k of climbing—you wouldn’t have to suffer so much if your specialty was a 12-second track event.”  I’m also anxious about some mishap (illness, mechanical failure) stymieing me.  Devoting so many weeks of hard training to a single event really leverages you emotionally.

John, on the other hand, is a bit worried about finishing (despite winning a race this year and getting third in another).  He’s studied the course profile carefully, and said in his e-mail, “I can’t stop thinking about EC.  I climb a lot of hills around here, but they’re all a lot shorter….  You love Lomas Contadas.  Looking at Strava, I can’t fathom why anyone would love that hill—it looks ridiculous. It looks pretty equivalent to Blakeslee Road here in Ithaca (if you want to look it up on Strava), and I frickin’ hate that climb. I’ve only done it twice:  it totally kicked my ass the first time, so I swore off it. Then I rode it on Sunday just to prove to myself that it didn’t own me. Well, it did (own me, that is).  If there are sections [of EC climbs] that get over 12% for any length of time, that will totally mess with my rhythm and my head.  And my legs.”

On the face of it, both John and I are over-thinking this thing.  But there’s no point commanding ourselves to stop; it wouldn’t work.  There’s no daytime equivalent to counting sheep until our preoccupations fall away.  What’s needed is to rethink this thing, to keep from falling into the same well-worn ruts of thought that make us worry.  A shift in perspective, away from the analytical, is in order.

The limitations of analysis

We can analyze the EC climbs, Strava data, our own training experience, etc. all we want but it won’t really make much difference at this point.  The fact is, the EC is fricking hard, and there’s no way to totally prepare yourself.  My own training hasn’t approximated either stage of EC, but then it hasn’t any of the other times I’ve done the race.  Nobody ever said the training has to be as hard as the race.  Training never is.  The human body always holds something in reserve to make up the difference.  Plus, for once we’ll be rested and fresh, instead of doing a big ride when our legs are already tired.

It is true that I love Lomas Cantadas.  The very reason I love it is that over time it has helped to forge in me a rare and useful trait:  grace under pressure.  I don’t have gobs of this trait, but more than I used to.  This is probably the only part of cycling that I have gotten better at with age. 

When I was dusting off my old Odyssey ‘91 story for this blog, I was struck by how much of the difficulty of that ride was just me panicking every time the road went uphill.  Recently I did several of these climbs again, during my “Non-Death-Ride Non-Warmup,” a point-to-point ride to a place I’d only seen on a map.  I had no idea what climbing was in store, or even how long the ride would be; plus, I wasn’t even very strong yet.  And yet, it wasn’t a disaster. 

The difference between Odyssey ‘91 and the Non-Warmup is that this time I was “tranquillo,” as the Italians say.  I was riding on about 10% physical ability and 90% resignation.  Resignation is totally underrated.  Sometimes I think I have a talent for resignation, but actually I think I’ve merely developed it by riding over Lomas Cantadas more than 500 times over the last seven years.

Climbing stupid

In that many trips up Lomas, I’ve never made it over without a struggle.  Sometimes the struggle is completely absurd—and yet I’ve never actually tipped over, or ground to a halt, or had to walk my bike.  Yes, I’ve occasionally yelled, “Spock!  Help me, Spock!” but I’ve never failed to make it over the hill.  I’ve tackled that climb several times when I was already shattered.  The trick is to pretend you have no choice and to take one pedal stroke at a time, riding like a robot.  Climbing stupid, you might say.  Not “climbing stupidly,” which I would never recommend, but “climbing as though you were stupid.”  Sometimes the brain just needs to be shut off (though actually I usually leave a few processes running, like the event logger that watches each half-pedal-revolution with astonishment and keeps track of the implausible ongoing progress). 

Eventually, even an 11-percent grade ceases to seem like a crisis, and starts to feel normal.  Not easy, mind you, but normal ... as in, “the new reality is that my life involves a lot of suffering on this hill, and there’s no way around it.”  Fear is replaced by fatalism.  This helps because suffering itself is never the real problem in sport; fear of suffering is the problem.  Suffering is inevitable, but fear doesn’t need to be.

The point isn’t that you need to ride Lomas 500 times to be ready for EC.  The point is, during a hard climb, once you stop thinking things like “what if I can’t?” and “is this too much?” and “oh, no!” and switch to thinking either a) nothing at all, or b) “I will do this until it’s done,” then the ride—any ride—is doable.  If you pace yourself, and keep panic and despair at bay, and ride as though you could not fail, you will succeed.  It may take a very long time, and you may find yourself mired in misery, but that’s okay.  Suffering and misery will not stop you from succeeding.  Only fear and doubt and despair can stop you.  

Here’s my brother Bryan lying in the road on the second trip over Ebbetts Pass during the 2002 Death Ride.  Sure, he’d had the stuffing knocked out of him, but that’s nothing a little rest can’t help, eh?

The psychological factor

Even without routinely climbing a hill like Lomas, a rider can have faith that, once the physical preparation for EC is complete (or as complete as it’s going to get), the rest of the race is mental.  Not as in intellectual, but as in psychological.  “It’s all psychological” is of course a cliché, and I’ve been struck by how untrue it seems in the context of racing.  You can’t (or at least can’t reliably) beat somebody who’s stronger just because you pretend you can, or try harder, or whatever.  But you can certainly silence the wimp in your brain that starts internally whining and casting doubt on your operation.  The notion that “I might not be able to do this” is just a psychological trick your brain is playing on you, to get you to quit.  Framing your progress as a “can vs. can’t” question is just weakness. 

(Obviously there are exceptions to this.  If you blow up completely, and literally cannot turn your lowest gear, and even lying down for awhile doesn’t help, then it’s no longer a psychological matter.  Or, if it’s 100 degrees and you’re not handling the heat well and you get goose bumps or something, then you need to quit to avoid heat stroke.  But these are very rare scenarios, in my experience.  It’s far more common for somebody to decide he can’t hack it, and either quit well ahead of total exhaustion, or sabotage his efforts by refusing to eat or drink enough, which reliably leads to total exhaustion and the mythical conclusion that failure was inevitable.)

I well remember my first EC.  I was good and scared about every climb, including the first one, and when I reached the top of it and still had good legs, I felt ecstatic.  The second climb, another out-and-back, was a lot harder than it looked.  When I saw my pals coming down it I assumed they were just really, really far ahead of me, but to my pleasant surprise the climb was over before I expected.  The last climb seemed endless and really beat the crap out of me, and I was worrying the whole time about the really steep pitches at the top, but when I finally reached them, they were more manageable than I’d expected.  I remember thinking to myself, “Is that it, mountain? Is that all you got?!”

The best part is, if you’ve paced yourself carefully and kept it in your pants, sometimes you (or at least I) feel strong like bull on the last climb, and it’s exhilarating!  On the flip side, if everything goes wrong and you suffer like never before, to where you want to curl up in the gutter in the fetal position, well, that also has value.  That’s vision-quest territory, and I’ve been there, too.  Just last year, in fact, while racing the Everest Challenge.

What Shouldn't Cyclists Eat?

I recently blogged about what cyclists eat when training for long races.  What I didn’t get into was whether any food or drink is off-limits to cyclists.  So, here goes.

First of all, the pros eat differently from amateurs.  Pro cyclists really watch their weight, because being anything other than freakishly emaciated disrupts the absurd power/weight ratio that makes them competitive.  That said, their diet isn’t exactly restrictive.  As reported in cyclingnews, world champion Mark Cavendish decided this year to trim down for the Olympics:   “I’ve stopped candy, soft drinks and ready meals.” 

It’s also worth pointing out differences between the Europeans and Americans.  I understand they eat a lot of horse meat over there.  Much of the Euro approach strikes Americans as unscientific, being based on tradition and mythology.  For example, in the 1980s the French castigated Greg LeMond for having the audacity to eat ice cream—which was obviously terribly detrimental to his fitness—during the Tour de France, especially while he was in the lead.  To the French, LeMond’s decadence was an insult to the yellow jersey.  At the time, I figured, “Heck, LeMond is burning a lot of calories, he can get away with it.”  After all, I’d watched plenty of Coors Classic racers in Boulder strolling along the outdoor mall eating ice cream.

As it turns out, LeMond’s ice cream wasn’t just a treat.  I found this out in summer of 2000 when I happened to encounter him at the Nevada City Bicycle Classic, where we were both spectators.  It was either my birthday or his—we’re off by just a day—so he bought me an ice cream.  I reminded him of the flak he’d taken during that Tour for his ice cream indulgence, and he said, very seriously, “That wasn’t an indulgence, that was crucial.  When you’re racing at that level you’ve got to replace the calories.”  It turns out ice cream is an excellent sports recovery food:  plenty of protein and much-needed calcium.

My friend John, who stepped up his training this year in anticipation of the Everest Challenge, told me recently, “These days I eat massive amounts of ice cream.  If I do a good ride, I’ll eat a pint of Ben and Jerry’s (about 1200 calories), guilt free!  Heck, I eat that much ice cream even on days when I don't ride!  But I weigh less now than I have in decades.” 

So ... is diet really “anything goes” for us freedom-loving American cyclists?  Well, as I was reminded quite recently:  no. 

Last Friday, I did a double-Diablo (digging myself into a deep calorie deficit), and then spent Saturday picnicking at a winery in Sonoma with a bunch of old cycling friends from SoCal.  While training for the Everest Challenge I don’t drink any alcohol—I figure my liver is working hard enough as it is restoring muscle glycogen—but I made an exception and had a teensy bit of wine.  More problematic were the lack of water (they were selling it, bottled, and I’m cheap) and the big bag of chips and other junk I ate all day.  My plan was to meet up with other friends in the area and go out for a giant Italian dinner to true up my stomach.  Instead, my friends served dinner at their house.  It was take-out dim sum.

Now, I don’t want to complain.  I love dim sum and my hosts bought tons of it, being familiar with my oversized appetite.  Meanwhile, I teach my kids to eat whatever they’re served and I have to lead by example.  Plus, it was delicious.  It must be said, however, that dim sum is no way to carbo-load.  By the time you’ve eaten three or four thousand calories of it, you’ve taken on a ton of salt and grease.   By the time we’d driven home from the wine country, my normally invincible stomach was in turmoil.

I looked in the bathroom mirror:  a disturbing, and yet fascinating, sight.  I could see my ribs (being a cyclist, after all) but also this crazy sphere of bloat pushing out over my waistband, like I was a boa constrictor who swallowed a soccer ball.  In all my years of overeating I’ve never seen anything like it.  All night I was up chugging water, tossing, turning, roiling.  At 4 o’clock on Sunday morning I couldn’t be in bed any longer.  I got up and prepared for my ride:  another double-Diablo.

Guess what?  I didn’t feel so hot.  Actually, I was miserable from the first pedal stroke and it got worse from there.  I thought about just going home—but I’d feel lousy there, too, so what was the point?  I met up with my friends and clung desperately to the back of the group all the way to the base of Mount Diablo.  Once the climb started, I got dropped so abruptly I didn’t even have a chance to tell them not to bother waiting at the top.  My stomach—a stalwart ally, the linchpin of my cycling ability—was livid to have been so abused.  As the climb dragged on, my system exorcised most of the evil, but my energy stores were empty, closed, all boarded up.

I ended up doing both Diablo assaults alone.  Many times I thought of cutting the ride short.  After all, each climb was optional.  Heck, the whole ride was optional—in fact, the whole sport is optional!  But I didn’t quit, because here was an opportunity to turn this poor dietary choice into a positive.  If I could stave off despair and continue pedaling under such duress, for no good reason, I’d give my psychological mettle a real test in advance of the big race.  The Everest Challenge is grueling, sure, but at least I won’t be riding it on rice flour and fatty pork alone.

After the ride I spent a good while lying on the living room floor.  I slept really well that night.  Once again, I dreamed of food:  I’m at my daughter’s soccer game coveting the snack somebody’s mom brought, which is a large bowl of cooked lentils.  “Could I have some now?” I beg.  “No!” the soccer mom replies.  “You can’t have any now or later!  It’s for the kids!”

Nutrition for Endurance Cycling

What does an ultra-endurance athlete eat?

I can speak for the cyclist who does really long training rides.  How long?  Well, lately I’ve been training for a two-day stage race, the Everest Challenge.  My favorite weekend ride these days is the “double-Diablo,” which is close to a hundred miles long with 11,000 feet of climbing.

It’s tough to convey, to the layman, and even to the typical cyclist, what “11,000 feet of climbing” really means.  Consider this:  a staircase rising 11,000 feet would have around 18,000 steps, would be about four miles long, and would take you to the top of a 900-story building.

I have it on good authority that the stomach of a well-trained athlete can handle about 200 calories an hour during intense exercise.  By calories I mean carbohydrates—protein and fat aren’t nearly as useful.  Any sugar will do:  energy bars, energy drink, energy gels, fruit.  I find fruit hard to carry and bars hard to eat.  So I try to drink a bottle of energy drink (160-180 calories) every hour, and eat a gel (110-120 calories) about every 90 minutes.  (I bring drink mix in baggies.)  The gels have caffeine, which speeds the metabolism and aids in fat burning.

So, during a 6½-hour double-Diablo, I’ll have five or six large bottles of energy drink and four gels.  That’s pretty disgusting:  1,300 to 1,500 calories of pure sugar.  (Don’t let anybody tell you there’s nutrition in energy drink.  Sure, these drinks contain electrolytes, but that’s not really nutrition.  There are only two electrolytes:  potassium and sodium.  Six bottles of Gatorade—about a gallon—provides, in total, just 270 mg of potassium, a mere 6% of a person’s daily requirement.  You can get that much potassium from four ounces of orange juice, or half a banana.  Four gels provides a total of 80 mg potassium—about as much as a mouthful of V-8 juice.  As for sodium, I don’t think that’s an elusive part of any American’s diet.)

The worst part of this forced gluttony?  It’s that I don’t even have a sweet tooth.  My kids are envious that I get to have so much sweet stuff, but I really don’t enjoy it.  The good news is, my stomach tolerates it pretty well—which puts me at an advantage over lots of riders, especially during a six- or seven-hour road race.  An envious teammate joked to me recently, “You have a Protour-caliber stomach.”  It’s true—my stomach is the one part of my body suitable for the Tour de France.

What would happen if a cyclist drank only water during rides?  Well, on a short ride he’d be fine, though he might not go as fast.  (Recent studies—click here and here and especially here for details—show that a sweet drink increases power output, even if it’s spat out instead of swallowed.)  On a long ride, though, the sugar-free rider is doomed.  He’s a time bomb:  he can be hammering along just fine one moment but will suddenly crack, and then barely be able to turn the pedals.  It’s pretty spectacular, but also sad, to watch.

How you eat after a long ride is also important.  For about half an hour after hard exercise, sugar taken in goes directly into replacing muscle glycogen instead of being absorbed the normal way.  In other words, you’ll recover more quickly if you consume carbs during this “glycogen window.”  So, right after my ride, when I’ve already had a whole gallon of energy drink, guess what I get to do?  Have some juice, maybe some sweetened yogurt, a few Girl Scout cookies.  My kids flock to the scene like pigeons, looking for handouts. “Did you just ride six hours?” I snap.  (I do leverage the glycogen window as a parent.  My older daughter will ride for an hour on the indoor trainer just for a half-dozen jelly beans.)

Refueling doesn’t end there, though.  A cyclist can burn a thousand calories per hour on a hard ride, so it takes many meals to catch up.  After a really long ride I dream about food all night.  As with any dream involving appetites, satisfaction is never achieved.  On Saturday night I dreamed I’d locked myself out of my office:  no wallet, no keys, no train ticket … thus no food.  The dreamscape shifted:  now I was stuck at a boring lecture.  Just as I tried to sneak out, the speaker asked me to come onstage.  At that moment I discovered my hands were full of noodles.  I ran for the door but dropped the noodles.  Could I eat them off the floor?  Everybody was watching.

On Sunday night I dreamed I was at a barbecue and just before I got to eat, my brother showed up and needed a ride to the airport right away.  The next morning my wife said I was talking in my sleep about “some sauce, Florentine I think.”

A cyclist can’t eat right.  What I mean is, he can’t eat the same things that ideally healthy people eat—he needs more calories than that.  Sunday night I offered to make dinner:  “I can make gnocchi with gorgonzola, or tortellini.”  My wife replied, “How about neither?  I mean, we’ve got all this produce….”  I thought of a dog, starving after chasing a ball all day, hearing its master say, “I could give you this Alpo … but then, we’ve got this nice chew toy!”  If I eat “right,” meaning lots of vegetables and fiber, I’ll feel sated but never catch up on calories.  Distance athletes have to eat wrong.  They need massive plates of pasta.

Sugary drinks aside, do I enjoy this abnormal caloric need?  Well, sure!  I laugh when I see a food product labeled “guilt-free.”  The only guilt I feel, when I eat a fatty-starchy calorie bomb, is that I might be setting a bad example, or making other people jealous.