How to REALLY wear the skin off your butt in 2 days

Remember way back in May how I rode 154 miles in a weekend and thought I was such a badass? Well I've built up a little bit more confidence and endurance on the bike since then, and this weekend more by chance than suicidal tendencies I planned myself back-to-back centuries. I was cognizant that I was coming up on my 1-year anniversary of sobriety and maybe I should do something big to celebrate, but that was more of an afterthought. Mostly, I just wanted to ride my bike as much as I could before winter forced me inside (or at the very least into a pair of running shoes).

So on Saturday I packed up my bike and set off for Lake Winnipesaukee (don't expect me to try and spell that name again!). It was a brisk morning, and Mindy turned up dressed like she was ready to climb Mt. Everest in snow gloves, arm warmers, crampons, and the shiniest pair of tights I've ever seen. Okay, I'm lying about the crampons. The only concession I'd made to the cold was a thin long-sleeved jersey to go over my regular jersey. Turns out Mindy was right. As we rode I lost feeling in my hands and feet and the cold really sapped my energy.

Know what else sapped my energy? The hills. Now you might think that doing a loop around the perimeter of a lake would be flat, because all water is level, and therefore the land around it should be level too, right? You would be wrong. If there was a flat inch on that course, Mindy and I must have missed it. We climbed roughly 3,000 feet in 60 miles, all broken into tiny 2-3-minute chunks. We were constantly either climbing or descending.

The scenery was beautiful. When we started the sun was out and mist was just coming off the lake. The trees started to change colors in New England this week, and there were bursts of color all over the horizon. Not far off we could see the White Mountains, and everywhere there were cute little towns and back country roads. And of course, there was the lake. Poor, poor drunk people who are sleeping in and hung over this morning, I thought. And they call me crazy?

The only blemish on the rout was the McCain signs we kept seeing everywhere. What the hell is up with New Hampshire?! It's bordered by Massachusetts and Vermont, arguably two of the most liberal states in the nation, with the third bordering state being Maine, whose politics are only slightly to the right of the far, far left. But New Hampshire is like our own slice of the Bible Belt right here in New England. I've heard it suggested that it's part of the "Live free or die" mentality that they have up there. They don't want taxes, they don't want anyone to tell them to wear a seatbelt or a helmet, and they don't want the damned government in their damned business, thank you very much! Mindy and I must have seen around 200 motorcyclists, and on all those heads I only saw one helmet. You know where it was? Strapped to the back of the motorcycle. And THESE are the swing votes that are deciding our fate?!

Anyway, the traffic prevented Mindy and me from talking much over the course of the ride (which I was, of course, disappointed about!), but we got back to the cars without major incident, then we parted ways and I turned back around to ride another 50 miles on my own. All was going great as I rode down a beautifully-paved road with the widest, cleanest shoulder you ever did see, until my directions told me to take the freeway. Damn. So I turned around, rode back to the car, and called it quits at about 97.6 miles.

I hadn't brought enough cash with me to buy snacks and liquids, and I'd kind of skimped on my nutrition, and by the time I got home at 5:00 (11 hours after leaving) having only ingested about 1.5 liters of Gatorade, a bag of gum drops, a Baby Ruth bar, and a small bag of Chex Mix, I was kind of seeing stars by the time I came in the door. But I drank as much as I could and ate some broccoli (which I'm convinced cures all ills) and got my shit ready for tomorrow: the Charles River Wheelmen's Fall Century.

But here's the problem: shipping my stupid aero helmet back to the UK had cost me way more than I expected, so it was between paying for the century and paying for the gas to drive there. I looked at a map and saw that the start was only 20 miles away, just beyond Concord where many of my training rides go anyway. So I figured, What the hell, I'll just ride to the start.

So I did. I hopped on my bike at 6:30 in the morning, went to Starbucks and filled one of my water bottles with iced coffee instead of Accelerade, picked up $1 worth of candy at 7-11, and rode to Acton. All was going well until I took a wrong turn on a rotary and found myself on the freeway. It was only 7:30 on a Sunday morning and I was going to stick it out, but the debris on the shoulder got so thick that I eventually had to turn around. It's a good thing, too, because it turns out that Rte 2 and Rte 2A are totally different roads going to different places. I just turned myself around and rode the wrong way back up the freeway, back around the rotary (the wrong way), past the State Police station and the State Penitentiary, and on my merry way.

I arrived at the start as most people were already leaving, which was just fine by me. I didn't want to get stuck in the trap of trying to stay with the big guns for the first half of the ride only to find myself 75 miles from home and bonking. Also, it meant that there was no line for the porta-potties. This wasn't my first rodeo, and I knew that I'd catch up with the middle of the pack before long, then I could leapfrog up as I saw fit.

I passed a group of riders right out of the gate, and one woman with super high handlebars and clip-on aerobars (that doesn't work, by the way ) tried to keep up with me. She couldn't, of course. When we hit the first stop sign after about a mile I was already far enough ahead to have crossed the intersection before I heard a scream behind me and I turned around in time to see her go down. There was no one around her, she hadn't been moving very fast, I hadn't seen her wheel go out from under her, what the hell happened? "Are you alright?" I asked.
"Yeah, just couldn't get clipped out in time," she said.
I said what I could to make her feel better, things like, "I won't tell anyone," and "Any blood?" but I swear, that has never, ever happened to me. How incompetent do you have to be to just not clip out in time? (By the way, this is TOTALLY different from, Rocketpants' experience: Rocketpants' fall: unfortunate sequence of events, this lady: incompetent.)

Before long I had fallen in with some Straight Men Over 40 and predictably, they loved me. Then we caught up with an even bigger crew of Straight Men Over 40, and they were tickled pink to have a girl in their midst who was keeping the pace and making old man jokes like, "This is the weirdest-lookin' downhill I've ever seen!" when we were going uphill.
"Hey, didn't I see you riding to the start?" one guy asked.
"Yeah."
"I told my friend Mitch that you were riding to the start, but he didn't believe me. He thought you'd have to be crazy to ride to something like this."
"I've been known to make some pretty bad decisions..." I admitted.
"Hey, Mitch, this is the girl we saw riding to the start!" he yelled to another guy in the pack. "I told you she was doing this thing!"

It was encouraging to have the adulation of so many Straight Men Over 40 marveling at how I'd ridden to the start and I was still keeping up, so I felt compelled to show off a bit. Where normally I would let myself drop back a bit on the hills, I rode hard to keep the pace. I made sure I stayed in the front third of the pack, and made excuses to take pulls and push the pace. Then, at about mile 20 (which was mile 45 for me), I ran out of liquid. I hadn't ever really caught up on my hydration from yesterday, and replacing one of my bottles of sports drink with a diuretic had had a double-whammy effect.

And that was when we hit the hills. Steep, terraced fuckers that just went up and up around every corner, and when you thought they were over, they went up some more. "Do you guys know where the first water stop is?" I asked.
"At about mile 50," one of the guys told me. Fuck! I was going to have to ride another 25 miles, over an hour, without any liquids, and it was starting to get warm. I hoped it would be downhill, but is it ever downhill when you need it to be? I could feel that I was fading a bit, and it was taking a little more effort to stay with the group. We climbed about 750 feet in short jags over the next 15 miles, and I tried to be cheerful, but my good mood was rapidly disappearing. I couldn't be fucking around with a group right now, I needed to get to food and water as fast as I could. On a steep, 20% grade I took advantage of the 50-pound advantage I had over most of these guys and dropped the group. I went on ahead as fast as I could, I didn't want to be messing around braking on the descents and I wanted to be alone when I inevitably got grouchy.

I reached the top and had a beautiful, expansive view of the foothills of the mountains in New Hampshire to one side, and the farms and rolling hills of Massachusetts to the other, and even more fall colors as far as the eye could see. But I had other things to think about. I sped down the hill, and with 75 miles on my watch, I was worried that I had missed the food stop. I interrogated the next guy I came to, and probably wasn't too polite about it, since I thought we'd missed it and was getting ready to blame him for it, but he told me we still had 5 miles to go.

When I finally hit that food stop with my mouth phlegmy and sticky from dehydration, I had one and a half bottles of water, two bananas, a bagel, a cookie some pretzels and maybe some other niblets. The Straight Men Over 40 thought it was hilarious that I'd dropped them. I was just surprised I'd made it 75 miles on such little food and water.

Now recharged, I saddled up with the Straight Men Over 40 and we started to climb right out of the aid station. I dropped them in the first quarter mile, and decided that I wasn't obligated to wait for them, so I rode the next hill alone. On the descent I was caught by an overweight guy who felt the need to talk about all the centuries he'd done, probably to compensate for what people might think of his weight. I was happy for him and the eighty-something pounds he'd lost, but I found it an obnoxious way of bragging, and couldn't wait till the next hill to drop his fat ass.

Then I picked up another Straight Man Over 40. When he passed me and couldn't drop me he asked if I wanted to work together. He was about a foot taller and had almost 100 lb on me, so I said sure. He had the kind of big, curly hair that you can tell he would talk a lot, but I was too lazy to drop him. "You can save like 30% of your energy by drafting..." he started to explain. I hate it when people try to explain the basics of cycling to me, because there's no way your can tell them, "Dude, I know," so I just let him talk until he was spent. Then it was my turn to pull. I hopped in the front and set a stiff pace for him to keep up with. I was feeling really good again after my feast at the last rest stop. "You're riding pretty good for mile 70," he said.
I looked at my watch, "Actually, 95," I corrected him and smiled. His face was pretty priceless.
"My god, you're ready for the Tour!" he said when it came out that I'd ridden 100 miles the day before (I forget how, I know I didn't bring it up).
"Yep, if they'd let women in," I joked.
We talked about the tour, about cycling, about races, and he got increasingly flattering about my riding. "Man," he kept saying, "I can't wait to tell my brother about you... making me hurt like this after 100 miles!" then an I can hardly believe it chuckle. His brother was apparently an even bigger cycling geek than he was.
He was more and more flattering about my riding, and he boosted my ego so high that I continued to ride hard. "You should get into racing," he was saying. "You could be a Cat 2, at LEAST!"
I know I'm cocky about my riding, but I'm conservative about expectations about where I'll stack up against real cyclists. I may be strong in small-town races, but I know that there are women out there who ride like beasts. I figure that if 18 mph fitness is like running a 10-minute mile, 19 is like a 9-minute mile, 20 an 8-minute mile and so forth, my skill is about equivalent to 7-minute pace: pretty good for an age grouper, but that's warm-up pace for a champion. The best women in the world can do 40 km time trials at 23 miles per hour or faster, I don't even know what their speeds look like in pack riding. There's nothing I would like more than to be paid to ride my bike, but women don't get paid to ride their bikes. While even the lowliest male domestique gets paid $60,000 per year, even the best women in the sport are riding for little more than free bikes and smalltime prize purses. It makes me angry.

At the 75-mile aid station (roughly 100 miles for me) I ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a handfull of pita chips, the Straight Men Over 40 caught up and joked about how I'd dropped them, and so they wouldn't offer me a ride home anymore, and then Curly and I set off again. He now had me competing on an international circuit and I was getting a bit tired of it. Anyway, I was dropping him on hills, and he was having to ride pretty hard to catch up, my drafting advantage was gone. Then 3 riders sped by, lead by a woman, and I took off after them. Ain't no woman going to pass me!

They were riding a pace that made me work my ass off, but I was keeping up. When it was my turn to pull I rode till I was slack-jawed and breathing as hard as I could. I was going so fast that I hardly had time to point out the potholes before we were over them. I kept going for longer than anyone else had been pulling just to prove a point, and then the other woman took over, keeping the pace high. As I drifted back I heard one of the guys say to the other, "Where did these chicks come from?!" Those final 10 or 15 miles were the fastest I rode all day, holding an average of a little over 21 mph. We were riding so hard that we missed one of the turn markers on the road and everyone had to stop and figure out what to do. Thankfully, after that we slackened the pace, we were already at about mile 97 (122 for me) and it was time to cool down anyway. Curly was dropped.

Unfortunately, this group seemed to have a pretty abominable sense of direction. We found the course again, but before long the woman yelled out for us to make a right turn. I hadn't seen any turn signals. I was second-to-last and slowed down for the sharp turn, but the guy behind me didn't see us slowing in time. Suddenly his brake hood was up my ass and he was pushing me down the road. "HEY!!!" I yelled. The brake hood got out of my ass, and then rolled right back into it again. "HEY!!!" I yelled again. We made the turn, and immediately the front two started saying, "Wait, this isn't right!" I didn't even stop, I just turned around and rode right back out again, alone. They caught up and the guy who'd hit me apologized. "If you wanted to grab my ass, all you had to do was ask..." I said, trying to be nice about it, but now I wished I could drop them. I rode the final few miles with them, and then they sailed right past the high school. "It's over here, guys!" I yelled after them. They kept riding, and I just stopped and turned my bike right around. They never turned up in the parking lot, and I wonder what happened to them.

I shoved some chips into my face and made myself a sandwich before Curly rode in. He gushed a little bit more about my ability to drop him after 125 miles. It made me a bit nervous, half the people sitting around at the finish were women, and not the kind in pink fashion jerseys riding Bianchis either. Letting Curly talk me up was almost like bragging myself, and you never know who's listening. "Well, we'll see next summer," I said at a volume level with his (loud). "I've gotta work my way through the system first... There are lots of talented women out there." Then I made an excuse about not wanting my legs to cool off too much and hopped on my bike and headed for home.

There wasn't much skin left on my ass, and I had a generalized fatigue deep in my legs, but I had no problem riding the last 20 miles home. In fact, the biggest pain was the one in my ass riding over rough pavement, so I just clicked up a gear and stood up. Biking is easier on your joints, bones, and muscles than running and as long as I kept eating, I felt like I could have gone on forever. I pulled into my driveway after 146 miles, and got off my bike.

This week my legs have been tired and heavy, but not exceptionally sore. Still, I've been taking the train into work.