Solo

I've got many half-written posts about France still marinating and waiting for publishing, but I just seem to have too much to talk about. Last Thursday it finally looked like it was going to stop raining for at least part of the day, so I set out to do the longest ride I've ever done: 275 miles. All by myself.

But on Thursday morning everything went wrong. First, I hardly slept. Next, I was out of bread AND eggs, so only had half the breakfast I usually have. Then I discovered that my Garmin hadn't been sitting properly in its cradle, and somehow it had turned itself on and drained all the batteries overnight. So I sat there for 2 hours waiting for it to charge and watching precious minutes tick by. When I finally did hit the road about 2 hours later than expected, it was raining. On top of that, I couldn't find an open bathroom at 6:30 in the morning. Finally I found some somewhat private shrubbery and popped a squat. As I was watering the already-saturated ground, I dropped my sunglasses and one of the lenses popped out. I couldn't find it in the wet underbrush and wasn't willing to look too closely since I couldn't be sure what was rain and what... wasn't, so I threw the remains of my glasses into a bush and got back on my bike. Time was of the essence. I was certainly going to have to do some night riding on the way back, and even though I had a light on my handlebars, I didn't have a headlamp to read my cue sheet. After an hour of riding I had only covered about 14 miles, and I decided that it just wasn't going to be safe for me to keep with it at the rate I was going, so I went home and beat myself up all day for being such a failure.

Take Two

Now I was really determined to succeed. Saturday they were predicting "scattered thunderstorms," so I decided to take my chances and try my all-day ride again. I took some Tylenol PM at 5:00 and was out like a light and dreaming about doing yoga with Mick Jagger by seven. The alarm went off at 2:00 am, and I ate just the right amount of breakfast and hit the road at 3:00.

I've done embarrassingly little night riding, but it was nice having the road to myself. It's true what they say that you go much slower in the dark. I could only see about 50 feet in front of me, and with lots of shadows lurking about it was hard to spot all the potholes. I went at a snail's pace to make sure I didn't ride through some bottomless pothole. It was a warm and sticky night, and I was already sweating by the time the sun came up.

I'd already gone about 60 miles before I hit the first open store to refill my water bottles at around 7:30. It was the kind of convenience store you see in lemonade commercials and in Fannie Flagg novels with the three toothless old men sitting on the front porch stating the obvious and complaining about being old. "Getting an early start this morning?" one of the men asked me as I shoved a bottle of Gatorade under my arm. I didn't even know what time it was, it felt like mid-afternoon to me. "How far you going today?" asked another young guy who was putting out coffee pots.
"You don't want to know," I said. It sounds patronizing, but I've found that this is a safer answer than anything else. If I tell them the truth, then they either won't believe me, or they'll tell me to be careful. Both these things make me doubt myself. When you've got an all-day solo ride ahead of you, the last thing you need buzzing around your head for hours on end is doubt. Best not to share any information and make them keep their doubts to themselves.

Back out on the road, it was getting really hot. It was muggy from the 22 straight days of rain, and I was already sticky with sweat. I had been listening to my iPod overnight, but now that the world was starting to wake up I pulled my earphones out and just started listening to my own thoughts. Sometimes people ask me what I think about when I'm on the bike for that long. The answer is disappointing: I'm just thinking, "Turn left on Rte. 202 at mile 78. Turn left on Rte. 202 at mile 78..." until I get to the next turn, and then I start repeating the next direction over and over to myself. I couldn't tell you what I thought about as I rode the rest of the way up to Lake Winnipesaukee. My legs hadn't felt that great at the beginning of the ride, but around mile 70 I started to feel like myself again. The terrain was relentlessly rolling, and the pavement was pretty shitty in spots. The skin on my ass was already starting to bug me a little bit. I'm sponsored by a butt lube product, but wouldn't you know I completely forgot to grease up before I'd left the house in the morning. I still had about 170 miles to ride, and I was already feeling a bit irritable. How was this all going to work out?

I rode to the half-way point in Meredith, and when I realized that it was someone's house, and not a convenience store, I got downright PISSY. Then I realized that I was going to have to backtrack about 5 miles before going on, and I got even more grouchy. Pretty soon I hit a stretch of highway had regular frost heaves every 10 feet for about 25 miles, and I ended up whimpering and yelling at the road to lay off as I hovered my poor tucchus half an inch above the saddle.

And then there were the hills. I've heard from many different people that the hills in the northeast are far worse than those in California or Colorado just because they never stop. Out west you can climb 5,000' in 15 miles, but then the next 100 miles are pretty flat. You get it over with. Here in the northeast you go from 26 mph down to 6 in the space of a minute, and then you're back up to 26. Our hills are short, and they're steep, and they give you no sense of accomplishment. It's hard to build up momentum, you're all over your cassette, and worst of all you feel like you're not getting anywhere. I don't know which kind of climbing I prefer, but let me tell you a little story about hills while I battle my way up and down the next 50 miles or so till the next interesting thing happens:

John, the world's kindest race director, who runs the Adirondack 540 RAAM qualifier told me about the year that some big shot ultracyclist came out from Wyoming for the race. "I don't think this course record has ever been challenged," he accused. "Why, your course record is 8 hours longer than the Furnace Creek 508!" Clearly, this guy thought that us east coasters are soft. It's okay, I've heard it before.
"So did he finish?" I interrupted John.
"Yeah, he finished. But you should have seen this guy stagger off his bike when he pulled into the parking lot. He was one sorry sight, and then he fell into his wife's arms and started crying."
"And did he beat the course record?" I needed to know.
"No, he missed it by about 6 hours! He didn't even win that year."

So back to me fighting my way over our tiny but painful rollers which may or may not be worse than what they have out west. I was now in towns with names like Salisbury, Amherst, and Hopkinton. When I saw their names on my cue sheet, I'd thought that they were Salisbury, Amherst, and Hopkinton, MA, but when I got there I was disappointed to find that I was still deep in New Hampshire. All morning I'd been secretly hoping for a light rainstorm to cool me off and wash off some of the grime that was stuck to my skin. Suddenly I saw something that just didn't make sense: up ahead the road was dry, and then there was a line and suddenly it was WET. When I crossed that line, the skies opened up. It wasn't raining, it wasn't pouring, it was pissing. I thought that it couldn't possibly rain any harder, and then it did.

I still had about 90 miles to go before I got home, and I'd been riding for about 180 miles. I'd never ridden more than 200 miles in my life. I thought about calling for a ride, but I had no idea where I was, and there would have been nowhere to wait for 2 hours for someone to come and get me anyway. So I just rode and rode and got wetter and wetter. It was raining too hard for me to dig sugary snacks out of the zip lock bag in my bento box, and I didn't want to take my hands off my handlebars for long enough to take a slug of water. I almost got hit twice, even though I'm sure that I was still plainly visible to drivers (had they been looking). And just when I thought it couldn't get any worse, it started to hail. I was looking at the granules piled at the side of the road, thinking how strange it was that they would still be salting the roads in June when it hit me that rain doesn't usually sting. Luckily the hail didn't last long, but when it gave way there was lightning. I rode like that for a couple of hours, feeling pretty miserable, wondering if I'd get hit by lightning. But actually that time passed pretty quickly. I was so busy trying to ride safely in the rain that I didn't notice the miles ticking by. All I could focus on was that there was a sunny patch right over my left shoulder, and how could it be so sunny right there and pouring where I was?

Finally I caught up with the sunny patch and the rain stopped around the Massachusetts border, somewhere around mile 225. Sixty-five miles to go back home, but I'd already decided that once I got to somewhere convenient to home, I'd have someone pick me up and drive me the last few miles. As I dried out, my spirits started to buoy again. Surprisingly, my legs were feeling really good. What was sore were my shoulders, and my butt. While my ass had been dry and rubbed raw before, now it was wet and pruny and getting rubbed even more raw. Whenever I could, I rode standing up. But still, you can't stand up all the time, and Massachusetts is worse than New Hampshire about keeping their roads in good shape, and it was pretty painful. My bike was hurting too. The rain had washed off all my lube, and it was making some horrible sounds as I pedaled and shifted.

Finally, at a little before 8:30 I arrived in Concord center, only 15 miles from home, still with a little daylight to spare. I'd be at the finish of my cue sheet in less than 5 miles, then my girlfriend could drive the last 10 miles to pick me up at the start/finish at the air force base parking lot. I called her. "You're still alive!" she said.
"I am!"
"Where are you?"
"Concord center, do you remember where that is?"
"Of course I do. Oh shit, I rode in to work today. I hope you didn't need me to pick you up or something."
"No... I guess not. I'll be fine."

I thought briefly about calling my parents to come pick me up, but I'd already had to call my dad once that week to pick me up when my jacket had wrapped 3 times around my gears under the chain on my fixed gear and I didn't have the tool to fix it. I didn't want him to think that I wasn't able to do these things all by myself. So I dug my lights back out of my pockets, lit myself up like a jack-o-lantern and headed back home.

About 3 miles from the house, there's this one brief climb that's just steep enough to be a pain in the ass. You climb about 200 feet at a grade that's just steep enough that you can only climb it in the big ring on a really good day. Even though I'd climbed much worse all day, I had been dreading that hill since the depths of New Hampshire because I knew it was going to be the last push, and that it was going to hurt like hell. But when I hit that hill, it didn't feel any worse than it did on any other day. I guess it's true that nothing changes after 200 miles. I'd hardly eaten or drunk anything in the last 4 hours, but I felt okay. I finished stiff and tired, but still in control of all my bodily functions. I rolled into my driveway exactly 19 hours after leaving, having ridden 275 miles, and climbed 15,000 feet.

Ever since that ride, I've been one hurt unit. The skin on my butt is raw and irritated. I've been sleeping over eight hours a night and still feeling like I need more. There are knots in my shoulders and feet the size of basketballs. My triceps are sore and weak. And my legs? They feel fine. What the hell is that?! Now the only thing I have left to do is rest up and recover for the 24-hour race in a week and a half! The goal: 440 miles in 24 hours!

Photos and Dropping Out

The photos were finally posted from the Patriot last weekend. For those of you who are too lazy to read the race report, here is the condensed visual version:

Me, Michelle, and some random woman who is NOT Big Red. This is absolutely, positively not Red, who I promised I would not post pictures of. The woman on the left is SOME OTHER LADY.

Finally it was time for my wave to start. I don't know if I'm in this picture, but let's imagine that this girl in the sleeveless wetsuit and black goggles is me. I have a sleeveless wetsuit and black goggles!

How very me. I'm not even out of the water and I'm checking my watch. I can never remember unzipping my wetsuit... I guess I do it as soon as I stand up.

I love this picture. You can totally see on my face that I can't believe the time that my watch says. It turns out that the course was about 500m short. I'm glad that the photographer got a picture of my double take!

Alright, ONWARDS! (I totally look like shit in this picture! I look about 20 years older than I am.)

Here we go!

This isn't me, but I found it in the lost & found and I love this picture! She totally stopped to pick her wedgie!

'Aaaah! So much better!' Well it looks like she's having fun.

Yes! This is the part we've all been waiting for!

I remember almost crashing into this guy. God knows why he decided to mount on the inside rather than the outside where there was much more room... He never passed me. Nobody did.
Nice helmet visor, buddy. Is this a mountain bike race?

And off we go!

I love the following sequence because you can see me coming at you, and see my whole pedalstroke. If you flip through it quickly, you can almost see me pedaling and breathing hard.




Finishing the first loop. I'm averaging 22.6 mph right here and thrilled! Can you see how happy I am? Nope, because I ALWAYS have that face on when I'm riding.

Note: Camera side knee bent, ALWAYS! I swear that my legs go all the way around!

Coming at you again! Get the hell out of my way, the Speedy Train is coming through!
What I love about the picture above and below is that if you look at the position of my left shoulder (right in the picture), you can tell how hard I'm heaving down on the pedals.

And then I won! (I was SO HOT in that jacket. It was about 85º and HUMID.) What's hilarious about this picture is that I'm standing a full step above the other chick (who I beat by about 17 minutes), and we're STILL the same height.

So there you go. It's almost like you were there watching the whole thing.

---

In other news, I've decided to drop out of the Longsjo Classic 4-day stage race in Fitchburg next weekend. I signed up for this race months ago when I was planning on spending all my free time doing road races. But then I met this great girl and started spending all my free weekends with her. I'm not saying that I'm not in good cycling shape, I'm just not in good ROAD RACING shape.

What I'm learning is that road racing requires a whole different style of fitness from ultradistance riding and triathlon riding. The balls-to-the-wall accelerations followed by recovery require a completely different kind of training which I just haven't done. I'm much better at holding 85% effort for hours at a time than I am going back and forth from 40 to 100 and back. It seems like every time it comes time to ride in a pack and do road race-style rides, I come up with an excuse not to do it. I've done a lot of thinking about it, and it's not that I'm not comfortable riding in packs. I'm comfortable riding shoulder-to-shoulder, wheel-to-wheel with others. It's that I don't LIKE it. I don't like letting someone else dictate my pace, and I don't like being lead through potholes and over branches. I don't like going slow when my legs want to go fast, and I definitely don't like when they make me go faster than I feel like going.

Plus, two stages of this race are a crit and a circuit race. I'm comfortable riding in groups, but not at full speed around turns. No-sir-ee! I'm not comfortable with that at all. Today I sat down and had a conversation with the King of the Bike Geeks, who knows everything (or so he thinks) about riding a bicycle. He said that this was a really technical course on really shitty pavement with horrible visibility coming out of the turns. "You would just have nothing to gain by having this be one of your first real road races," he told me. This is a guy who thinks that everyone should jump into every kind of cycling that there is out there.

The final reason for me to scrap the race is that I have my 24-hour race the following weekend, and all I want is to save my poor legs for that. I know, I know. This is a strange time to change my M.O. of never resting, ever (not true, by the way), but this race is really important to me. Way more important than a road race with a bunch of road riders with seat posts up their butts.

So I've made an executive decision. I'm going to do the time trial the first day, and then I'm going to drop out. There will be a time to get into road racing, but this race is not the time or the place I want to be doing it. Maybe I'll find more time for it this fall when I'm not trying to squeeze 200-mile rides into the same week as balls-to-the-wall group road rides. Maybe I'll focus on it next year. Maybe never. Who knows.

Point and taunt all you want. I know I'm making the right decision, even if it is based 70% on fear and 30% because I won't be instantly successful at it. Road riding just doesn't lend itself as well to "participation" as "you against the course" sports like triathlon. So if you see someone riding all by herself around the potholes of New England, go ahead and yell names at me out your window, honk at me, throw Gatorade bottles at my head (it's all been done before). I'm confident that I'm making the right decision.

Exceeding Expectations

Last year the Patriot half ironman was a real breakthrough race for me. While I talked all about pee on my blog, that was my first real win of the year and the first time I really saw that I might be on to something on the bike. That was a great race for me, I wish they all could come together like that race did... well, maybe without the bit about pee in my shoes.

This year I only signed up for the Aquabike. All I could remember of last year's run was getting passed, and passed, and passed, and wanting to cry when I saw the uphill into the finish. Fuck that. So even though in the triathlon world, an aquabike seems to be a "respectable DNF," it was sure a hell of a lot better than running. I showed up at Big Red's house with reheated coffee at 4:25 am and we were on the road singing along to P!nk songs in her Little Purple Car by 4:30 in the morning. Check-in and marking went uneventfully. Michelle (who also makes me pee my pants) turned up minutes behind Red and me, and I spent the morning hopping back and forth from my rack to theirs, nervously drinking from a 2 gallon jug of water. I racked my bike, made for the porta-potties as usual, and set up my transition area. By "set up my transition area" I mean that I took my cycling shoes out of my bag and clipped my helmet to my handlebars. Aaaaah, only doing 1 event is great!

Well, okay... it was a bit more complicated than that. I also had to set up my drink bottles. If you remember from my last race, I had a bit of a problem with my aero bottle rubbing on my front wheel. I took the bottle over to show Michelle and Big Red the groove on the bottom. You could have rolled a marble down that groove. "Holy cow!" Michelle screamed, appropriately impressed. "You essentially rode that whole race with your brakes on!" So it is a matter of public record, the groove was deep, and I am a badass (Michelle, please back me up on this). I was nervous about that bottle. I must have fucked with it a dozen times trying to figure out a way to make it sit above the wheel, but since I still didn't have a way to hold it in place, there wasn't much I could do. ...Which lead to another question, how many bottles to carry on my frame? I had only planned to carry one, but if I had to dump the aero bottle then I would need to slow down for more bottle handoffs. But if I carried an extra bottle, that would be a LOT of extra weight on my bike. I wound up filling all the bottles and deciding that I'd dump one of the frame bottles if the aero bottle worked. It didn't, so now if any of you want to see the DEEP ASS GROOVE that my wheel made in the bottom of my bottle, you'll have to search in the weeds at the side of the road in Freetown, MA.

I've already peed in my wet suit twice... and I haven't been in water any deeper than my waist yet!

For some reason I was INCREDIBLY nervous for this race. Maybe it was because I had put really high expectations on myself. Maybe it was because I was thinking about the whole event all at once swim, bike, transitions, and all. Maybe it was the fact that I was in the last wave, and I had to wait half an hour after the first starters to actually get in the water. Maybe it was the 20 oz Starbucks coffee I'd had on the way over. Then I realized that I'd forgotten to put the sticker with my number on the front of my new sperm hat (aero helmet), and I got even more nervous. Do they DQ for that kind of thing? By the time Grease Monkey (who had driven down later) found me in the bull pen, I was so wound up that I thought I would explode.

The Swim
1,500 yards cleverly disguised as 1.2 miles

I was in the same wave as the relay swimmers and the fat people waves (sorry, I just don't believe in Clydesdales and Athenas), so I was kind of expecting all the relays to take off ahead of me, and all the fatties to fall behind me. That's what happened. I think. The swim can be so isolating, you can only see such a small space ahead of or behind you, that unless you're in a pack it can be so hard to tell how you're swimming. I was alone for the whole swim out to the far buoy.

I'd been really working on my swim, getting wet every chance I could since I got back from France, and my mojo finally seemed to be coming back. I wasn't swimming as well as I had been last winter, but well enough. As I was swimming, I could feel that I was having a good swim. I felt strong. The buoys were coming quickly. The far buoy came quickly. We had to swim around 1 cross-buoy before we could turn back to the beach, and after the turn was when I caught up with 2 guys from my wave: The Kicker and The Drafter. I easily got around The Drafter (over and over as The Kicker pulled him through), but I just couldn't seem to get by The Kicker. I got a mouthful. I got another mouthful. And another, this one went down. UGH! Not again! The water was a really, really nasty thick shade of red. I felt nauseous only until the next turn buoy, though, when I was finally able to get around The Kicker and swim into shore.

Most of the swim back was spent getting around the blue caps from the wave in front of me, and the odd orange cap from the wave in front of that. The swim was over so quickly! I could live with that. I don't dislike the swim, but it always makes me anxious and I'm always eager to get out of the water and get on my bike already. I looked down at my watch as I was coming out of the water: I was in the 22 minute range! That couldn't be right... Looking at my times and others' times, it seems likely that the swim was 1500 yards instead of 1.2 miles (about 500 yards short).

Official time: 23:16
Official pace: 1:06 per 100 yd (I'm going to the Olympics!)
Estimated real pace: 1:32 per 100 yd
Division (Aquabike) place: 8/27 (30%)
Estimated overall place: 75/307 (24%)
Improvement on last year: 9:33 (not really though)

T1

Transition should have been easy, but I was worried about that stupid sticker for my helmet. I rooted through my bag and found the envelope with my run number still in it, and there was the sticker for my helmet. I fiddled with it for what seemed like forever, and was probably only about 4 seconds. I couldn't get the paper off the adhesive on the back. I gave up. I went to put on my shoes. It felt like it took forever. It probably took about 10 seconds. Helmet on, garmin on, glasses on, let's get the hell out of here!

T1 time: 2:45

The Bike
58 miles of Get outta my way!

As soon as I'd started riding I checked my water bottle. It had slid down and was rubbing my wheel again. I tried to shift it higher in its cradle, but nothing I did would make it sit higher, so I just pulled it out and chucked it at the side of the road. I felt bad about littering, but felt that the Universe owed me this one after all the Gatorade bottles I've had chucked at my head by snotty teenagers. It was probably the best decision I've ever made in a race.

What I hate most about being in a late wave is that you have to fight your way through the whole, entire field. It felt like it took forever for my legs to come around, but I was still passing everybody. I practically lived on the left side of the road for the first loop yelling "LEFT! COMING UP ON YOUR LEFT! YOU HAVE A RIDER COMING UP ON YOUR LEFT!" over and over again. You should all know that even though I'm super cocky on my blog, I'm actually a pretty nice person out on the race course. I'll say "excuse me" and "please" and whenever possible I'll use full sentences to let people know that I'm coming. It seemed like every time I came into a turn, I was about to pass somebody. I would try to yell, "YOU'VE GOT A RIDER COMING IN BEHIND YOU, I'M GOING TO PASS YOU AS WE COME THROUGH THE TURN!!!" That way it seems like I'm being nice. Really, though, I'm just making sure that nobody does anything stupid like swerve, or get mad and sprint past me and get in my way. Plus, in a turn if they think they're going to be passed, they'll slow down even more. Hey, it makes my life easier!

On the back half of the first loop, the traffic was getting bad. There were cars backed up way down the road making it hard to pass, and I was in the thick of the pack at this point. At one point a pickup pinched me into the shoulder and almost drove me off the road and I had to brake hard. I was glad I'd done a lot of urban riding and had developed a sixth sense for when drivers are going to be stupid, so I wasn't in my aero bars at the time. I know it's hard for races to get permits to close off entire roads for a morning, but I wish that they would at least find a way to keep one lane closed so no one gets hurt.

As I was coming back towards transition to begin the second loop I checked my average speed for the first time. For the past 29 miles I'd been averaging 22.4 mph! The next time I looked down it had come up to 22.5! I was so excited. I had set a best-case-scenario goal pace of 22 mph and here I was going half a mile per hour faster and feeling great! I felt like I could negative split this thing.

On the second loop I had already fought my way through much of the pack, and the farther I rode, the clearer the road got. Thank goodness! Before long I spotted Michelle up the road! She had left 20 minutes ahead of me, and I hadn't expected to catch her at all, let alone so early in the bike. Then again, I was having the ride of my life. I yelled something encouraging to her as I passed, and then I said, "I'm averaging 22.6 mph!" I just had to share my excitement with someone. That .6 at the end only lasted for a few more minutes, though as I irrevocably dropped back down to 22.5.

The course is flat, but there are some rollers that can take you up 60–100 feet before they're done with you. On the second loop they broke up my momentum a little bit and took the wind out of my sails as I began to give some of my speed back. I could feel my legs were getting tired. I tried to eat and drink whenever possible, but I was having trouble finding times when the road was smooth enough and my breathing easy enough to take my hands off my bars and reach for a bottle or food, and then swallow it. Still, nobody passed me. There were maybe two or three guys who thought they could pass me, and pulled ahead of me once or twice but I passed them all and they stayed passed. To be fair, all the real guns had gotten a head start on me and never got the chance to pass me, but it was still fun. I didn't come up on Big Red until well after I found Michelle, which surprised me because she was having knee problems and had a terrible cold. But if there's anyone who can step up to the plate, it's Big Red. I tried to yell something encouraging to her as I rode by, but I forget what I said. Whatever it was, she made fun of me afterward, saying that I was even a ballbuster when I was trying to be supportive.

Finally I reached the final loop around the lake for the second time. I had given up a lot of speed on the second lap. While I'd averaged 22.5 on the first lap, I only averaged 22 on the second lap, for an average speed of 22.3 by the end. I know that I shouldn't be disappointed with that 22 mph for the second loop, seeing as it was my best-case-scenario goal to start with, but it still irked me. Why had I slowed down so much? I crossed the 56-mile mark in 2:30:37, but still had 2 miles to go to the finish. Three minutes and sixteen seconds later, I was dismounting my bike (Garmin says the course was only 57.14 miles).

Unofficial bike time: 2:33:53
Unofficial average speed: 22.3 mph
Average heartrate: 173 Max heartrate: 193
Gender bike rank (all women, all divisions): second

Improvement on last year: 12:04, 1.4 mph

The Run
Now that's my kind of triathlon!

I racked my bike on the Aquabike rack that they had set up and started sprinting towards the finish line. I had already taken off my bike shoes, so I ran the .12 miles through the finishing chute barefoot in my ass hat/aero helmet. Grease Monkey was screaming for me the whole way, and something happened that has never happened before...
... I finished the race smiling!

Official bike time: 2:35:29
Official bike speed: 22.4 mph
Unofficial run pace: 7:19 min/mi (haha! Wouldn't it be great if I could have held THAT for another 13 miles!)
Total time: 3:01:28
Women's Aquabike finish: 1st place
Overall Aquabike finish: 4th place
Overall Women's Swim/T1/Bike rank: 2nd
Improvement on last year's swim/bike time: 19:07
Gap on the next Aquabike woman: 22+ min.
How much I beat Bobby's Swim/Bike time by: 14:27 (another one off the list!)

The Aftermath

Immediately my ass cramped up. After a short visit to the PT booth to get stretched, Grease Monkey and I cheered Michelle through T2 before going to catch Bobby finish in a PR time of 4:55, and then we got to see Michelle finish her first half ironman, and finally Big Red come through, finishing strong on a busted knee.

As I was picking up my stuff from transition a chick I'd never seen before in my life said, "Are you Claire?" Oh god! I've pissed somebody off again! was my first thought.
"Yeeeeees..." I said, warily. I was ready to run once she started swinging. She looked sweet enough though. I wondered if I could take her in a fight?
"I read your blog!" Now I was really ready to run away once she started swinging! But she didn't take a single shot, amazingly. I was so flattered! I felt famous to have lurkers that recognized me (and didn't want to kill me). Thanks, PJ, you made me feel famous! And everyone should wish PJ luck in the Rhode Island 70.3 in 2 weeks.

Finally I got to shove food into my face and wait for the awards ceremony. At the picnic table, a woman struck up a conversation with me. I didn't know it till later, but she was the 45-49 winner. "I think I passed you on the course," she said. "Were you wearing a red, white, and blue helmet?"
"No, it was black and red."
"No, really, I think it was you. What color was your helmet? Does it have some grey in it?"
I couldn't resist. "It couldn't have been me," I said, trying not to let my attitude show through. "Nobody passed me."
"But..."
"Nobody."

They announced my name, gave me my award, and then went on to announce that they were giving premes for the fastest swim, bike, and run times. Even though they excluded elites, aquabikes, and relays, I still wanted to hear what the fastest women's bike time was. "2:43:24?! I rode faster than that!" I whined.
Michelle smacked me in the sunburn on my shoulder. "Yeah, but you didn't have to run," she said.
"Still, I beat it by 8 minutes," I sulked. "I could have WALKED a half marathon after I rode..." Actually, it wouldn't have mattered, because the woman who won overall still rode about 5 minutes into me. Now that really IS fast!

Breaking It Down

I've been trying to figure out what I did right this year to have such a better race than last year. I think it's due to a few things (in no particular order):

1. My phyxie: I've put hundreds of miles onto my fixed gear this year, which has not only smoothed out my pedal stroke, but more importantly it has taught me to climb little hills in a WAY bigger gear than I normally might. So now when a short little roller comes up, I can stay in a much higher gear and keep up my speed over the top of it.
2. Suffering! I've been working since last fall to learn how to suffer. This time last year I was still racing where I felt comfortable, never going balls to the wall and always saving something for later. Now I've gotten a lot of practice at feeling uncomfortable, and I'm comfortable there. That whole ride I was sucking wind and at the point where if I pushed any harder, I would have dug myself into a hole that I couldn't easily get out of. Maybe in physiological terms I've raised my lactate threshold. All I know is that I can hurt a lot more now without actually hurting.
3. Yeah, I'm sure the mountains helped.
4. Riding more, not running: Last year I'd put in about 20 fewer hours by race day than I have this year, even though the race was 3 weeks later last year. Also, since I'm not wasting my time running, my legs are much fitter for my rides, and I have more free time to ride more.
   
5. Running: Alright, alright, I'll admit it. That block I did last winter where I ran my ass off did put me in phenomenal aerobic shape. I noticed that I was putting up the same times on the road this year AT THE BEGINNING OF THE SEASON (when I wasn't in shape) than I was last year when I was in shape. So yeah, the running helped.
   

The Alps, Day 1: Geneva

In case there was ever any doubt that we were riding what the REAL TdF riders ride, there was real painting on the road to prove it. This is just one example. The climbs were long and they were hard, but they weren't IMPOSSIBLE. The rides in the north east aren't that long, but they go straight up and over a mountain. If the mountain has a 15% grade, the road will have a 15% grade. In France, the mountains were steep, but the switchbacks meant that you kept a pretty constant grade the whole way up. So it hurt, it just never hurt MORE. Unfortunately, my Garmin deleted all the data about grade and elevation profiles, etc by the time I got home. I'm crushed about it, by the way.

Shane and I picked up our Renault Kangoo at the airport where all the EuropeCar employees said they didn't speak English... and then conducted the transaction in decent English anyway, then we packed up the car and hit the road. France was TINY! For some reason I had it in my head that it would take us 24 hours to drive across, like Texas, but in about 6 hours of driving we had crossed France and were driving through the Alps next to the Swiss border.

We were going to ride around Geneva, but then we realized that Switzerland wasn't part of the EU. So rather than dealing with customs and another currency, we just stayed on the French side of the border. We scoped out some nice, hilly stretches of highway, and pulled over on a turnout to sleep in the car for the night. The first thing we realized: We had no utensils. So Shane and I ate pasta salad and cold mashed potatoes using an empty margarine container as a spoon to shovel it into our mouths.

We didn't want to leave the bikes outside the car, so we shoved them to either side of the trunk, put all our stuff (including my bike box) in the front seat, and hunkered down for the night. It was a pretty uncomfy night, I have to admit. The bottom of the trunk was tilted, so I kept feeling like I was sliding down towards the bottom. Also, I'd skimped and bought the cheapest sleeping bag they had at Decathlon: a 15º (celcius) bag, meaning it was no match for the 40ºF night. When we woke up, I was frozen, relieved that I didn't have to lie in that car anymore, and ready to start riding.We rode a roughly 60-mile loop over some small mountains, but when we were getting back into town, we lost the road in a maze of traffic circles. "I think it's this way," Shane said, leading me over a freeway overpass, and then up a one-way street.
"I really don't think this is it," I insisted. This highway was supposed to meet up with the one we were parked on. Why would we have to take a 1-way street? We should just follow the highway down farther!
"Well town is roughly in this direction, so I think we should just see what's down this road..." Shane insisted.
"Alright, we can ride down it, but it just looks like a neighborhood down there. I really think that we should follow the highway a little further rather than getting lost in some neighborhood that may or may not get us to town..." I was willing to play along. I knew I was right, but I don't know why I HAD to make him see that he was wrong. Maybe something to do with how stupid it was to stick to your guns that going the wrong way down a one way street was the way to go.
"Fine, we'll try it your way!" (somewhat angry).

Lake Geneva, before the blow-up. This was going to be our mascot, since both Shane and I hate being in pictures. He only made it into pictures that one day though. Actually, I'm kind of glad. it was a dumb idea anyway.

I was right. We hit town, but then there was another traffic circle. "Now what do we do?" I asked.
"Well there's one of those little bike trail signs. We saw it yesterday, we should follow that."
"Shane, we've been seeing different bike trail signs all day! There are 30 different trails. That's not the same one as we saw this morning. We're on the XYZ trail, and that's pointing towards the ABC trail!" I still knew I was right, and now I didn't feel like him dragging us on a wild goose chase.
"Fine, if you know everything, then why don't you lead us back to the car!" I hadn't been mad until that point, but now I was.
"Fine!" I said, and sprinted off. I was sick of slowing down for him. I shot off west-ish (the sign was pointing south-ish and it turned out that the car was north-ish), but my temper tantrum was hindered by a light, and he caught up to me. As soon as it changed, I was off again, and when I turned around, he was gone. Fuck. I had been right and gotten us to a place that Shane recognized. But Shane had been the one driving, so he knew his way around town while I had been paying attention to maps and tour books, not the roads themselves. Pretty soon I figured out that he'd figured out where he was, and had made a turn, letting me go on and get lost by myself. I was FURIOUS! After I'd already kept him from getting lost twice!

When I finally found my way back to the car about 20 minutes later (I was only lost for about 5, but then had to climb about 8K up the road back to the car), he was already packing up the car, eating a sandwich and listening to music. I was fuming. I threw my bike on the ground and stormed off. My helmet fell out of my hand. I realized it looked like I threw it. Good! I thought. Let him know I'm mad! I huffed away, and when I'd finally calmed down, I walked back to the car and started pulling my bike apart.
"Are you done now?" he asked, like he was dealing with a child.
"ME?! That was way the fuck out of line, Shane! Don't you ever pull a stunt like that again!"
And then we had a screaming match. Knock-down, drag-out, where things that I will probably never be able to fully forget were said. But what else could we do? We were stuck in the middle of the woods outside Geneva in a place where neither of us spoke the language. We had to stick together. We sullenly climbed back in the car and set off towards Alpe d'Huez.

To see the rout we took and elevation profile, click here.

Next up: Peril and mechanical difficulties on Alpe d'Huez, and what can go wrong when you stick a banana in your cycling shorts...

Aquabike: The pros (and the cons)

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