Messy

While Boston is buried under like 4 feet of snow, California has had a warm, sunny spell this week. Maybe as payment for deriving such satisfaction from Boston's misfortune (or because I pushed myself so hard to enjoy every second of the January nice weather), this is also the week that my body decided to catch that cold that everyone's had around me. My decline went something like this:
Tuesday: Woke up feeling sick-ish. Thought that maybe it was just me being dehydrated. By 6:30 am I knew I really was feeling sick-y. Taught a spin class. Did some heavy squats.
Wednesday: Woke up definitely sick. Also woke up feeling like I'd just gotten beat up. Was it because I was achy or because of the squats? Not sure. Ran 8.5 miles over lots and lots and lots of tall hills in the 40* and wind (it wasn't warm yet). Tried to make up for it with a nap. Woke up from said nap feeling shittier. Tried to kill The Sick by taking lots of zinc. Swam for 45 minutes. Taught a spin class. Almost threw up in the spin class from the zinc.
Thursday: Really, really feeling shitty now. Not like super sick, just not feeling 100% and having a full day where I needed to feel 100%. Had a free hour in the middle of my morning. Lifted more weights. Went for a swim. Taught another spin class. Cold moved into my chest and I started coughing shit up.
Friday: It was sunny and warm and finally decided to take a day off of training and sleep.

But on Saturday I'd signed up for the Santa Rosa 200K through wine country, and with sun and highs in the high 60's forecasted, I wasn't going to miss it for the world. I'd ridden much sicker in way worse conditions! So off I went to Healdsberg, somewhere in Sonoma county.

The start was only about an hour and 45 minutes away. For some reason my brain just wasn't getting around the idea that if it started at 8, then I should plan to be there before 8, so I left at 6:06 in the morning and stopped to get gas. Then I stopped for coffee. I walked into the Starbucks (Starbucks, please sponsor my blog) and there was no line, so I figured I'd go to the bathroom before I got my coffee. In the bathroom, I pulled down my shorts and there was a slasher movie going on in my pants. Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck! Not only did I not have any tampons, my body doesn't really deal well with sitting in the saddle for more than about an hour with a tampon in. Yuck, yuck, yuck, yuck, yuck! I was going to have to spend the day bleeding into my chamois. I did my best to deal with the immediate mess, and came out of the bathroom about a minute after I'd entered it to find a line about 8 people deep. Ugh!

When I left the Starbucks, I still hadn't put together exactly how late I was, so I just kept driving. It wasn't until I saw a sign that said that Santa Rosa (which was before Healdsberg) was 27 miles away and it was about 7:22 that I realized that I was in a bit of trouble. I looked at the GPS, and it said that I would arrive at 7:56 am. Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck! It was my own damned fault. I started driving 80.

I arrived at the start with about 10 minutes to spare, put together my bike, pumped up my tires, and packed my pockets in record time. Then I grabbed my brevet card and started asking for the bathrooms. "There's a bathroom in the Safeway down the street," a guy told me. He looked like a triathlete more than a randonneur with race wheels and well-groomed, tight-fitting clothing. I tried to work out how I would get over there and back to the start in 3 minutes, and where I would leave my bike while I was inside. "Do you have to pee or poop?" he asked. I loved him not only for asking, but because he used the word "poop" with a perfect stranger.

It's not that I had to poop, it's that I needed the toilet paper to help deal with the issues going on in my shorts. I had that "not-so-fresh feeling," and just from the ride across the parking lot I'd already had to wipe a big smudge off my white saddle. Why oh why wasn't there a porta-potty?!

I peed behind a fence and comforted myself that there would almost certainly be a bathroom at the first checkpoint where I could clean up a bit. When I came back out, everyone was gone (and I mean everyone, even the people who hadn't been on bikes.) I got onto my bike as fast as possible and took off down the road. They had told us to print up our own cue sheets, and I didn't have a printer, so I was going to be reliant on the rest of the group to shepherd me through the route. Right before the first turn, I started catching people. I kept hauling as fast as I could, catching one clot of people and slingshotting through to catch the next group. I was riding so hard that I could hardly breathe, but I wanted the guy who asked me if I was going to "poop" to be my friend. I liked him and he looked fast. But after a few miles of riding like the wind, I reached the next front group just as they turned. It was a wrong turn, so we all had to turn around. I got caught behind a car on the U-turn, and by the time I caught the group a few minutes later, I figured that if there was another group up the road, I wasn't going to catch them. Maybe I could catch up with them at the first checkpoint.

Every brevet that I've ever done has had us stopping at gas stations every 20-30 miles to get our cards stamped and the time written on them. It wasn't until several miles later that someone mentioned that there was only one checkpoint at the turn-around. Lame. As I tore through the streets, I recognized where we were. We were on the same roads as the Vineman bike course. The last time I was here my feet were so swollen and achy that I could hardly pedal. Now my tootsies were slightly cold and a wee bit numb. I tried to pick out the spot where the truck had hit me, but I don't think we passed it.

This was the most crowded brevet that I had ever done. We were riding in a group of about 30 riders, none of whom had the rigid pack etiquette of racers. Bike racers move like Germans: quickly and efficiently. These guys move like Spaniards: everyone at their own pace and oblivious to those around them. (Triathletes move like Americans: fast, loud, only thinking of themselves, and taking up as much space as they can.) At one point a guy came up on my right, "I'm coming through on your right," he warned. You couldn't really blame him, it was crowded in here, and I suppose there was enough space. I looked over my shoulder to see if I could move left to give him some room, and suddenly there was an arm. A woman was coming up within millimeters of me on the left side, pinching me in. Normally I wouldn't have minded, but this woman validated everything bad I have ever said about Bianchi riders (poseurs: the type of girl who buys one because she dates a bike messenger or because she likes the color and that it was made in Italy). I have never seen one bicycle take up so much space. It's not that she was swerving, it's that her straight lines were three feet across. She was all over the fucking road! I couldn't get around her. And every time I would make a move to try to get away from her, she was back with me within the next mile! I almost said something, but I'm non-confrontational and I would much prefer to say terrible things to someone in my own head than actually confront them out loud and have them get mad at me.

I noticed a Straight Man Over 40 riding a fixie and asked him about his gearing. He told me stories about how he'd started riding when he quit drinking 8 years ago, and now he commutes 40-60 miles to work every day. He told me about how he'd had to ride the Furnace Creek 508 all by himself when his 4-person team had flaked on him one by one. He told me that his birthday was yesterday. He told me lots of other stuff too before he finally noticed that this conversation was more of a soliloquy and turned his attention to me. "So, are you married?"

Whaaat? Of all the questions to ask, that's the first one you ask? "Uh, no," I said in surprise.

"Well you would need to find a guy that would keep up with you first," he said.

That bothered me for some reason, although it doesn't usually bother me when people assume that I have a boyfriend, or that I don't because I'm too intimidating. "I know lots of guys that can keep up with me," I said. "But that doesn't do me much good. I'm not allowed to get married in the state of California anyway."

"Laws change real quick," he told me. And that was that. I told him that I'd give him my card, just in case he ever needed a last-minute teammate again, but I never did get to give him my card because then we started descending and the fixies couldn't keep up.

I was starting to get hungry and thirsty, but with such a huge group averaging about 20 mph, I couldn't take my numb hands off my handlebars for long enough to reach under my jacket, into my back pocket, pull out a granola bar, unwrap it, and shove it into my mouth without taking out another rider. Not to mention, once it was in my mouth I would have to breathe around it as I chewed. By the time we finally pulled into the turn-around point at mile 70 (somebody explain to me what an "uneven out-and-back" is), I had only drunk one bottle of water and eaten about 3 handfuls of gumdrops (the rest I had lost on a bumpy road in Sonoma). I was ready to clean up in the bathroom, drink some Gatorade, and eat. But.... the checkpoint wasn't a gas station at all. It was a picnic area in the middle of nowhere. There was no bathroom that I could see.

I put my bike in a far corner where no one would get too close to it to see the brownish stains in the textured pattern on my saddle and went over to get my card signed. I ate 3 Chewy bars, 2 chocolate chip cookies, several tortilla chips, and some celery and dip in about 5 minutes, filled my water bottles, and waited for the first group to leave. "You coming with us?" one of the nondescript Straight Men Over 40 asked me. "Good choice," he nodded when he saw me mount. Strange answer, I thought.

Now there were only about 8 of us, and everyone seemed to know each other but me. We were riding more in an organized paceline now, with everyone rotating pulls and taking their time at the front. As the guy coming off the front would drift past the group to the back, everyone would thank him. Now I've heard of people saying "nice pull" before (only if you really turned it up up there, or took an extra long pull), but I'd never seen people thanking each other and calling each other by name. As I got close to the front, one of the littler guys got in front of me and took an extra pull. Was he trying to protect me?! Did he not want to get pulled by a girl?! That made me angry. We hit a traffic light or a turn and I found myself in the back again with the little guy next to me. "You see that guy up there, he's the club's rider of the year. And you see the guy in the yellow? He got something like 10th place in the California Triple Crown series. A lot of these guys are real accomplished guys. Not like racers, but real elite in the brevet and double century stuff."

"Sounds like fun," I said. "I didn't even realize that centuries and rando stuff could be competitive."

"Fun for them, not for me," the little guy said. "These guys are just getting their spring legs on." I don't know why the little guy was telling me all this stuff, but he seemed to have some sort of role of authority in the group. He was one of the most vocal praisers, and he was the only one getting out of rotation to talk to the different guys in the group. When one of the "stars" fell behind, he was the one that went back to help break the wind for him. Finally I got my turn at the front. I didn't think I was riding that fast, but then I heard the little guy's voice behind me. "You're gapping them! You're gapping them."

I slowed down and let someone else take the pull. "Best you not lead," one of the guys joked. "I don't think we can handle it."

The little guy drifted back. "These guys can't handle more than about 20 mph. They're not in real great shape for this time of year." I wondered what he thought my story was. I wasn't in great shape either. I hadn't even ridden 100 miles since Memorial Day, and hadn't ridden more than 40 or 50 miles in the last 6 months. I had no idea how fast I was riding, because my Garmin was in running mode, so it was giving me my speeds in minutes per mile rather than miles per hour. I wondered what these guys made of me turning up in their midst at all, since none of them asked me anything other than my name. At least they didn't ask me if I was married.

Except for a few spots with 5-minute traffic lights (so that 2 directions of traffic could share one lane), we rode the 50 miles home without stopping. I was tired and hungry and thirsty and I just wanted to get off my bike, but I didn't really feel all that bad. I was surprised, these guys were fading faster than I was. I was actually the second one up the biggest hill on the route. And yet they weren't curious about me. I was a bit perplexed, I mean, how could you not want to know about me?! What was wrong with the Straight Men Over 40 around here?

When we got to the finish, after 6 hours and 19 minutes of riding (20 mph average), and 6 hours and 38 minutes total, I had drained my two water bottles and wanted more. I also wanted some food that hadn't come in a foil packet and a BATHROOM! The finish was at a lunch/brewery place, and when we pulled in, the guy who had asked me if I had to poop was sitting at a table on the patio. He offered us a beer. There was a frosty pitcher of ice water on the table too, and I tried to get my hands on a glass of that. But by the time I got a cup, one of the Straight Men Over 40 had poured water into everyone else's cup, and there was only about a Dixie cup's worth for me. "Oh, sorry," he said, pouring the last few drops into my cup. I wanted to cry and kick him in the shins. I drained it and went inside to go to the bathroom. The line to the bar was about 30 people deep and stretched all the way to the door. I wasn't going to be getting any more water here. I found the bathroom. There was a line about 6 women deep, including an old lady and two children. I left the restaurant. Finally I found a public bathroom that smelled like poop but had toilet paper in it. I surveyed the damage. At this point, there wasn't much I could do to clean it up, but at least I could pee in a real toilet. Then I grabbed my filthy bike, packed up the car, and drove to a gas station where I had Chex Mix and a big bottle of water.

The whole drive home I could smell myself. In addition to the situation in my pants, the rest of me was soaked through from sweat. Also, I started coughing up great gobs of grey phlegm that I had nothing to do but wipe on my pants. I wanted a shower so badly and I wanted out of this Spandex. I got home, showered, and then sat in a cold bath. When the cold bath was over, I ran a hot bath and poured more epsom salts in the bath. I don't know if the epsom salt thing works, but I had been so sore all week that I was willing to try anything to speed my recovery along. I didn't even wait for the water to reach the salts before sitting down in the tub, right on top of the grains. As the water reached and dissolved the salt under my crotch, I realized that something was... not right. My chamois had been so wet and sticky all day, that I had chafed my entire undercarriage. Sure, it wasn't chafed right through the skin, but it was bad enough that when sitting in extremely salty water, my whole crotch burned like an STD. Ouch.

I drove into the City that night, and Scout and I got chair massages at the Chinese massage place down the street. Scout thinks the guy named Charlie (real name) is the best, but the woman with a face like a foot has a crush on her. "Herro, Rady!" Cindy with a face like a foot said to Scout when she saw her walk in, face bright as the sunshine.

The receptionist said something in Cantonese to Cindy with a face like a foot, and I heard "XXxXXxxXxX xXxXX xXX Charlie XXX xxXxX xXXxxXXX." Cindy with a face like a foot's face darkened and she looked at me. "She your friend?" she asked Scout. Then Cindy with a face like a foot begrudgingly ordered me over to a chair. "Here, Rady. You sit." I spent the next hour wondering if Cindy with a face like a foot would break me just to be vindictive. But the massage didn't even hurt. I've humped foam rollers this week, too, and that didn't hurt either. (And yes, I'm doing it right) In fact, very few massages have ever hurt, and only once on my legs. I wondered for the second time that week what it was about me that kept my muscles from tying themselves up in knots like other people's. I wondered if it had something to do with my not getting tired like other people when I've been doing a lot of exercise. Oh well, something to think about...