The way it should have been

You may remember that Trouble and I signed up for a series of three half marathons for an uber-mega-medal with lots of glitter on it. The first of these 3 races was the Golden Gate Half in San Francisco. Based on the 2 awkward guys with adult acne at the picnic table where we signed up, we thought that this would be one of those little podunkville races with us and like 200 other people. Then, this week Trouble and looked at the website for the first time. “Whaaaa? Race packet pick-up is at the expo the day before.” I hate it when I have to go to an expo the day before anything shorter than a marathon. “Where is Fort Mason?” Trouble asked. Arggghhh! Fort Mason is about 47 stoplights from the nearest freeway. And it’s San Francisco, so you KNOW there’s no parking nearby. Trouble decided to pay $40 (in other words, 60% of the registration cost of the race) to be able to pick up her packet on race day. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.

The expo was nothing to speak of; you’ve been to one small race expo, you’ve seen them all. But in the event space next door, there was a hipster expo which was way more interesting. We walked around and looked at ironic t-shirts with octopodes on them, ironic tea towels that said “A doughnut is just a gay bagel,” and coffee microroasters auctioning off a 1 gallon Ohio fermentation crock. Whatever that is.

Running in San Francisco means start times early enough that the road closures don’t cause traffic for people trying to get to brunch. That meant that Trouble was at my house by 5am. Do you know how early 5am on a Sunday is? So early that the first Starbucks we went to wasn’t even open yet! I don’t mind waking up that early by myself, but with someone else, that hour just seemed uncivilized. We got to San Francisco right on time, but because it was San Francisco there was a road closure on the most direct route, so we had to take a giant detour, to get to a parking garage that wasn’t all that convenient (but was open), and walk just far enough that there was no way we would be able to get back to the car before the start if we needed to. On the way, we passed a police station at 6am on the nose and saw a meter maid pulling out in her little golf cart. Bitch! Where are you going?! I thought. Only San Francisco would be shitty enough to have meter maids out on the street at 6am on a Sunday.

Then we had to face the age-old question: which to do first? Pick up Trouble’s race number, or get in the porta-potty line? There never seems to be time enough for both, even if you do wake up before Starbucks opens. We elected to go for the porta-potties. If I were ever un-lazy enough to put on a race, I would have more than one bank of porta-potties. And I would have Purell in my porta-potties. Each line curled back on itself 2 or 3 times, until the whole area just looked like an unruly mass of people, and as always every person in my line was taking a long, leisurely poo.

Now we had to find Trouble’s packet pick up. And gear check. We didn’t have time for both, so Trouble went and ran up the hill and half a mile away to pick up her packet, while I got in the 200m line for gear check. That’s right: there were about 5000 runners, and two high school students grabbing gear bags. Soon enough, people started coming up the line telling us that all we had to do was pin our numbers to our bags and dump them at the truck. So I took our reusable shopping bag with Trouble’s wallet in it, tied the handles in a knot, tied my number on with one of those arm bands that they give you at an 18-and-up club, and hoped for the best. With less than 2 minutes to go, we made it to the start and started elbowing our way forward in the crowd. We almost made it to the 2:30 pacer before we could go no further.

The beginning

Luckily, after a brief 2-block incline, we started to drop down toward the Marina, which is flat as it comes. The trouble was, that Trouble and I were stuck 2/3 of the way back in the pack, and once we were on the Marina, they squeezed the whole race onto the sidewalk. Trouble and I spent the first few miles ducking and diving through tutus and waddling meatballs before we could even find our stride.

San Francisco is known for the hills, but you could run 5.5 miles that looks like this:

Or you could run 5.5 miles that looks like this:

If I were arranging a race, I would choose a course that incorporated a couple of humane hills, but let runners get into a groove and test themselves. I wouldn't have them keep doubling up to approach every hill that my permits covered from every direction, but that's just me...

To the bridge

Because we were in San Francisco, they just had to run us up over the bridge, which is fun and exciting, but the Golden Gate bridge is at the top of a hill. The most direct way up to the bridge looks like this little 1K climb:

But we ran right past the most obvious route up to the bridge and ran up the back way. Which was fine. From sea level, I looked up the hill and saw people running away from the bridge. “Who are those people?” I said to Trouble. The bridge is 1.7 mi long in each direction, so there’s no way they had already gone and come back. Once we got to the top, I found out we were those people. We’d just run up 200 feet, only to run back down to the beach, and then run back up the same hill the longest way to the bridge.

As we made the final approach to the bridge, Trouble fell behind me as I slipped through two tall guys’ elbows as they closed in from each side. I kept waiting for her to catch up so that I could say, “Was that woman wearing two scrunchies?!” but I never saw here again.

I’ve ridden and run over the bridge countless times, but every time I’ve ever run across in a race, they had always shut down 2 lanes for us to run across. As we came up to the bridge, we headed toward the road… and then they turned us onto the pedestrian walkway. You know, the one that people jump off of. The one that’s only wide enough for three people abreast, except when there is an emergency call box, maintenance equipment or bridge tower to run around. Then it’s narrower. 6 miles into the race, I was still ducking and dodging around people trying to find the right pace. Every time I started to find a rhythm, I got stuck behind some asshole taking a selfie. One guy I swear was face timing.

Marin

The most direct way to turn around on the bridge and run back the other way is to run around the parking lot, go through the underpass, and run up a slight incline to the pedestrian walkway on the other side. The elevation profile looks like this.

Instead, they directed us off the edge of the hill onto an unpaved path that dropped us down toward the water and under the bridge. Trail running! The elevation profile of this route looks like this:

The Bridge… again

Then we ran back over the bridge. There were more selfies. More bottlenecks, but it was finally taking me some time to catch people, and they were staying with me longer and longer.

The humidity that had been in the air at the start had congealed into fog as we had come up to the bridge almost an hour ago. And now that fog had condensed further into a misty, dreary rain.

The mist

I already have a tendency to slam my feet into the ground and figure out the balance part later, so as the misty rain slicked up the sidewalk all I could think about was what would happen if my feet slipped out from under me. Perhaps I would fall forward and break my teeth on the concrete. Maybe I would slip like on a banana peel and crack my tailbone. Perhaps there would be some spectacular protracted stumbling and windmilling of arms and I would take out other runners like a grabby bowling ball. And if I ate shit, would I get up and keep running or take it as an excuse to walk it in while I nursed my hurt feelings, giving dirty looks to anyone who cheered me on.

As I thought all this through, I heard a scuffle of shoes, then a thump and clatter as a man right over my shoulder tripped over the concrete foot of a temporary barrier as the course again funneled down to a narrower passage. Putz, I thought. You almost took me out like a bowling pin.

I feel awful, I feel awful, I feel awful, I feel awful... When I think about you I touch myself...

We had reached the point in the race where it was starting to get a little old. In fact, it had started to get old at the exact moment when I had finally felt like I could run my own pace. My focus was narrowing and thoughts getting less and less complex. I found myself singing “I Touch Myself” over and over in my head. God knows where it came from, but for the rest of the race my brain sang to me over and over, “I don’t want anybody else. When I think about you I touch myself.” I would try to stop, think about something else, sing another song, but after a few seconds my brain would slip and the pitter patter of my feet would drop the record needle of my brain right back on, “[inhale] I don’t want… [exhale] anybody else… [inhale] when I think about you… [exhale] I touch myself… ooh ooh ooh…”

The flat

Finally we reached sea level again, and I knew we’d run up every hill we possibly could and it would be flat all the way back to the finish. That’s when my legs fell off.

We ran a brief stretch back toward the bridge one final time, and then doubled back. This would be my first chance to see how far ahead of Trouble I was. She was my bad luck charm, and dammit, I refused to be beat by Trouble again. But I was having trouble focusing, and finding it incredibly difficult to keep my balance on the crumbling pavement while I searched for her in the stream of people coming toward me. I never did see her. If I had, I would have liked to find out her opinion on the floral print running tights running ahead of me. Was I really running so slowly that an ass that jiggly could be keeping up with me, or was it just an unflattering illusion and the print hid the ass of a thoroughbred?

With a couple of miles to go, we got off the slick asphalt and onto a packed sand trail along Crissy Field. Normally I would have been happy for the break from pavement, but the sand seemed to be sucking the power out of my legs ever since I’d gained 300lb a few miles back. Running in a straight line was still taking all of my concentration, even though there was no one coming in the other direction now. Then the guy in front of me started texting, or tweeting, or trying to find Eye of the Tiger on his phone or something. He suddenly slowed to a lope and started swerving like a drunk driver as he typed, “Can’t wait for brewskis after this half marathon. #hydrateordie” Suddenly he cut to the left and stepped ½ an inch in front of me. I used my best runner judo block and held up my hands looking shocked ready to push him down in front of me to cushion my fall if I tripped. By some tremendous powers of mental strength and focus I managed to step out of the way with a breathy, “whoa.”

Suddenly, from my other side I heard a girl say, “Get off your fucking phone, man.”

God bless you, I thought as the girl and I ran away from the tweeting Dude-Bro. Then I thought, ...when I think about you I touch myself...

The last mile

Back on the sidewalk for the last mile, I was counting down the inches to the finish. I told myself, I’m not allowed to check my watch again until I think of a positive adjective for every word in the alphabet. Amazing. Beautiful. Courageous… I touch myself… Daring... I got one for every letter but K. There just is no positive adjective that starts with K. Well, as I type this, I just realized “kind,” but that’s beside the point…

Finally I was within view of Fort Mason, where the finish was. But… I couldn’t see an arch. Why couldn’t I see the arch? There were 3 places that the finish could be: they could make us turn left into the shipyard parking lot for a flat finish, they could send us right onto Bay Street for a flat finish, or they could send us up the short steep climb into the park at Fort Mason. I got closer and closer and I still couldn’t tell. Finally, barely 100 yards away from where the road ended, I could see the runners ahead of me…

Oh fuck no!

… they had us finishing up that fucking hill! It’s only a short little 30-foot climb over less than .1 mile, so I told myself to gut it out. I gathered myself and ran fast up the little incline. As soon as I reached the top and saw the finish a mere 30 or 40 yards away, my body went, NOPE! You will walk right now, or you will puke your guts up. 

I’m a puker. This was no idle threat. I did a quick scan of the sidelines and saw people standing shoulder to shoulder. If I tried to run, I would puke all over one of these nice people. With a nauseous, “wuh-oh” I started walking, and walked my ass right over that finish line. And just like a slap in the face, the announcer called out my goddamned name. Jerk.

Later, Richie Porte berated me for my decision. “But if you’d thrown up at the finish line, you would have been spewing magenta beet puke in your finishing photos! You missed your chance.” She’s right. That would have been the best thing ever

Gear

I waited a couple of minutes for Trouble to come through, and we started wandering around looking for our stuff. We crossed the park and went down the hill on the other side to where we’d dropped our stuff off. It wasn’t there. We climbed back up the hill and asked a warm-looking runner where she’d found her stuff. She pointed in a general direction and we followed her finger. We found 2 different signs pointing to gear, but pointing in opposite directions. Finally, we found an area barriered off. “Is this the gear tent,” we asked a guy inside.

“Yeah,” he said. “But there are a couple of guys checking ID’s at the entrance.” That was the stupidest thing I ever heard. This road race security was really taking it too far, especially with the lack of security at gear drop-off. I told the security guy as much, and that no runner runs with their fucking ID; that my ID was in my bag. He shrugged and let us in. We walked around in circles for a few seconds, looking for the piles of bags, but there was only the one tent…

“Trouble,” I said. “This isn’t the gear tent. It’s the BEER tent!”

A really dumb thing to do

I’ve never really been into the big races with tens of thousands of people, but when I was searching for races that would fit into my training plan, the Rock and Roll San Jose half marathon was on the right weekend, is only about 25 minutes away and registration was still open. That settled that. I was finally going to do my first run in the R&R series (scoff). Doing the huge races means that I have to carve out a few hours on my Saturday to go to the expo. For a half marathon.

Reason no. 1 that I do not enjoy large races: the expo

Seriously? An expo for a half marathon? Double scoff.

A coworker decided last minute to sign up for the 10K race, so I swung by her house and together we drove to the expo. Where we had to pay for parking.

Reason no. 1a that I do not enjoy large races: paying for parking at the expo

We then wandered through the San Jose convention center for about 137 miles before finally finding the expo space. The expo was smaller than Boston’s, but still about 10x larger than either Ironman expo that I did. For a half marathon: A distance any reasonably fit person can finish in about 2 hours. We wandered through the expo looking at pink bumper stickers that said “5K” in gritty fonts, and shirts with lame slogans like “Will run for chocolate!”

My companion and I have promised to do a marathon together, so as we got to the section of tables selling race registrations we slowed down. We stopped at the San Francisco Hot Chocolate Run table, where Trouble (the reason for the nickname will make sense by the end of this post) picked up the finisher’s medal. “I don’t get it,” she said, pointing to a giant blob of gold on the medal that looked like Thailand

. It took us a while of staring at it to put together that the medal was supposed to be a Willy Wonka style chocolate bar. That’s stupid, we both thought. But look at the cool jacket! screamed the display. We turned away.

We walked on to the next table where two socially awkward running geeks were standing uncomfortably behind a table covered in medals shaped like different alcoholic accessories - a beer bottle opener, a coaster, a glass of wine - and let them start their halting schpiel. “We run a series of 3 half marathons in the Bay Area. The first is in San Francisco in November that starts at Fisherman’s Wharf and goes over the Golden Gate Bridge” (every race in SF follows the same course, so no comment here) “...The second is in Oakland and runs through neighborhoods where you won’t be shot and then finishes at Lake Merritt” (where the homeless people who turn up dead are usually stabbed, not shot) “...And the last one is in Livermore where…”

“LIVERMORE!!!! How exotic!” Livermore is about as nice as it sounds. It’s way out on the edge of civilization, is inhumanely hot in the summer, is filled with cows and industry, and not much else.

“Yes, Livermore. They’re growing into the second largest wine region in California and are becoming a tourist destination. After the race we have a beer and wine tasting event, and if you sign up today you get this jar…” Here he held up a midget 8oz Mason jar.

“I get my own jar?!” I asked excitedly.

“...And if you sign up for all 3 races, it’s only $197…”

“Hang on,” I said. “Seriously? It’s only $197 for 3 half marathons?” I looked at Trouble.

Trouble said, “Looks like we’re going to Livermore!”

I now have a partner in crime: Trouble. As in, “Here comes Trouble!”

Reason no. 2 that I do not enjoy large races: the parking

After seeing the parking situation at the expo, and learning that the Indian Prime Minister would be staying right in front of the finish line that morning (further restricting parking options because of security). I settled in that night to figure out where the heck I was going to park. Rock and Roll San Jose Half Marathon > The Race > Parking… “There will be NO PARKING AT SAP CENTER on Sunday. We have several alternate garages secured. Each garage is $5 and you will require a pass to enter. If you plan to park in one of the Rock ‘n’ Roll secured garages, you MUST stop by the PARKING BOOTH at the EXPO to purchase or pick up your Pre-Purchased Parking Pass.” Well fuck. It looks like I was going to bum a ride with Trouble.

Reason no. 3 that I do not enjoy large races: the tutus and ribbons

Trouble’s brother drove us through the back roads of San Jose, and we wandered into the several-block start area to find a bathroom. We found an out-of-the-way block of porta-potties with a short line, and stood waiting in front of a large office building with about 400 runners standing on the front steps like a church choir (most of them Women of a Certain Age) dressed in the same red singlet. There were tutus. There was glitter. There was curling ribbon everywhere. And there was chanting. If you had to write a chant in the style of The Song that Doesn’t End from Lambchop, it would sound something like this. When Trouble emerged from the porta-potties I whispered to her, “Get me out of here!”

Reason no. 4 that I do not enjoy large races: the famous people

As we wandered around trying to find the starting corrals I saw a fast looking guy run by. “Was that Meb?” I asked. I met with a blank look from Trouble and we continued our conversation. Then he ran by again, “Trouble, I think that was Meb Keflezighi.” Still no reaction. “... the fastest American runner in the US right now?” Nothing. We moved on and separated into our different corrals. It was Meb, by the way.

As I stood in my corral near-ish to the 1:45 pacer, a guy near me pointed up ahead and said, “You see that woman with the sign next to the 1:45 pacer? If you run next to her, you’re running with an Olympian.” I looked where he was pointing and saw a sign that said, “Deena.” No way! Deena Kastor? You’ve got to be kidding me. Sure enough, the announcer said something about Deena Kastor running with the 1:45 pace group the whole way. Oh great. I was hoping to run with the 1:45 pace group, but now I was sure to do something stupid.

The race started, and I wasted no time before beginning something stupid. I wormed my way through all the elbows (reason no. 5 that I don’t like large races: elbows in my face) until I was running right next to Deena Kastor. Everything would have been fine if I’d stopped there. I would have run the whole race with Elvis on my left, and Deena Kastor on my right. But I get star struck, and I had dry mouth and my heart was pumping nothing but adrenaline.

So I passed Deena Kastor, and just kept running.

I ran that first mile in 6:34. The next came in 7:36, and the one after that was 7:45. I’ve run a half marathon in 7:19’s before, but that was years ago, and I knew I’d be lucky to finish THIS race with an average pace of 8, but that wasn’t happening now… I didn’t look down at my watch and realize I was screwed until mile 3, when I thought, my legs are burning. How fast am I going anyway? Oh shit.

Thanks a lot, Deena Kastor.

Reason no. 6 that I don’t like large races: the bands

It’s the Rock n Roll series. I knew that there were going to be bands of questionable vintage, but I was expecting aging hair bands playing covers of “Eye of the Tiger” and “Get Ready for This.” Instead of music, most of the bands seemed more into making noise. Except that one guy who was playing smooth jazz guitar in someone’s driveway. It’s a good thing that I decided to run with headphones (something I almost never do), or else I probably would have just lain down on someone’s front yard and let myself shrivel up like a slug. After passing a particularly depressing Evanescence wannabe band around Mile 7, Deena Kastor came blowing by me at about 6:30 pace screaming, “Great job, guys!” and waving her arm bones like a crazy person. That was when the thought first occurred to me to quit running, not just in this race but for life.

There is really nothing much that can be said for the final 5 miles of this race. It was horrible. I sweat through my shorts. I sweat through my shoes. I gave up on myself. I walked in places. I knew I was running within blocks of Trouble’s house, and I thought of just walking off the course and going back to my car, but my keys were in the start/finish area. I questioned what I was doing in this race. I questioned whether I ever wanted to run another marathon again. I questioned whether I ever wanted to run again. I might as well quit and just let myself get really, really fat.

I don’t want this race report to turn into a Russian novel, filling thousands of pages with ruminations on tragedy and despair. I finished the damned thing. I took my medal, and I went off in search of my stuff.

Reason no. 7 that I don’t enjoy large races: the finish

I waved off photographers who wanted to take pictures of my medal framed by my overwhelming sense of  failure. I navigated my way around a sort of ¼ mile circuit to the exit of the runner’s area, ducking my way around reps slinging chocolate-sand bars and dehydrated pomagranite-soy sauce-tarragon-chicken gizzard nutrition lumps and found my way to the exit. Runners were milling around with their families having picnics, drinking beer, buying t-shirts and in general enjoying the block party. But my shorts were stuck to my legs, I was one giant crotch sweat stain and I wanted to go home and take a shower. Where was my stuff? I wandered around for what felt like miles, using my medal as nunchucks on small children that got in my way, and stomping on the fingers of happy people sunning in the grass until finally I found the bag drop. Then I wandered another 14 miles trying to find my way back to a road open to traffic so I could get an Uber back to my car. I felt kind of bad about leaving a wet buttprint in the back seat of that guy’s immaculate Uber, but not bad enough to do anything about it. I was miserable, and wanted the world to be miserable with me. The driver’s name was Jose F; I gave him 5 stars. If you’re ever in the back of his car, that stank is my fault.

Another reason I hated this stupid race: I lost $20.

I had brought a $20 bill to the race to buy myself a snack and a water at a convenience store while I was waiting for my Uber. When I reached into my key pocket where I’d stashed it, it was gone. It was probably still sitting in the old piss at the bottom of the porta-pottie where I peed next to the chanting tutus. What a rotten day.

When I got home, I texted Trouble to tell her how my race had gone and to check on hers.

Trouble: Womp womp. I’m sorry Claire. :( I’ll bet you still kicked the butt of anyone wearing a tutu.

Claire: There was one guy who passed me early. In a tutu.

Trouble: Noooo! A MAN in a tutu passed you?? Just retire from running now.

Claire: AND I lost $20.

Trouble: I think I’m bad race luck for you! (I’ve never had a good race when Trouble was there. Reason no. 2 for the pseudonym.)

Claire: Yes! It’s Your fault! And Deena Kastor’s. But mostly yours.

See you in Livermore!

Maffetone Revisited

Owwww! This is so hard!

I wrote recently about my experimentation with the Maffetone Method. My initial conclusion: It is a giant load of crap. I turned the heart rate alert off on my watch and started running faster paces again. Paces that used to be easy suddenly felt unsustainably hard as I reintroduced sub-9-minute speed into my legs.

I ran my frustration out for a few runs (like a long weekend), and then switched my display on my watch to show heart rate again. Just out of curiosity, not because I was going back to that stupid “run slow to race slower” concept. Just to see.

Almost immediately, I started seeing the kind of speedier pace trend that Maffetone promised: I was now able to run paces that used to blow my heart rate monitor up at a heart rate that was about 10 beats below my “MAF zone.” Since I didn’t feel like a slave to the chirping on my wrist, it wasn’t such a time and boredom suck to run bigger volumes. I went from 30 or 40 miles per week up to 50 or 60 (up to 15 miles per day), still keeping most of my running easy but allowing my heart rate to drift up in tougher conditions like heat, hills, or distances where heart rate creep was inevitable. Seriously, Mr. Maffetone; I refuse to run up a 4-mile hill at 154bpm. That's just crazy talk.

Three weeks later, I’ve gone from being able to run 5.7-6mph at my MAF heart rate up to 6.7 to 7mph again. What am I to make of this?

I should admit that a lot of variables changed in the past 3 weeks, not all to do with the average heart rate of my runs.

• 
  I started letting myself break 154bpm. Sometimes by only a few beats, sometimes exceeding it by 20 beats or more.
• I started running more volume, including two-a-days at least once a week.
• I drastically changed my diet, going back to eating clean: no sugars, no processed grains and no cheese. I also stopped eating starches during work hours.
• I have taken Optygen HP for years during periods of heavy training for years, and started taking it again when I kicked Phil Maffetone to the curb.
• I finally found a massage therapist who was able to help resolve a long-standing soleus injury that had been plaguing me for over 6 months.

Maffetone does have a place for pace work in his Method (everything above an easy aerobic pace - whether it be marathon race pace or 200m pace is called “anaerobic training”), but he is vague about how it should be implemented. Instead of describing how an athlete should use speed work to run faster, he only describes how an athlete can recognize he has done too much "anaerobic" work and should return to his MAF heart rate. So clearly there is something to be said for pace work, but it is unclear whether this contradicts Maffetone. Was I able to run faster at a lower heart rate because I did so much of my training at that lower heart rate and was therefore more efficient at burning fat, as Maffetone suggests? Or was I more efficient at the lower heart rates because my body was re-learning how to handle those higher heart rates again; getting better at clearing the byproducts of anaerobic metabolism? To put it another way: was it the speed that was making my slow running faster, or the slow that was making my faster speeds better?

What about the diet? Was I better able to burn fat because my blood sugar was more stable with a lower starch, very high fiber diet? (“Low carb” doesn’t really make sense for any unprocessed vegetarian diet.) This theory holds some water, given all the differences I noticed in my body when I cut out sugar and processed grains; but that’s a post for another time. But would it really affect my heart rate? Or just my recovery and glycogen sparing on longer runs?

Or was it just the volume? After all, it was when I started running monster volumes that I suddenly dropped 35 minutes off of my marathon time. Is it such a leap to think that 30-40 miles a week just wasn’t enough to maintain my fitness?

Or was it that I was no longer babying my left foot, and thus able to fully engage my glutes and hamstrings for the first time in months.

Or is it just the supplements?

Has Been

I used to be quite good at cycling. I wasn’t the best there ever was, but I was good enough that I knew that at most club rides, shop rides, group rides or triathlons I could hang with pretty much anything that most other people could lay down. There was the occasional exception - like I said, I wasn’t the best there ever was - but it was the best feeling in the world to have someone accelerate away from me and be able to dig in and follow… and then answer with an attack of my own. I once rode a century in comfortably under 5 hours. I once averaged over 22 miles per hour for a 58-mile time trial. No world record, but I had earned some swagger.

Then, over 3 years ago I stopped cycling. It had stopped being fun, so I just hung up my bike on March 10, 2012 and started doing other stuff. And there my bike hung in the garage collecting dust until recently, when I decided that I wanted to start riding my bike to work again. I took my fixie down off the wall, took it to my local bike shop, described exactly what I wanted using all the right jargon, and took home my revitalized little fixie a few days later.

I was enjoying riding to work, but the quickest way to get there was on a bike trail (I know, I know, I HATE bike trails… but it cut 10 min of traffic lights off the trip!), and that damned trail had a lot of tight turns. On a fixie, tight cornering can be kind of sketchy, because you can’t really control where your pedals are at any given moment (since you have to pedal constantly), so there’s always a risk of scraping your pedal on the ground when you lean into a corner. So I took my racing bike down off the wall a couple months later, and walked back to my local bike shop.

This is where our story begins.

When I came to pick up my racing bike, they had forgotten to put new tires on. He first took me over to the super-skinny racing tires. “Aw, there’s no need,” I said. “I’m just going to be riding this thing to and from work.”

The guy stopped and looked at me with disgust. “You’re going to have the best commuting bike on the road,” he said. But what he meant was, that’s too much bike for a commuter bike, you dumb bitch. I hate Silicon Valley where people use top-of-the-line racing bikes just to go to and from the farmer’s market. It’s true. I’ve seen $5000 bikes locked up outside the bar with a cable lock less than a mile from this bike shop. But that’s not me. The $30 U lock in my hand was for the fixie I bought on Craigslist for $300. I wasn’t about to lose a $100 lock if my cheap-o bike was stolen. I know that you don’t lock up carbon. Duh.

“Oh, I know,” I said. “This bike has had its racing days, but now I just want to pull it back out because it’s kind of sketchy cornering on some of those tight bends on the bike trail on my fixie.”

His contempt grew deeper upon hearing the words ‘bike trail.’ “Well, actually, there’s a difference between a single speed bike and a fixed gear…” he started.

“I know,” I cut him off. “I ride a fixie.”

“That bike I fixed up for you a few months ago? I put a freewheel on it.”

“No you didn’t,” I said, starting to feel my blood boil. “I would never pay for that. It’s definitely a fixie.”

“On a fixie you can’t coast,” he corrected me patiently.

“Believe me,” I said. “I don’t mess around. That bike is a fixed gear.”

“Oh sure.” He gave up.

I was apoplectic. Not only had he accused me of riding a lamer, less skill-dependent bike, he had also accused me of being too dumb to know the difference. It was like saying to someone who had bought and fixed up a ‘69 Mustang, “Oh yeah. That ‘89 Toyota Cellica with the Duct Tape holding up the ceiling upholstery is yours, right?”

He had heard me use the language. I had dropped details about my riding history, including that I used to race, that I knew all the names to all the parts, and I remembered my bike’s entire maintenance history. And yet something about me still gave him a strong impression of no fucking clue. In his head I was no different than the woman who came in right before me to have air put in the tires of her beach cruiser, and paid an additional $75 for them to blow the dust out of the grooves in her handlebar grips. It made me want to challenge him to a throw-down right then! I railed about it to anyone that would listen for days.

A few weeks later, I was at work (my job now is as an executive assistant to a venture capitalist rich guy). In setting up a meeting, another assistant in the company mentioned that her boss couldn’t make a certain time because he was the chair of a big east coast charity ride that would be going on that day. Joking, I said, “Your super secret assignment, [Assistant], is to find out who rides faster: me or your boss.”

“Haha, you’re killing me over here, Claire,” she said. “Boss is quite an experienced bicycle rider, and he does it quite a bit, so I’m sure he is very fast.”

Dismissed and denied!

This bugged me for the rest of the week. He’s a cha-ri-ty rider! Just because he rides a lot doesn’t mean that he’s fast! I’ve ridden with plenty of straight men over 40 who ride their bikes every weekend - slowly - just so that they can have a big brunch afterward. And so their bellies grow. Again, the assumption is that there’s no way I could actually be, like, fast. Or know what I’m doing. Hahaha, Claire, you’re so funny. You think you can take on the boys. But when I used to ride, I DID take on the boys. I rode faster than John Kerry, remember?!

“Why does it bother you so much,” Richie Porte asked me when I was still seething a few days later. “Why does it have to be a competition?”

I’d asked myself the same thing. Am I just a spandex-clad Napoleon? Isn’t getting this belligerent when my dominance is challenged the sign of a weak, insecure person? Why can’t I just focus on myself and let other people do their thing?

“Because,” I said, “these guys are smarter, richer, more powerful and better connected than I could ever dream about being. They never have to take no for an answer with anything. I know, because it’s my job to figure out a way around every rule that the rest of us have to live by. But that’s what they’ve worked for their entire lives. But that’s just in their context. I have spent my entire life working toward something else, and in that realm, I want to be powerful and successful. I don’t care that people ignore my emails and treat me as if I’m invisible when I’m seating meetings in the VC context, because that’s not what my life is dedicated to, it’s just what I do from 8-6 every day. But when people dismiss me sight unseen at something that I really care about… something that I feel I’ve accomplished something in… in my context because I am unimportant in their context… that makes me feel like I don’t matter. I don’t need their approval, but I do need to know that they are not superior human beings.

When the world comes to an end and we’re all surviving on our physical wherewithal, I want to believe that I would be the VIP.