Patterson Pass Out

I’ve sat down to start writing so many times this year, but it’s been impossible to set out my state of mind without going into all the boo-hooing about what a shitty year it’s been. I keep getting a couple of paragraphs in, and then getting too depressed to go on. So we've established the background that this year has sucked, and there's no need for me to go deeper into it. 

And then I went on another biking vacation and came back to life. Freshly inspired and with a solid 5 days of climbing in my legs, I headed out to tackle another road on my 2017 treasure hunt checklist: Patterson Pass.

The first time I rode Patterson Pass I busted a spoke halfway up. Riding the remaining 120 miles and climbing the roughly 12,000ft of that ride that remained on a borrowed wheel with an “easy” gear with 3 fewer teeth than my own rear cassette proved to be the toughest ride I have ever finished. So Patterson Pass made an impression. 

It is also memorable because it is so ugly that it’s almost artistic. Patterson Pass goes over the very easternmost part of the range between the East Bay and the San Joaquin Valley, so the hills are low and stumpy, covered with dry, yellow grass, and there’s hardly a tree to be seen. It looks kind of what I imagine southwest Texas looks like from movies like No Country for Old Men. It’s the kind of landscape that would make you want to die of boredom, except that it is absolutely covered in power lines and windmills; not the Don Quixote kind of windmills, the other kind. It’s almost like some sort of modern art piece that tries to make a natural landscape from found metal scraps at the dump. One thing you can say for Patterson is that it’s not just another redwood-lined mountain road.

And it’s hot over there. If San Francisco is 50º, and Palo Alto is 80º, and Oakland is 90º, you can count on Tracy (the far side of the pass) to be 110º. On this day, according to the internet the high temperature reached 98º. 

I drove about 50 minutes east to Livermore (a town whose reputation matches its name, but it has gotten a bad rap in my opinoin - it’s far less shitty than Vallejo), found some sports fields, and dumped my car. It was about 10:15 in the morning. 

My planned route would take me about 15 miles over a roughly 1000-ft climb, then through the streets of lovely Tracy (home of the Safeway Supermarkets regional distribution center). Then I would hook up with a road that ran parallel to Patterson Pass Rd, past (what I think was) a nuclear testing facility and a positively enormous ATV park, over the hill and back to Livermore. The whole thing was very Mad Max. 

The ride over Patterson Pass was uneventful. It was the sort of climb that is only tough because it’s hard to think of a 1000 ft climb as being worth your anxiety, and yet it still takes an annoying amount of effort. As for the descent, you know how there are rollercoasters that make you want to scream “Yeeee-haw!” (Space Mountain) and those where you actually do scream “ohshitohshitohshit!” (Tower of Terror)? Well this was more of a Tower of Terror descent. Rather than nestling into the hill at a safe and steady grade, it just kind of dipped and rolled with the ground at whatever grade allowed it to keep a more or less straight line. Usually, that meant it was STEEP. Also without many landscape features to gauge distance and depth, the speed came on disorientatingly fast. And then there was the crosswind (remember the windmills?) that would gust through unexpectedly and throw me a foot across the road. 

But whatever, it was fine. 

When I got to Tracy and rode past miles and miles of enormous factories and warehouses, I started to get a distinct feeling of unease. I can’t really explain it. I had a tailwind at my back and was riding about 23mph with very little effort, and almost no one was on the road, and I just had a strange feeling of foreboding.

But whatever, that happens to me every time it’s overcast.

After a stunningly long time riding through the impressively ugly outskirts of Tracy I found my way to Tesla Rd, which would take me past the (I imagine) nuclear testing site and endless ATV park. I passed the testing facility. I felt like I was living in a .gif riding through miles and miles of identical picnic spots and campground bathrooms in the ATV park. It occurred to me that I should probably stop and refill my water bottles, but I still had a full 20 oz, and this was only about a 35 mile ride. It also occurred to me that I probably should have packed a snack, but again, I ride 35 miles and ~2000ft elevation all the time without need for a snack. And anyway, I only had about 10 miles to go, most of which would be downhill. How bad could it be?

Unlike on the way out, the hill on this side hit me like a wall. I was riding along at a 2% grade for ages and ages, and then suddenly I turned a corner and the road jumped up to 8 or 9%. It was steep, but not FML steep. Just “I wish this weren’t taking so much effort” steep. Then a section of my traps started to get really tight. I can remember thinking, “Dammit, I want to crack my neck but it’s too steep here to take my hands off the handlebars.” And I could feel it getting tighter by the second. 

And then suddenly I got weak and woozy and needed to get off my bike. I dismounted and tried to walk, but getting my bike over a small pile of dirt and gravel proved overwhelming. I finally made it to a guard rail a few feet away, but laying my bike against the rail was more coordination than I could handle. I dropped my bike on the ground and staggered over to the guard rail to sit down. As soon as my ass hit the rail, I started swooning. When I say "swooning," I was doing that nodding thing that you do when you’re falling asleep on an airplane, but I was doing it from the waist, not the neck. My arms were spazzing out trying to catch me, but they couldn’t get the timing right either and were just as likely to push me over as catch my fall. I knew I had to lay down. I melted down off the rail and lay down in the same ridge of dirt and gravel that I’d had trouble getting my bike over. I remember thinking, “I should care about this…” before my vision totally closed in and I lost consciousness for a few seconds. 

I came to enough to realize that a few cars were driving by. This whole thing had happened in less than 30 seconds, so they may even have been close enough to see the whole thing. The first slowed down and then drove on. The second followed him. The last guy pulled over. 

“Are you okay?” he asked, as he got out.

“Not rea…” I slurred, and then I went out again. 

When I came to, he had produced a huge jug of water. I didn’t want the water. Even though I didn’t feel nauseous, I thought it likely that I would vomit ,and then my prince would be more likely to call an ambulance than take me to safety in his Mustang. 

“Do you think you would be able to take me back to my car?” I asked, when I came to again a few moments later. I tried to sit up, but realized that that was a terrible mistake and laid my head back down in the dirt. 

As I described where I was parked, I managed to pull myself together enough to get to a half-sitting position without passing out. As I tried to talk him through taking the wheels off my bike, I tried moving my arms around to point but that brought on a few more mid-sentence swoons. Eventually I pulled myself over to his car and sat in the passenger seat. 

At some point in this ordeal I had put together that this man had his toddler son in the back seat. “I’m sorry, I’m scaring your son,” I blurted. I was sorry. I realized that this man was doing me a gigantic favor, but the extent of his generosity wouldn’t hit me until my head had cleared a little more. All I knew was that I was in trouble, and this man could help me. Later I realized that he probably would have preferred to call an ambulance for me rather than let me in his car, except that I’d passed out in a dead zone in his cell service. It definitely didn’t occur to me until I was telling the story to a friend the next day that getting into a stranger’s car when I was incapacitated could have been an equally dangerous thing to do. (“But he had a kid in the back seat,” I argued. “You could have been the second person he abducted that day!” She joked.) But I prefer to live knowing that most people aren’t sociopaths, and in general if someone pulls over it is to help you and not to rape you. And in Ryan from Stockton’s case I was right. Ryan from Stockton was just a generous man who was taking his son to the beach to beat the heat, and willing to go a few extra minutes out of his way to get me back to my car. 

By the time Ryan from Stockton got back in the car, I was at least solidly upright and conscious, if a little punchdrunk.  The toddler in the back seat was very quiet and very still in that way that kids are when they’re waiting for the first signal from an adult that it’s time to freak out. 

In the 15 or 20 minutes that it took us to get back to my car, I started to come back to life and was able to hold a conversation. I was able to remember the names of beaches in a town where I had lived for 3 years over a decade before. My fine and gross motor skills came back, and I was able to use my phone again. I stopped trailing off mid-sentence to gather my strength before finishing a thought. By the time we got back to my car, I at least felt safe to drive. 

One good thing about towns like this is you were never far from a good, cheap taqueria where I could count on being the only native English speaker in the joint. I found one within a mile and ordered a burrito and “lots of water.” I was handed a single 12-ounce cup of tap water and sighed as I looked around for a refill cooler. There was none. 

I looked up “causes of loss of consciousness during exercise” on my phone while I waited for my food. Heat syncope (the first stage of heat illness) seemed to fit the bill, and I decided that I wasn’t about to spend $75 and an afternoon waiting in Urgent Care for some dumbass doctor to tell me to drink more water. I didn’t have much faith that a busy doctor would have any more creativity than a Google search bar. 

And it probably was heat stroke. Probably. But I’d been riding much more difficult terrain at elevation in similar heat the week before without incident. It’s probable that I had just fallen behind on my hydration or some electrolyte, but then again…

…a couple of years ago my running performance cratered in a way that was sudden and alarming. After being able to maintain 8-minute-miles without much effort, completing a marathon at 7:49 pace, and a half marathon at 7:19 pace, suddenly I could hardly sustain 10:30 miles, and only for a few minutes at a time at that. I couldn’t run more than 3 or 4 miles without completely falling apart. My marathon time became an hour slower in about 6 months. Rest days didn’t help. Neither did recovery weeks, or months where I cut my overall volume by 60% or more. I kept going to doctors insisting that something was very wrong, and they would run tests but everything would come back normal. 

As they ruled out one cause after another, the possibilities that they tested for got scarier and scarier. Did I have a chronic condition that I would be living with for the rest of my life? Did I have something that could kill me? Was I possibly just going to get sicker and sicker… or maybe just die suddenly? Did I have cancer? Lung disease? Heart disease? Eventually all the tests came back within the normal range, and the last specialist told me to “jog for fun,” and for the last time I resisted the urge to punch him in the face. I appeared to have lost about 10% of my lung function over 6 months, but they told me that that was "not statistically significant" given the different methods used to measure the 2 numbers.

So I gave up. I slowed down. I tried to be satisfied with short runs of 9-minute miles. I started riding my bike again. I figured maybe this is what aging is, and maybe I really was overtrained. 

Until I laid down at the side of the road and passed out. The feeling I got as I staggered toward the guard rail was exactly the same feeling I was getting the year before when I tried to run faster than a 10-minute mile. Maybe it was just my Central Governor slowing me down to save my ass, whether from overtraining or overheating. But what if it was something else?

As I drove the hour back home I thought back on the 5-day tour I’d done the week before. After a winter and spring of isolation, I had finally connected with other people again. I befriended two riders who were consistently the last to roll into camp every day (something anathema to my usual riding style), and would start out with them each morning, working my way to the front of the group throughout the day. As I passed people, I noticed that I was cheerful and outgoing with each one of them; even if they were wearing a stupid jersey, or had a dorky mirror on their glasses, or committed any of the other cycling faux pas that I used to turn my nose up at. It reminded me how 10 years ago when I fell in love with riding (back before I knew about Serious Cycling Dogma), it was because I was my best self on a bike. I was playful and confident and wanted to talk to everybody. 

With the grit from the road still all up the right side of my body, I swore that I would build up my riding network again. No excluding people because they were too slow, or wore sleeveless jerseys, or rode a (oh god help me!) touring bike. I am 34 years old, and I had just had a medical emergency and had to ask a strange man for a ride home, and had scared his 3-year-old, and it was about time that I fucking grew up, get over myself, and started riding with other people again. 

So even though I know no one reads this blog anymore (I post mostly for myself), I’m ending this post with an invitation: The Bay Area has some of the best riding in the country. If you happen to find yourself here, let’s go for a ride. Seriously. The chances of you having to take me to the hospital are really so much lower than the chances of us having a good time. Let’s go!