The Death Ride was one of the most fun rides I've ever done. It is a 5-pass ride, with about 12,000 ft of climbing (in reality, more like 15,000). The course is shaped like a Y. In the first arm of the Y you ride up and over Monitor Pass, down the back side, and then you turn around and ride back over the mountain backward and on to the second arm of the Y. That's where you ride up and over the top of Ebbett's Pass, down the back side, then back to the top, and then on the the base of the Y. The final climb, Carson Pass, you only climb the front side before returning to the start. Monitor isn't the highest, but it's the most symmetrical with long climbs on each side. Ebbett's is the steep one, like a staircase it jumps back and forth between 6 and 12% as you climb through pine forests and past huge rounded granite cliffs that probably have some geological name I don't know. Carson Pass is the longest and least steep, but it is exposed and coming at the end of the day, it is usually hot. But the descent down Carson is a real treat: perfect pavement, a steady grade, and practically no turns. The descent down Carson is worth the 110 miles that come before it to get there.
The ride isn't a race. There is no official start time, no timing chips, no records kept (other than a sticker put on your number at the top of each pass). The volunteers (every boy scout and their mother - literally - in the entire Sierra region) don't know jack about cycling. The attraction of the ride is mostly that you would never be able to ride out here without the support. There would be nowhere to get food or water, and no cell reception when you inevitably keeled over. My most ambitious goal of the day was not to keel over.
I have been looking forward to this ride all year with growing trepidation. With such a shitty winter, and work being so out of control, and my motivation being absent all year, I hadn't built nearly enough of a base. I hadn't done any rides longer than 90 miles. I hadn't done any rides with more than 2 passes longer than 2500' each. I hadn't been taking care of my body all spring: eating like crap, never drinking enough water, and shorting myself on sleep. If there were such a thing as a Stress-o-meter, the needle would have broken off the far end. And then there was my my strange fainting spell a couple of weeks ago. When I arrived, I knew I wasn't ready and all I could do was plan to be brave and hope for the best.
For as successful and popular as the Death Ride is, the organization of it is surprisingly informal. You show up some time around dawn (5 pass riders are supposed to start between 5 and 6:30), pick up your number/sign a detailed medical release at the surprisingly upscale race headquarters trailer, and then you just kind of go. The roads aren't marked, but they don't really need to be (it's not like there are many cross streets out there). No one is keeping track of you. It's your job to make sure you make it back in one piece. So I showed up, parked my car, picked up my stuff, and had to stop someone to ask which way to ride out of the parking lot.
Monitor Pass
The ride up Monitor Pass is a steady 8-mile roughly 3000 mile climb with no false summits or killer grades. With people of all levels ahead of me, and everyone still pretty bunched together, there was lots of passing to be done. Since the less experienced tend to weave as they climb, or just ride in the center of the road like a douche, sometimes the passing wasn't textbook. I had to do vulgar things like announce myself, or communicate with other riders. Near the bottom of the pass I got caught behind a clot of riders with the gross motor skills of a toddler taking its first steps, and looked over my shoulder to see if I would cut anyone off if I came off my line.
"Claire!" I heard behind me.
"What?" I said.
"I said, CLAIRE!" said the voice behind me.
"What did you call me?!" I asked, in a voice that sounded way bitchier than I intended because of my labored breathing. "Do I know you?!" (Again, way bitchier than intended.)
"I just said, CLEAR. You can go," said a shocked and timid voice.
"Oh," I said sheepishly, realizing exactly what had happened. Then I said very slowly and deliberately, careful to modulate my intonation, "My name is Claire and this situation happens to me a lot."
And thus I made a friend who kept me company almost all the way up the pass. He took my mind off the fact that my lungs kind of hurt and my body didn't feel that great, and despite drinking so much in the car yesterday that I practically knocked over a handicapped lady standing between me and a Starbucks bathroom, I still hadn't drunk enough water.
The descent on the back of Monitor is open and not terribly technical. You have sweeping turns and expansive views of the mountains and valleys on the other side. I descended comfortably, using my brakes liberally but never feeling skittish. I have never been a terribly confident descender, but I'm not terrible either. I use the brakes more than I probably should, but I have never had my rims turn into tire-melting rings of fire either. I think I just descend like a feather. I have been on straight, open descents in rabbit-like tucks with my chin sitting on the bars, hands framing my chin on either side, elbows tucked in tight to my body, and my belly button on the saddle, and have had skinny tiny men bomb past me. I just don't have the gravity that other riders do, and I'm not confident enough to draft a serious descent. Oh well. So I suck at descending.
I happily and safely sucked down several thousand feet for about half an hour, and was feeling much better when I got to the bottom. The lowest point on the back side of Monitor was a few hundred feet lower than on the front side, so the next climb was slightly longer than the first. When I got to the bottom of the hill, I collected my second sticker and skipped the only water stop that I would skip all day, since I hadn't drunk anything on the way down. Then it was time to turn around and climb back up the way I came.
I had lost my new friend from the first climb back at the summit, so this climb I was left to do alone with my thoughts. In my previous riding life, I was always an atrocious climber but for some reason, when I found my way back onto my bike I had lost my endurance and monster speed on the flats, but I had become a climber. Who knows why. I guess life is full of mysteries. I'm just as baffled...
So even though I was trying to take it easy up the hill, I was still passing everyone too quickly to exchange more than a couple of sentences. That meant that I was climbing alone, and had no opportunities to make friends to distract me from the fact that not only did my lungs ache, now my back hurt too. In the hour or so that I was climbing, I dissected all of my pain. Was it my lats? My intercostal muscles? Maybe it was my diaphragm. Or was it my kidneys? Whatever it was, breathing felt terrible in a number of different ways. My quads also felt pretty grouchy. I might have been able to handle all that, if the temperatures weren't climbing up toward the 90's without a cloud or tree in sight.
Just when I thought I might get into trouble, the climb leveled off for a couple of miles to the summit, and a cool breeze found its way over the ridge and onto my face. I realized that I was spared for now, but I would be very, very lucky to make it through the day. I made sure to drink an extra V8 and eat all the food I could shove in my face. Only about 35 miles into a 130-mile ride, I'd already drained about 60 oz. I didn't feel parched, but I didn't know what else to do. I'd been shoving as much food into my face as I could force down, but no matter how much I chewed, I could hardly make myself swallow the stuff
I hardly turned the pedals to get back down to the valley, but I stopped at 2 rest stops in less than about 10 miles just to make sure that I was as hydrated as possible. I was going to win at the nutrition part of this ride, dammit! Then I turned my wheel up Ebbett's Pass.
Ebbett's Pass
Ebbett's is the steep one, but at least there is tree cover. It started out with a long, mellow climb hovering around 5% incline. I took about a toe's worth of pressure off the pedals and managed to settle in to the pace of a pair of riders, and worked on being charming and likable. The strategy was to find someone to keep me company for what could be a really messy climb. It was going well. I was being friendly and charming for a couple of miles. But then we turned a corner and saw the road kick up to a less socially forgiving angle. "Well, Claire. It was nice meeting you," said one of my new friends, who had seen me on the previous climbs and had decided that she couldn't or wouldn't climb with me. On something that steep, no one has much control over their speed. You ride at whatever pace you can turn over the pedals in your easiest gear. Slow down your cadence, and you lose momentum and the pedaling feels harder. I guess adulthood is a little like climbing a mountain too. It's easy to make friends in the flat and smooth bits, but once you meet some resistance everyone falls away to deal with their own struggles and you have to get up that mountain on your own. I was not feeling in great shape for adulting on this particular climb.
Normally a fraction of a mile at a 12% grade wouldn't turn me inside out. It would be mildly unpleasant, I might get out of breath and my legs might sting, but I would hardly notice such an effort. But today after just one pitch like that, my hands felt shaky on the handlebars. On the next steep step up, my knees started to feel wobbly and I felt giddy. I tried to slow down in the less steep sections in between to let my body recover, but slowing down my cadence meant giving up momentum, which made the climbing harder, not easier. I started to worry that It would happen again.
A few miles later, It was definitely happening again. Every time the road got steep I had to plan my exit, just in case I had to bail off my bike and get off the road as soon as possible. Since I was still mostly passing people, I was forced toward the center of the road more often than not. That meant that if I had to bail, then I would have to cut directly in front of the last person I passed. In a car cutting someone off at 3mph might not be a big deal, but when you're going so slow you're strugging to stay upright, cutting someone off suddenly would be a real dickish move. With downhill riders coming out of nowhere every few seconds in the oncoming lane, the left side of the road was off limits. I talked myself through one ramp after another until the tree cover gave way to a giant granite face with a waterfall falling in the cleavage between 2 peaks. It was gorgeous, but it was also hot and steep. Luckily, there was a turn-out.
I pulled off and sat down against a guard rail in the shade, waiting for my heart rate to come down and my hands to stop shaking. One after another I saw people that I had passed look at me with concern, or shock, or smugness as my head lolled to one side. After several minutes, my heart rate was still over 100 bpm and I was still feeling incredibly faded. I remounted rode a few hundred feet, and then had to pull off again. In this shady patch there were half a dozen other riders strewn across the pine needles experiencing a similar dilemma to mine: could we make it to the top or was it time to go hom? With our various maps and gadgets we ascertained that there were still about 1000 feet and a couple of miles to the top. The temperature was in the low 90's at this point, and I couldn't even imagine how I would get my bike moving from a standstill on this kind of grade, let alone make it all the way to the summit. Lest you think I'm a real sissy pants, I would like to reiterate that this hill was less severe than the hill I ride almost every weekend. But my body was doing that thing again and I was reduced to a shaking wobbling, crawling creature. Finally I decided that I would prefer the dignity of quitting but driving myself home, than being pulled off the course in an ambulance. I could maybe get to the top of the mountain if I allowed myself liberal breaks, but then I would be tempted to go down the other side. And if I let myself go to the far side of the mountin, I almost certainly couldn't make it back up again. I decided that it was time to point my bike back downhill and get a cold soda.
Reflection
When I got back to the lunch stop about 20 minutes later, they offered me a turkey sandwich. "Do you have anything vegetarian?" I asked.
"Well, we don't have any vegetarian sandwiches, but we can give you a plate of vegetables," said the friendly boyscout, who was very enthusiastic but obviously hadn't earned his endurance nutrition badge yet. I thanked him for my plate of shredded lettuce, 4 cherry tomatoes, a few cucumber slices and a tablespoon of hummus. Then I thanked my lucky stars that I hadn't come down here bonking and hoping for a meal that would take me the remaining 30 miles to the summit of Carson Pass.
I found a table in the shade and asked some strangers if I could sit with them. On my side of the table was a fit-looking couple who had dropped out like me. On the other side was a revolving door of riders who had already been up and over the mountain, come back, and were headed out to Carson Pass all before lunch time. The other side of the table were me in a previous life, and on my side of the table was me now. We quitters politely congratulated those who were still in the game and listened to their stories, then we filled the intermissions between riders with our own excuses. I told the woman about how I'd passed out a couple of weeks ago, and how, not knowing what was causing it, I didn't want to push myself to complete exhaustion. She then told me about the 2 times that she had fainted, and how she had gotten a diagnosis of... dehydration.
Seriously. No shit. Dehydration. The most boring, obvious explanation for loss of performance -- and then consciousness -- there is: drink more fucking water.
I don't know what it was that made me listen to this woman, who was offering me the most obvious advice in the world. Maybe it was because she offered it acknowledging that it was the most obvious advice in the world. Maybe it was because we had just talked through a couple of other vitamin deficiencies (D and B12) and wondered why we couldn't meet those needs without supplementation. Maybe it was just because she wasn't arrogant and pedantic when she told me. But it was like that scene in the movie when all the pieces fall into place at once, and you understand how they pulled off the heist. I was severely and chronically dehydrated.
You see, right before my athletic fall I had become obsessed with hydration. I was running a lot (10+ miles/day average), mostly indoors in a facility with inadequate air circulation. I was desperate to learn how to get better at hydration, but the only information I could find on the internet about hydration was that if your pee isn't clear then you're dehydrated. Well everyone knows that, but how do you rehydrate when you're sweating like 5lb of fluid a day? So I found a book called Waterlogged by the unimpeachable Tim Noakes and read almost the whole thing. The book was so boring and repetitive that getting through 80% of it was a feat of endurance in itself, and probably gave me all the information that reading the whole thing would have given me.
Noakes's argument is that dehydration really isn't as dangerous as you think, and it is safer (and possibly better for performance) to drink ad libitum (according to thirst) and allow yourself to get dehydrated during a race than to try to replace all fluid losses. It made sense. For most of human history, we didn't have Camelbaks and Swell bottles. We spent almost all day away from a water source. And humans evolved in hot climates and with active lifestyles. So maybe we didn't need as much water as I thought. So I took the pressure off myself to be such an obsessive water drinker.
The problem with Noakes's book was that in all those hundreds of pages, he never talked about a timeline longer than a day. He never suggested how athletes should rehydrate after a big event, or how they should deal with hydration through week in and week out training. So I extrapolated some conclusions myself. I figured that as long as I wasn't really thirsty, then I was probably hydrated enough. I stopped taking a water bottle on my run, and obsessively sipping off a Nalgene every few minutes throughout the day. And for awhile, my performance was fine.
That was several years ago, and several things changed in the months after reading that book. I got a new job, so I was sitting at a desk all day rather than running around a gym. My job was 9-5 (actually 8-6), so I wasn't getting as much sun (which could explain my vitamin D deficiency a few years later when I started getting all the tests). Work provided a lot of free food, so my nutrition changed. I started running with my dog and ditched the structured treadmill workouts. And I stopped thinking about how much water I drank in a day.
Years passed. My athletic performance fell apart. When I used to be able to easily run 10+ miles in the low 8-minute/mi range, now I struggled to get through 3 miles at a 10:30 pace. No one could figure out why, despite a million tests increasingly elaborate tests that I insisted that they run. Eventually they couldn't find a medical reason for running any more tests, and I gave up and resigned myself to a life of boring runs.
I know how obvious and basic this sounds. It wasn't that I thought that I didn't need water, but that I couldn't find a reliable number for how much water I actually needed to stay hydrated. I work out an average of 2 hours a day, and often longer on weekends. I'm a heavy sweater. That's a lot of fluid to replace day in and day out. Without constantly focusing on drinking more water, it's easy to fall a fraction of a percentage behind every day. If you've ever been overcome by credit card debt from a cup of coffee here and a restaurant dinner there, you can understand how if you're not responsible and only pay minimum payments, tiny debts can really add up over months and years. Maybe I had just reached my hydration credit limit, and I was hydration bankrupt... I could get through the day-to-day little workouts (without flourishing), but any big withdrawals like a 12-hour ride in 90-degree temperatures would extend me past my credit limit and my card would be declined.
I had already drunk some 5 or 6 bottles in the 80 miles and 6 hours (with a little over 9000 ft of climbing) that I had been riding, but I hadn't drunk enough over the past month to pay down enough debt to get through the ride. On my 4 hour drive home I drank another 100 oz of water, which earned me one itty bitty pee. By the time I got home, my lungs had stopped aching (then again, I was back down at sea level by now). At home I drank about another 80 oz or so before bed. I did not have to wake up at night to pee. Over the next few days I sucked down as much water as I could. I started peeing again.
Since the internet couldn't offer me any better information in hydration than, "Your pee should be clear," I spent the drive home thinking deep thoughts about what I knew about water. In California this year, drought recovery was a hot topic. How much would it take for California to recover from 4 years of severe drought? Every time it rained, people would speak authoritatively about how the ground was too dry to hold water. What the hell did that mean?
I don't know anything about gardening, but once I had a basil plant that I bought at the supermarket. I managed to keep it alive for a few weeks, but then I went away for a long summer weekend and when I came home my basil plant was dead, or so I though. The soil was so dry that it had pulled away from the walls of the pot. With some encouragement, I poured one watering can over my basil plant, but most of it ran right through and leaked out the holes in the bottom of the pot. But despite me pouring a gallon of water over the damned thing, the soil was still shrunken and sandy looking. This was stupid. I poured in another watering can, and then another and another. Eventually the water took longer to run through the holes in the bottom, the soil swelled back up to fill the pot again, and the next morning my basil had come back to life. Maybe the same thing had happened to my body. Even though the water was coming out my drainage holes, maybe my soil was still dry and shrunken.
So the next day I kept drinking, and the day after that too. I drank like it was my job. It was harder than it sounded. I was out of the habit of drinking, and had to find ways to remind myself and make sure that I didn't let my glass stand empty for too long. But as I poured more and more water down my throat, really miraculous things started happening:
For months my runs had felt like they were mentally uphill with a headwind. My performance had somewhat recovered since my crisis of a few years before, but my runs had become a chore. Once I started drinking again, my runs started feeling effortless. The secondary effects of this (enjoying running) again alone were tremendous, giving me hope again for the future and excitement for all the adventures and races I could do.
Last fall I was hit by a car on my bike on the way to work and totaled my commuting bike. I commute on a fixie, and when I calculated the gear ratio for my new bike I had made an error and picked a gear that was just slightly too heavy. Or so I thought... Once I discovered water, my rides to work felt comfortable again, despite coming directly after an hour of running every morning.
My lungs stopped aching. I had been blaming myself for this lung ache, since I had recently started smoking rather than eating my weed a couple of times a week. But as soon as I started drinking enough, my shortness of breath and tightness in my chest improved.
The benefits weren't just limited to my athletic performance. My appetite improved: instead of wanting to eat the "I hate myself" dinner of chips and ice cream, I started craving vegetables again. I stopped looking for sweets every time I was stressed out.
Perhaps most profound, almost as soon as I started peeing regularly the crushing depression I'd been living with for months started to lift. I had the energy to do the things I'd been putting off, and the optimism to make myself do it. I worked my way through the stack of unopened mail. I finished purging things from the house and started redecorating to make the place mine. I started looking forward to seeing friends again. Stress at work got me charged up rather than making me want to curl into a fetal position and hid. I stopped wanting to get stoned to eat up time alone...
Who would have thought that something so simple could have such a profound effect on my life. I wouldn't go so far as to say that drinking more water solved all my problems, but it was enough to finally get me over the hump to move on. Cheers!
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