Grizzley Claire

Once upon a time, long, long ago in the summer of 2008 Shane and I heard of the Grizzly Century in the mountains between Yosemite and Sierra national parks. Shane rode it that year with a terrible cold and after hill after hill of harrowing climbing (as described by him) he finally abandoned the race somewhere before the final peak, not wanting to descend in the snow with his tuberculosis-like cough. He was sick for months after that, and this is the point where I suppose I should admit that he'd called me to ask if I thought he should ride that day and I'd told him to harden the fuck up and be a man. My curiosity was piqued, of course. I had meant to do the ride last year, but this is Northern California and people flaked on me. I was too poor last year to do the ride anyway. This year I put out the word on Facebook and one person was as intrigued as I was. It should be no surprise that it was Me in Boy Form, Counterpart Chris.

The original plan was to drive the 4 hours down to the race the night before and then just sleep in the car... and then reason won out. I looked at about 5 different hotel reservation sites to find a hotel near North Fork, CA. Mostly they seemed pretty expensive bed and breakfast type places, and then finally I found a cheap Motel 6 right in North Fork for about $60/night. Score! I got half way through booking before I realized that I was booking a hotel in North Fork, PENNSYLVANIA. Shit. I started again with the zip code, and again Hotels.com directed me to PA. I did a Google map search and all the hotels that showed up within 100 miles said "call for reservations." I'm a 21st century kind of gal, and I don't make 15 phone calls to comparison shop for hotel rooms. I do not even like to use my phone for calling. Twenty-first century fail.

There were more fails when it came to planning. "If the ride starts at about 7, then we should be done by about noon, one o'clock at the latest, so we can request a late check-out and come back and shower..." Counterpart Chris suggested.

"Uh, Chris, have you seen the course profile? There must be 8,000' of climbing in the first 80 miles. I can ride a sub-five century, but not over mountains. I was figuring more like 7-8 hours." I was beginning to fear that this ride would be ruined by trying to race through it in time to not have to pay for a second night at the hotel. When the cheapest hotel I could find was an hour from the start, I breathed a sigh of relief. There was absolutely no way we could get to a hotel an hour away and shower in time for a late check-out. I was free to enjoy the ride again.

We arrived at the start and rolled out a leisurely 20 minutes late after buying cartoon jerseys with bears on them. Mine had a bear making sushi and licking his fingers in a somewhat salacious way if you have the mind of a 13-year-old boy, which I do. The first incline hit after about a mile, and Couterpart Chris blasted off. I sat there grinding away on my pedals and breathing hard but refusing to sprint off after him. I could only lose that game, and I would rather hand him the car key in the first 5 miles rather than chase after him for the next 95 and dig myself into a hole I couldn't get out of. The day before I'd ridden a spin class (my 5th of 6 that week) on a CycleOps bike with a real power meter. I'd been crushed when the girl next to me was pushing the same power on the interval sets and didn't seem to be working as hard as I was. I too had become an "average" cyclist, and I had to respect my limitations with 75 miles of climbing ahead of me.

Counterpart Chris finally slowed down for me and I offered him the car keys if he wanted to go on ahead. He declined and we started climbing the first major climb from 2500' to 4500'. After awhile Counterpart Chris said, "Oh my god, when is this going to end?"

"Didn't you look at the elevation profile?" I asked.

"No." (And this is why we're the same person.)

"We're climbing pretty much straight through from mile 1 to mile 75 at 75000', then there's a 5000' drop over 10 miles and it's all flat home. I'm thinking of this as a 75-mile climb, and any downhills we get in between are bonus miles. This is going to be one of those 7 mph centuries." Silence. "Chris, how do you play the alphabet game?" I asked.

"You take turns and each person has to say a word that starts with the same letter. I played for five hours once. Mouse."

"Map."

"Mold."

"Musty..."

And much of the conversation for the day continued like that. When we spread out a bit or on the downhills we would have some time to think of new words, and then we'd pass each other again and yell out:

"Muckraker!"

"Moron!"

"Mastodon!"

"Mucus!"

"MULLET!"

People always knew that we were coming, and after recovering from the initial shock of a couple of kids riding by yelling, "Molester!" "Masturbate!" I think they figured out the rules of the game.

"Hey, it's the kids with the word game!" they would say.

The alphabet game ate up the first 60 miles or so of the ride, and we hardly noticed all the climbing. The views were typical California spectacular, with wooded mountains and those knobby glacial rocks that Yosemite is famous for sticking up out of the landscape. We took lots of pictures, but Counterpart Chris lost his camera somewhere between the ride and San Francisco, and I had an iPhone emergency and had to do a factory reset and lost ALL my pictures since 2009. I will instead tell you what pictures I would have put in here: Note: this is the one surviving picture from the trip.

We got to the top of the first peak where they were serving... lunch? "What mile are we at?" Counterpart Chris asked.

"Uhhh, 27," I told him.

There was an overlook and Counterpart Chris asked a stranger to take our picture. "Bend over, Chris," I told him. Then I stood behind him. Insert picture I'm describing here. Instead I will put a picture of something else. The people around us were shocked, and not in that good-natured kind of way.

"I'm glad that it's not the other way around!" one woman said.

"I think they're homophobic," Counterpart Chris whispered to me later.

"Aw, come on people," I said. "It's for Facebook. You've got to say something like, 'How did the hill go Chris?'" Sheesh, it wasn't Chris and I who had something up our butts.

I stuffed myself with baclava, nutella, and grapes and Counterpart Chris munched on potatoes for awhile before we got back on our bikes. Counterpart Chris is one of those people who can't eat anything. He's gluten intolerant, violently allergic to dairy, and eggs don't sit too well with him either. Plus, he's got a "no high-fructose corn syrup" policy, which is always good to have but was limiting his fueling options. As we picked our way higher and higher up the hill, we were each banking more and more "M" words as Counterpart Chris drifted back for longer and longer periods of time. Because I have grown up in the past few years, I didn't want to rub it in his face because he really did look like hell and I knew the day would come when I was feeling like hell and he would have to wait for me. When that day came, I knew that I didn't want him rubbing my nose in it.

"How are you doing?" I asked.

"If you drop me, I'll see you at the top," he said, which all endurophiles know means, 'Fuck off, I'm not in my happy place and I'm going to punch you if you try to help me.'

"What's the matter? You want some spice drops?" (Some things never change with me.)

"No, if I don't take a crap soon I think I'm going to die."

We hadn't seen a porta potty since lunch, and when we passed the 60-mile rest stop and there were still no facilities, I urged him to do it in the woods.

"What will I wipe with?!"

"C'mon! A leaf! What's worse, wiping with a big ol' leaf or shitting your pants. Just go! How do you think the bears do it???" In recent years I have also amended Claire's Number 1 Rule of Public Pooping: "Don't" to Claire's Number 1 Rule of Public Pooping: "Don't Unless You Will Be Done Before You Can Find Your Page/Load Angry Birds." Chris's angry turds could clearly beat Angry Birds in a race. "Hell, even I shit in the woods las week!" (It's true. Another life experience I can cross off the list.) So finally I stood at the side of the road and smiled and waved as people rode by while Counterpart Chris had a bear in the woods moment.

On the final climb up to 7500' I turned around to share a word like "Marjoram" or something and Counterpart Chris just wasn't there anymore. I had no idea how long he'd been gone and couldn't be 100% sure he was behind me and not in front of me. Anyway, this was the first time all day that I'd wished I'd had more gears. We had been climbing hills that were made for lots of traffic up until this point, but this was more like a service road that didn't bother to carve the flattest path but just followed the contours of the hill, which sometimes got uncomfortably steep. It was just hard enough that I didn't want to give up my mojo and wait for my brother from another mother. When we reached an impromptu water stop about 5 miles from the summit, it took Counterpart Chris several minutes to catch up and when he did he looked ashen and his lips were a funny color. I forced an Odwalla bar on him, despite his gluten thing because it looked like it was either going to be stomach discomfort or a long wait for the SAG van out in the middle of nowhere. He chose stomach discomfort. It was enough to get us both to the top of the hill where there was another spread of fresh fruit, baclava, and potatoes.

We had heard that there was a bad crash down the hill, so we decided to chill in the last rest stop for a bit to let them clear the road. They had a little fire going in a habachi, and next to it there was a pile of wood and... a hatchet!!! "Look, Chris! An axe!" I squealed, grabbing it.

"Uhhhh... be careful with that!"

I inexpertly raised the hatchet above my head and brought it down with pitiful force on a log. I think the log survived. Truth be told, I was too scared to chop hard. Weapons scare me, even hatchets. "Take a picture of me with it!" I said.

So Counterpart Chris took a picture of me looking WAY too excited holding an axe, and then made me put it down. Around that time a big ol' Jeep pulled up with a very dead buck tied to the roof. It was all covered in blood and stuff. I'm not so sensitive to the loss of an animal life as I used to be, so instead of mourning the deer like I would a cute puppy in an ASPCA poster, I just thought it was disgusting. I mean, come on. It's a carcas! And you strapped it to the roof of your car. How's that any different from picking up road kill at the side of the road (it's perfectly good meat, right? It didn't die of a disease or anything) or frying up your neighbor's dog because you're low on hamburger meat? "Hey, Earl! I just stepped on a huge roach! Go get me a cracker!"

Now that we were at the summit, we had a 12-mile, 5000' descent and then a 15-mile flat ride around the lake back to the start. On the downhill I tried to practice my countersteering by pressing on the inside drops, but even though they say it's supposed to be much more stable than being in the hoods, I just couldn't commit to being away from my brakes on a long descent and wound up descending at a comfortable 30 mph rather than pushing it to a pulse-racing 35-40 mph. Where did my huge balls go?

And that's pretty much it. We rode the rest of the way in, Counterpart Chris came back from his bonk. I murdered all the popcorn I could at the finish. Chris accidentally forgot his jersey in the school bathroom (which is why there are no pictures). I stripped down to nothing to change in the parking lot to save myself a trip back to the school, and was only vaguely worried about being entered into the sexual offenders registry for exposing myself on school property. Then we stopped at a Chipotle on the way home and I got terrible heart burn (something that happens to me about once every 2 years). Then we both got grouchy by the time we hit San Francisco again.

The End!

(By the way, does anyone know how to resize images in Google Chrome for Mac?)

So this is what 197 bpm feels like

Grease Monkey's pervy roommate invited me to come on a century ride through the White Mountains in New Hampshire this weekend. It sounded like fun, so I told him I'd go. "I'm glad you're coming," he said, "so I won't be the last one up the hills."
Daggers shot out of my eyes and I said, "Oh, I suck at climbing, I have no problem bringing up the rear so that no one feels bad." It was a lie, of course.

He arranged for me to carpool with a friend of his who turned out to be an insufferable motor mouth. He showed up at Grease Monkey's house half an hour late, and the whole ride up was telling me, "If you go 75, we may still be able to get there with 20 minutes to spare." This was in a 50 zone. After a bad experience with a speeding ticket, I don't push the speed limit anymore. But the guy was a navigator for the Coast Guard and couldn't keep his eyes off the needle of my speedometer. "That guy's got a pretty good pace going, follow that Suburban," he would encourage me. It was making me nervous, so I complied. Somewhere in New Hampshire we got pulled over, and I was ready to push the guy out of the car. I can't afford to pay a speeding ticket, let alone the increased insurance.
"Do you know how fast you were going?" the cop asked.
"No, I don't," I said.
"You were going 50, this is a 35 zone. Is there any reason for your hurry?"
"Nothing other than that I have to go to the bathroom, which always makes things feel more urgent," I told him.
"Really? You have to go to the bathroom? Why didn't you stop? There was a Dunkin' Donuts and a gas station back there. Do you want to give me another excuse?"
"No," I said. "I'm not going to lie."
I guess that was the right answer, because he let me off with a warning and Motor Mouth will live to see another day.

When we showed up, we had plenty of time to spare. The Pervy Roommate came over and yanked up my shorts to about my nipples. He does that all the time. He says it looks like I'm "carrying a load in my shorts" or "like I've got a dick," but I know it's so that he can either look at my cameltoe or my ass. I can't wait till Grease Monkey moves out and I don't have to put up with the guy anymore. Then he put a road rash kit in my pocket. "What's that?" I asked.
"We'll be going down some fast descents," he said. "If we bring it, we won't need it."
"Why don't you carry it?"
"Because I've got no room in my pockets." I looked. He had plenty of room in his pockets, he just thought I'd be the most likely to be in the back.

Just as we left, a latecomer showed up. Some of us went on, while others stayed to wait for him. Motor Mouth sat on my wheel yapping away for a 7ish-mile gradual climb. "You know," he said, "you're pushing a much slower cadence than I am. You should really conserve your energy, you've gotta let your aerobic system take care of it." Later, I learned that he has read one and only one book: Chris Carmichael's book. Great, I was talking to one of those people who thinks the only way to ride well is to ride like Lance.

I wanted to drop him right then and there. Instead I put on my most cheerful voice. "Yeah, I tried the high cadence thing for a season. It didn't work for me. I don't really have much motivation to change, since I keep winning this way." Then I popped it into the big ring and sped up a little bit so that he would have to shut up.

The other guy that was with us had a bike that made me cringe. It was an aluminum frame (scoff!) with a giant pannier rack complete with bag, and an attachment on his handlebars so he could fit all his other attachments on his handlebars. He wasn't even wearing a bike jersey, just a tech muscle shirt from somewhere like Planet Fitness. And an Mdot tattoo on his calf. I didn't know what to make of the guy. I can't stand tour riders that carry so much unnecessary shit, but I can't stand Mdot geeks who take themselves too seriously. He was both sides of the spectrum at the same time. We got to the first turn and stopped to wait for everyone else to catch up. Mr. Touring Bike/Mdot stood his bike in the middle of the road and came over to me and Motor Mouth. "What? Where are your guys' kick stands?" he asked in that dry way that means that he was joking. I decided I really liked the guy.

Once everyone else caught up, we started up a several-mile climb together (Bear Notch Road if you know the area). I happened to be in front, and Pervy Roommate started narrating so that he could be the center of attention at all times. "Claire's sitting at the front," he said in a bad British accent to mimic the tour commentators. "She's setting a blistering pace. She's positively dancing on the pedals." I just kept riding. "Hey, Claire. How does it feel to have a guy with a kickstand sitting on your wheel?!" he asked. I had to laugh. Then a twiggy guy who I like a lot went off the front. Me and one other guy responded. Pervy Roommate, Motor Mouth,Mdot Guy, and the others stayed behind. I pushed hard and kept up with the guys, and then chased Twiggy down the 40 mph descent on the other side. The other boys were a few minutes behind us.

The ride went on like that, with the three of us dropping everyone else on all the hills, and then having to stop and wait (at the first stop, we were waiting an hour for everyone to show up). Climbing up one long climb with a few steep "walls" thrown in, Twiggy went back to take a picture of some funny road graffiti. When he made his way back up to me and The Other Guy, he reported on our progress. "You guys are already about a quarter mile up on them," he said. "I passed Pervy Roommate and he goes, 'I fuckin' hate hills, man,' and then he threw a punch at me." Now that Twiggy was up here, he and The Other Guy stepped on it a bit. I was hanging tight, and then we hit the steepest grade of the day: 13%, but it felt like more. I rode as hard as I could, but soon I was seeing spots and breathing like a moribund asthmatic. My heartrate hit 197, and I had to lay off the pace or risk collapsing. I fell back bit by bit, losing some 50m to them in the next couple of miles to the top.

On the threshold of death...

I wasn't feeling all that great. I don't think I was eating regularly enough, and I'd started the day dehydrated. Still, we had no trouble dropping the others, which was good. Motor Mouth was determined to stay on my wheel as long as possible. Twiggy tried to talk to him once. "I've gotta watch her hub, man!" he told him.
"Her hub's a little lower," Twiggy pointed out.
Motor mouth would sit behind me and talk, and talk as he stared at my ass. Twiggy and The Other Guy helped me push the pace until we were riding so fast that Motor Mouth couldn't talk and breathe at the same time. Then we would speed up a little more and he would drop off. Once we couldn't see him behind us anymore, we would lay off the pace–but not so much that he might catch up.

On the final, gradual climb that started around mile 70, I started to crack a little bit. I told my footmen that I had no intention of putting myself in the hospital to keep up with them, and let them pull away. Don't get me wrong, my heart rate was hanging around 180 (I did Patriot this year at an average of 173) and the this is hard, what the fuck am I out here for?! inner monologue was going at full volume (so that I could hear it over my breathing), but I watched the boys pull further and further ahead until eventually I lost sight of them around a bend. By the time I crested the top of the hill I was ready to whimper and whine to the first person who would listen. Unfortunately, my two footmen had waited for me and I wasn't about to let them know how much I was hurting. Instead I thanked them for waiting for little ol' me and kept riding so they wouldn't make me wait for Motor Mouth and the rest of them.

At the bottom of the 14-mile descent that was our reward for the hill, Twiggy stopped at a DQ to wait for everyone else. The Other Guy and I went on alone. I was feeling the effects of riding so hard, and all I wanted was to get off my bike. Not to mention that I had a HUGE saddle sore on my... well... you know. As we rode the last 5 miles into Conway, someone honked at us. It was the Pervy Roommate's girlfriend. "What's she doing here?!" The Other Guy asked. "All the outlets are in the other direction! There's nowhere she could go out here except to pick up the Pervy Roommate!" We rode through the traffic of all the people who had come to the outlets in tax-free New Hampshire to do their back-to-school shopping and laughed at how we were the only ones moving for miles and miles. After stopping at one traffic light I pushed a pedal down and felt the satisfying sensation of my bike jumping forward, accelerating faster than the cars for a second. I swooped around a turning car back onto the shoulder of the road and felt at one with my bike, a machine that let me balance on two inches of razor-thin pressurized rubber and fly down a hill at 45 mph. This is why I love this sport, I thought. That and the fact that most of those guys are way behind me.

The Other Guy and I got in after about 5.5 hours of riding (but 7.5 hours in real time) for 105 miles. Half an hour later, Twiggy and Mdot Guy rolled in all smiles. After another 5 minutes the Pervy Roommate rolled in drooped over his bike next to The Late Guy. Where was my ward? I couldn't leave until Motor Mouth had come in. It turns out that everyone was too irritable by the end of the ride to put up with him. He was bonking, so everyone had dropped him easily. A minute later my phone rang. "Hi, Claire. I... I'm bonking pretty bad. Were we supposed to take a left or a right on Main Street?"

"Right." We'd made rights all day. It was a circle. Mr. Coast Guard Navigator should have known to keep making rights to get back to where he'd started.

Finally, the caboose rolled in 45 minutes after I'd finished. The whole ride home he talked at me about how I should ride a tandem with him. All I kept thinking was, Why? So I can drag your ass around and you can stare at mine?! I wanted to remind him about what he'd said about gear mashers, but that would have been rude.

Hitting the Spot

When I don't have a goal, I'm convinced that my entire life is going to swing out of my control. If I live even 5 minutes without some sense of what the big picture will look like, then my mind reels. Give me something to focus on, now! Now! NOW! Why get out of bed? Why eat? Why not eat cookies all day? Why be nice to the people around me? Why get on my bike or go for a run or swim? Why save money? Why spend money? What's the point when you don't know exactly how it's all going to fit together into making me... whatever it is that's going to make me a happy, complete person? Okay, so maybe you're a bit more laid back than I am. At least I hope you are. But this should give you an idea about the kind of agony I've been going through this past week as I tried to sort out my life. Not knowing what my next race will be is one thing, but not knowing what sport? Oh the horror!

On Friday I took my bike out for the first time all week. The whole point of the workout was to punish myself. (This, by the way, is not a good reason for a workout.) I just wanted to ride around the same 10.5-mile loop for the remaining 12 hours that I felt I owed myself after dropping out of the 24-hour race. I rode about 56 miles with aching hamstrings, drinking only about a bottle and a half of water, and not swallowing a single morsel of food. Finally I had to admit to myself that my legs and stomach just weren't recovered enough for this ride. I went home even more frustrated than before, swearing that this time I really was going to rest.

That day my phone kept blowing up. "My friend broke his leg and can't do the 2-day ride to Maine and back this weekend! Please take his spot!" Grease Monkey's pervy roommate begged me.
"Come out and do the Climb to the Clouds century with us," my favorite bike shop guy suggested. "It's just me and the boys, but I know you can keep up. C'mon, it'll be fun!"
"Can we do a trail run on Sunday morning," Michelle asked. "I've been wanting to run in the woods, but I need my little wood sprite to come with me!"
Finally I ditched Michelle (who had asked me first) to do the Climb to the Clouds with my favorite bike shop guy. If my legs were so tight that I could barely touch my toes, and I didn't know how I would handle the 135 miles of hilly terrain (it made no sense to drive to the start when it was only 15 miles away), but I just needed to be around people and feel like I could ride again. I needed to PASS some folks. I needed to ride my bike FAST.

After a short night's sleep, I crept out of bed, pulled my bike and all my supplies out of the back seat of my car (where they'd been since Friday's failure), and headed to Starbucks to fill one of my bottles with coffee. I found Teen Heartthrob (one of the other bike mechanics) working the support tent, stood in the 20-minute porta-pottie line (4 stalls for 400 riders!), and finally tracked down my companion at his truck. I have no idea what nickname to give him, so I'll just call him Slick (because that's what he thinks he is when he gives you a hug just so he can grab your butt).

"I thought you were riding over here!" I said to him when I found him at his truck.
"Oh, sweetie, if you knew the night I had last night..." he moaned.
"Why? What happened?"
"Well my wife took my son up to the lake this weekend, and then I get this call mid-afternoon saying that there's a squirrel in the house. It had torn through the screen door and was running around the kitchen. I had to leave work early to chase this damned squirrel out the door and..."
"A squirrel?" I said. "That's why you couldn't ride here this morning?"
"Yeah... it was in the kitchen and..."
"A squirrel? That's what you're going with?"
"It was a squirrel in my house! And anyway, I got a call from a friend of mine last night who does Ironmans. They thought he had a heart attack on Friday and ran all the tests, but they all came back negative. So they put him on a treadmill and did a stress test. He passed with flying colors, and hit 197, which is pretty good for a 40-year-old. Then as soon as he stepped off the treadmill he went into defib. They still don't know what's wrong with him... And all this on the 6-month anniversary of my heart attack."

Let me officially introduce you to Slick. Slick has been a pro mountain bike racer. He's still fast enough at 48 to have a sponsorship from Trek, another from Micheline, another from Mavick, another from SRAM... and those are just the components that I know about. Then, last winter he had some chest pain. After a day and a half with the pain (and an hour and a half trainer ride in the attic of the shop), he finally went to the hospital where they diagnosed a heart attack. "It was just bad genes," he told me. "I came back better than normal on every test at my physicals. The doctors said that there was no way they could have seen it coming. He showed me the prevention list, and I was already doing everything on it. They say I'll be even faster now, though. I've been going all this time on only 3 cylinders. Now I can be firing on all four." But once the season started, and enough time had passed for Slick to take for granted again that he was still alive, he started getting disappointed. His aerobic fitness is the same as it always was, with a lactate threshold of about 180 watts (that seems low to me, but that's what he said), but his medications simply won't let his heart beat fast enough to ride hard and go anaerobic.
"I'm nervous that you guys are going to dump me on the hills," I said. "I'm not a very strong climber."
"Don't worry, honey. I'm not going to be going up any hills very fast," he promised. "And where is everybody anyway?" We couldn't find them, so we left on our own, just the two of us.

Almost right out the gate we caught up with a co-ed pack of MIT riders. "Now here's what we're going to do," Slick whispered. "We're going to let these guys do all the work, because they're wicked strong, and we're just going to sit in and be done with this before you know it." I was excited. I always saw these guys training on my commute to work, and always wanted to see how I stacked up. But they were always going in the other direction, and I was always on my phyxie. This was my chance.

The MIT riders set a stiff pace and I sat at the back just trying to blend in. I didn't care about passing anyone, just as long as no one picked me out as having bad bike handling skills. I still had my aero bars on my bike, which was pretty much the same as a big neon sign over my head saying "Steer clear! I don't know how to handle my bike!" Two of the MIT riders were on a tandem, and they kept splitting up the pack into two groups: those in front of the tandem, and those behind. I kept passing them on the hills (not an easy bike to get around!) and catching up to the front group, just as the road would head back downhill and the tandem's superior weight would propel them back into the gap just closing up in front of me. Stuck behind the tandem again, we came to a tight right turn with some lollygaggers right in front of us. It just so happened that I was just to the outside of the only MIT rider with aero bars at the time, and we hit the corner just as we caught a lollygagger in pink, so all three of us had to take the turn at the same time with me on the outside, Aero Bars in the middle, and Lollygagger on the inside. Suddenly, right in the apex of the turn, Aero Bars swerved. I gasped. Lollygagger looked none the wiser. We pulled through the turn and I dropped back a foot so that I could watch what Aero Bars was doing. She picked a line and swung unexpectedly to the outside, almost knocking me over. That was it. I sprinted to the front of the pack to take a pull. "Hey, snookems!" I said to Slick when I got there.
"Hey, baby doll. What are you doing riding so fast?"
"I don't let anyone cut me off more than two times in a minute without getting the hell out of their personal space," I said before putting in another acceleration to get to the front of the pack where I could pull out of the middle of the road. When I got there though, I had picked up so much momentum that I shot right off the front and rode alone for a few minutes before anyone caught up. I had done it! I had DROPPED a group of competitive riders. I could never hold them off, but I'd had enough in me to get away.
"What the hell was that?" Slick asked once the pack had swallowed me again. "Who cut you off?"
"Fucking aero bars!" I pouted, seeing open road in front of me and hunkering down into my own aero bars to give my wrists a rest for a second.
"Fucking triathletes," he said facetiously.

Then the first hill came along. It was a real pack smasher, about half a mile at a 10-15% grade. I expected to fall far off the back like I always do. I picked a gear just one harder than I would have liked to have taken normally and pounded my pedals. For a second the pack pulled away, and then I started catching them. Then I started passing them. My legs loaded up and I went to an easier gear. I passed more people. Now I was in the front part of the pack. I could see the crest of the hill and clicked back up to the harder gear and pushed over the top as the grade mellowed out. I had stayed with the pack, on a hill! I even got some extra elbow room and rest on the way back down since I had more momentum than most of the other riders carrying me over the other side.

Over the next couple of miles the MIT guys in the front stepped on the gas, the group split, and we lost the group behind the tandem. Now we were really riding with the big boys, and I had the thrill of riding faster than I could ever ride alone. Unfortunately, Slick hit a bump and knocked his saddle nose-up, so we had to stop after about 20 minutes so that he could adjust it and one MIT group, then the other got away from us. Just then Teen Heartthrob pulled up in the support truck and I yelled "OH MY GOD! ARE YOU ONE OF THE JONAS BROTHERS?!?!?!" He was laughing so hard that he forgot to check and make sure that Slick had everything that he needed, and drove off. Luckily, Slick had everything that he needed.

The first MIT crew was gone, but before long we caught up to the post-tandem group and picked up a rider in a Harvard kit (who knows what she was doing with the MIT crew?) riding a creaky, squeaky old Orbea that looked like it needed a tune-up about 10 years ago. "Did you see what she's riding?" Slick asked.
"You mean that rusty old hunk of junk with the saggy chain? What about it?"
"Yeah, but she's riding with only a 23 on the back!" In other words, she was riding without two of her easiest gears! On a double! Not surprisingly we lost her once we started hitting the serious hills, much to Slick's disappointment. "What did you do to my girlfriend, bitch?" he asked.
"Don't call me that! Aren't I good enough for you?"
"Grease Monkey would kill me. And anyway, I don't want to deal with her being bitchy when you dump her for me."
"Oh whatever, you grab her ass too. I should kill you for that. Come on, let's go." I was secretly satisfied that no woman had really dropped me yet. The only reason any female had gotten away from me was because we'd had to stop. There was even one androgenous-looking, über-aero tri-lady who had thought she'd dropped me, only to have me catch her up and pass her to ask where the next water stop was.

Time was going so quickly! We hit the foot of Mt. Wachusett and One Mile Road so quickly! Much to my relief, they were re-paving the auto road, so we would only have to climb the mile up One Mile Road to the Ranger's Station, and then come down off the mountain without climbing the last 3 miles to the top. I pulled to the left to ride around the solid stream of slower riders and pushed hard up the steady 7% grade, losing Slick behind me. As I climbed, I not only had a gear left, I still had enough air to have a short conversation with the guy hanging next to me, despite my heartrate monitor screaming that I shouldn't be riding above 180 bpm.
I waited for Slick at the top, chomping on the first morsel I'd eaten since leaving the house (a Lära bar) and then we were rewarded with a long, fast 40-mph descent all to ourselves without anyone around to look out for. When we pulled in to the first rest stop, Teen Heartthrob was there helping the clueless masses ("Lady, you have no front brake pads. Where did they go? Yes. I do think that's unsafe. Yes, I do think that means that you shouldn't keep riding!"). "Is it true that you turned down a date with Hannah Montana?!" I asked in a loud voice so that all the clueless masses could hear me. He laughed and the clueless masses looked confused, and a little impressed. I ate 2 fig newtons before I was cornered by Curley, eating a can of cold Spaghetti Oh's. He seemed disappointed that I wasn't a pro cyclist yet, and I couldn't wait for Slick to save me. "No wonder he's gained 10 lb. since last year," Slick said once we were back out on the road. "He was eating a can of Chef Boyardee... and did I hear him say that he'd only just picked up the rout 10 miles ago?" Awwww, and all this time I'd thought that Slick hadn't been listening. My knight in shining armor!

We picked up another small pack of riders, but I kept losing Slick, and the time that it would take him to catch me was getting longer and longer. "You're killing me, bitch!" he said, burping in the middle of the sentence, when he finally caught me on the wheel of a strong climber. Don't call me that! "I should have eaten my own food. I don't feel good at all." I hadn't eaten much of anything all day either, and I must have been pushing 100 miles at that point. Then I dropped the pack by running a red light. Everyone else spotted the undercover cop and stopped to wait for the light to change. When some of them caught up, I slowed down, expecting to find Slick at any moment. He never showed. I topped off my bottles at the next stop, ate a Kind bar out of my pocket, and waited and waited for Slick. When we finally left again, we were alone again.

Somewhere around here my garmin stopped. I laid off the gas. Slick seemed to be having a pretty bad day, and leaving him to ride alone just so I could ride alone slightly faster didn't seem like much fun for either of us. Around the 90-mile mark (about 105 for me), I finally started to notice the effects of not eating much all day. All I'd had were 2 fig newtons, a Lära bar, and a Kind Bar. All I'd had to drink had been a bottle of coffee, one Powerade, and about 3 bottles of water. About 700 calories and 2.5 qt of liquid (coffee doesn't count, since it's a diuretic) in about 5 hours on an 85-degree sunny day. I started dipping into my bento box and trying to stomach the sugary candies that I was so sick of. That's when Slick seemed to put on the gas. Either that or I was just running low on gas. Either way, I was pushing the pedals HARD and we caught up to the group that I'd been riding before I stopped to wait 5 minutes for Slick at the last rest stop. On hundred miles deep, and I was still racing, working hard to hang on to Slick's wheel. It felt great! This is why I fell in love with biking!

"This rout is so stupid!" Slick told me around mile 90. "The finish is about 4 miles up that road, but they make you do all these stupid loops around Concord just to hit the 105 miles." We rode and rode, and then we hit Concord center at about mile 101. When I saw arrows pointing away from the school and pointing me home, I groaned.
"I'm not going to ride 3 miles towards my house, then turn around, ride those 3 miles back just for a sandwich, and then turn around and ride the 3 miles again back home!" I complained. "Fuck the pretzels, I'm going home!" I headed home, despite having emptied my water bottles. As I rode over 5 miles of the world's worst pavement with another rider still following me, I must have lead him through every pothole and sand patch in the road. "Sorry," I said. "I'm having a bit of trouble seeing the road. My reaction time is a bit off." Finally he peeled off and went home and I continued on by myself, staring hard at the road, trying to concentrate on picking a line. I didn't remember riding on rough roads being this difficult. Then a tiny little person passed me and looked over its shoulder. What was wrong with that person? Why was it so tiny? I wondered. It took me a second to realize that it was a little boy of about 10 drafting behind his dad. Great, now I was being passed by a kid. By the time I got home and got some water and food into me, I was pretty wiped, but SATISFIED with my riding for the first time in a long time.

I'd ridden 125 miles, and I'd ridden them HARD, right up until it was time to go home. We'd hit the 100-mile mark in about 5 and a half hours, including stops. I'd averaged about 19.45 mph for a very rolling 100 miles (over 3,500' of climbing). I'd kept up with everyone I'd ridden with; even the guys, even on the hills. And I'd even dropped Slick (even though he was having a bad day, and even though his heart meds wouldn't let him ride hard). I had passed a guy in an Mdot jersey. Finally I had that high back from a perfect ride.



While I'd been riding, I was trying to think about why things were going so well. "I've been thinking..." Grease Monkey said when I got back and told her about my great ride. I think that the reason that I'd had such a great ride was because I had other people to chase. "Maybe you just need people around you," Grease Monkey suggested. I just get so lonely when I'm out there riding so much by myself. I like riding alone, but there's only so much you can motivate yourself to push hard. "When you go out and do your rides, you're always by yourself all day," Grease Monkey mused. "It's impossible to keep yourself motivated when you spend that much time by yourself." I don't mean to sound arrogant, but I very rarely have anyone who can keep up with me over long distances. So even when other people are doing the same ride as I am, either I spend the whole time waiting for them, or I ride alone. "At that race last week, you were really cooking. Most people just weren't riding as fast as you were," Grease Monkey went on. "I think that you just need to be around people a little bit more. That's when you ride best, and that's when you seem to enjoy riding the most."
"That's exactly what I was thinking." It's so nice to be with someone who understands me!

So I've made a decision. I need to have fun on my bike again. I don't want it to feel like work anymore. I'm not going to give myself any more cycling-specific goals this season. A little clarification on what I meant in my last post when I said, "I don't think that there's a future in triathlon for me." I'm not talking about turning pro or anything. I think that if I don't do Ironman Cozumel, then I'll never do another ironman again. I also think that if I do do Ironman Cozumel, then I'll never do another ironman again. I do want to do one more before I bow out of the sport altogether. So I've decided to do the Ironman, to not put too much pressure on the result (because, if I were to do too well, then I might qualify for Kona; and I don't want to have ANY MORE TRIATHLONS hanging over my head). Then I'm going to enjoy my offseason. Next season I'll hit the "Reset" button. I'm going to take everything that I've learned this year, and next time I'm going to do it right. But for now, I'm going to go back to what I understand and have some fun passing people.

How to REALLY wear the skin off your butt in 2 days

Remember way back in May how I rode 154 miles in a weekend and thought I was such a badass? Well I've built up a little bit more confidence and endurance on the bike since then, and this weekend more by chance than suicidal tendencies I planned myself back-to-back centuries. I was cognizant that I was coming up on my 1-year anniversary of sobriety and maybe I should do something big to celebrate, but that was more of an afterthought. Mostly, I just wanted to ride my bike as much as I could before winter forced me inside (or at the very least into a pair of running shoes).

So on Saturday I packed up my bike and set off for Lake Winnipesaukee (don't expect me to try and spell that name again!). It was a brisk morning, and Mindy turned up dressed like she was ready to climb Mt. Everest in snow gloves, arm warmers, crampons, and the shiniest pair of tights I've ever seen. Okay, I'm lying about the crampons. The only concession I'd made to the cold was a thin long-sleeved jersey to go over my regular jersey. Turns out Mindy was right. As we rode I lost feeling in my hands and feet and the cold really sapped my energy.

Know what else sapped my energy? The hills. Now you might think that doing a loop around the perimeter of a lake would be flat, because all water is level, and therefore the land around it should be level too, right? You would be wrong. If there was a flat inch on that course, Mindy and I must have missed it. We climbed roughly 3,000 feet in 60 miles, all broken into tiny 2-3-minute chunks. We were constantly either climbing or descending.

The scenery was beautiful. When we started the sun was out and mist was just coming off the lake. The trees started to change colors in New England this week, and there were bursts of color all over the horizon. Not far off we could see the White Mountains, and everywhere there were cute little towns and back country roads. And of course, there was the lake. Poor, poor drunk people who are sleeping in and hung over this morning, I thought. And they call me crazy?

The only blemish on the rout was the McCain signs we kept seeing everywhere. What the hell is up with New Hampshire?! It's bordered by Massachusetts and Vermont, arguably two of the most liberal states in the nation, with the third bordering state being Maine, whose politics are only slightly to the right of the far, far left. But New Hampshire is like our own slice of the Bible Belt right here in New England. I've heard it suggested that it's part of the "Live free or die" mentality that they have up there. They don't want taxes, they don't want anyone to tell them to wear a seatbelt or a helmet, and they don't want the damned government in their damned business, thank you very much! Mindy and I must have seen around 200 motorcyclists, and on all those heads I only saw one helmet. You know where it was? Strapped to the back of the motorcycle. And THESE are the swing votes that are deciding our fate?!

Anyway, the traffic prevented Mindy and me from talking much over the course of the ride (which I was, of course, disappointed about!), but we got back to the cars without major incident, then we parted ways and I turned back around to ride another 50 miles on my own. All was going great as I rode down a beautifully-paved road with the widest, cleanest shoulder you ever did see, until my directions told me to take the freeway. Damn. So I turned around, rode back to the car, and called it quits at about 97.6 miles.

I hadn't brought enough cash with me to buy snacks and liquids, and I'd kind of skimped on my nutrition, and by the time I got home at 5:00 (11 hours after leaving) having only ingested about 1.5 liters of Gatorade, a bag of gum drops, a Baby Ruth bar, and a small bag of Chex Mix, I was kind of seeing stars by the time I came in the door. But I drank as much as I could and ate some broccoli (which I'm convinced cures all ills) and got my shit ready for tomorrow: the Charles River Wheelmen's Fall Century.

But here's the problem: shipping my stupid aero helmet back to the UK had cost me way more than I expected, so it was between paying for the century and paying for the gas to drive there. I looked at a map and saw that the start was only 20 miles away, just beyond Concord where many of my training rides go anyway. So I figured, What the hell, I'll just ride to the start.

So I did. I hopped on my bike at 6:30 in the morning, went to Starbucks and filled one of my water bottles with iced coffee instead of Accelerade, picked up $1 worth of candy at 7-11, and rode to Acton. All was going well until I took a wrong turn on a rotary and found myself on the freeway. It was only 7:30 on a Sunday morning and I was going to stick it out, but the debris on the shoulder got so thick that I eventually had to turn around. It's a good thing, too, because it turns out that Rte 2 and Rte 2A are totally different roads going to different places. I just turned myself around and rode the wrong way back up the freeway, back around the rotary (the wrong way), past the State Police station and the State Penitentiary, and on my merry way.

I arrived at the start as most people were already leaving, which was just fine by me. I didn't want to get stuck in the trap of trying to stay with the big guns for the first half of the ride only to find myself 75 miles from home and bonking. Also, it meant that there was no line for the porta-potties. This wasn't my first rodeo, and I knew that I'd catch up with the middle of the pack before long, then I could leapfrog up as I saw fit.

I passed a group of riders right out of the gate, and one woman with super high handlebars and clip-on aerobars (that doesn't work, by the way ) tried to keep up with me. She couldn't, of course. When we hit the first stop sign after about a mile I was already far enough ahead to have crossed the intersection before I heard a scream behind me and I turned around in time to see her go down. There was no one around her, she hadn't been moving very fast, I hadn't seen her wheel go out from under her, what the hell happened? "Are you alright?" I asked.
"Yeah, just couldn't get clipped out in time," she said.
I said what I could to make her feel better, things like, "I won't tell anyone," and "Any blood?" but I swear, that has never, ever happened to me. How incompetent do you have to be to just not clip out in time? (By the way, this is TOTALLY different from, Rocketpants' experience: Rocketpants' fall: unfortunate sequence of events, this lady: incompetent.)

Before long I had fallen in with some Straight Men Over 40 and predictably, they loved me. Then we caught up with an even bigger crew of Straight Men Over 40, and they were tickled pink to have a girl in their midst who was keeping the pace and making old man jokes like, "This is the weirdest-lookin' downhill I've ever seen!" when we were going uphill.
"Hey, didn't I see you riding to the start?" one guy asked.
"Yeah."
"I told my friend Mitch that you were riding to the start, but he didn't believe me. He thought you'd have to be crazy to ride to something like this."
"I've been known to make some pretty bad decisions..." I admitted.
"Hey, Mitch, this is the girl we saw riding to the start!" he yelled to another guy in the pack. "I told you she was doing this thing!"

It was encouraging to have the adulation of so many Straight Men Over 40 marveling at how I'd ridden to the start and I was still keeping up, so I felt compelled to show off a bit. Where normally I would let myself drop back a bit on the hills, I rode hard to keep the pace. I made sure I stayed in the front third of the pack, and made excuses to take pulls and push the pace. Then, at about mile 20 (which was mile 45 for me), I ran out of liquid. I hadn't ever really caught up on my hydration from yesterday, and replacing one of my bottles of sports drink with a diuretic had had a double-whammy effect.

And that was when we hit the hills. Steep, terraced fuckers that just went up and up around every corner, and when you thought they were over, they went up some more. "Do you guys know where the first water stop is?" I asked.
"At about mile 50," one of the guys told me. Fuck! I was going to have to ride another 25 miles, over an hour, without any liquids, and it was starting to get warm. I hoped it would be downhill, but is it ever downhill when you need it to be? I could feel that I was fading a bit, and it was taking a little more effort to stay with the group. We climbed about 750 feet in short jags over the next 15 miles, and I tried to be cheerful, but my good mood was rapidly disappearing. I couldn't be fucking around with a group right now, I needed to get to food and water as fast as I could. On a steep, 20% grade I took advantage of the 50-pound advantage I had over most of these guys and dropped the group. I went on ahead as fast as I could, I didn't want to be messing around braking on the descents and I wanted to be alone when I inevitably got grouchy.

I reached the top and had a beautiful, expansive view of the foothills of the mountains in New Hampshire to one side, and the farms and rolling hills of Massachusetts to the other, and even more fall colors as far as the eye could see. But I had other things to think about. I sped down the hill, and with 75 miles on my watch, I was worried that I had missed the food stop. I interrogated the next guy I came to, and probably wasn't too polite about it, since I thought we'd missed it and was getting ready to blame him for it, but he told me we still had 5 miles to go.

When I finally hit that food stop with my mouth phlegmy and sticky from dehydration, I had one and a half bottles of water, two bananas, a bagel, a cookie some pretzels and maybe some other niblets. The Straight Men Over 40 thought it was hilarious that I'd dropped them. I was just surprised I'd made it 75 miles on such little food and water.

Now recharged, I saddled up with the Straight Men Over 40 and we started to climb right out of the aid station. I dropped them in the first quarter mile, and decided that I wasn't obligated to wait for them, so I rode the next hill alone. On the descent I was caught by an overweight guy who felt the need to talk about all the centuries he'd done, probably to compensate for what people might think of his weight. I was happy for him and the eighty-something pounds he'd lost, but I found it an obnoxious way of bragging, and couldn't wait till the next hill to drop his fat ass.

Then I picked up another Straight Man Over 40. When he passed me and couldn't drop me he asked if I wanted to work together. He was about a foot taller and had almost 100 lb on me, so I said sure. He had the kind of big, curly hair that you can tell he would talk a lot, but I was too lazy to drop him. "You can save like 30% of your energy by drafting..." he started to explain. I hate it when people try to explain the basics of cycling to me, because there's no way your can tell them, "Dude, I know," so I just let him talk until he was spent. Then it was my turn to pull. I hopped in the front and set a stiff pace for him to keep up with. I was feeling really good again after my feast at the last rest stop. "You're riding pretty good for mile 70," he said.
I looked at my watch, "Actually, 95," I corrected him and smiled. His face was pretty priceless.
"My god, you're ready for the Tour!" he said when it came out that I'd ridden 100 miles the day before (I forget how, I know I didn't bring it up).
"Yep, if they'd let women in," I joked.
We talked about the tour, about cycling, about races, and he got increasingly flattering about my riding. "Man," he kept saying, "I can't wait to tell my brother about you... making me hurt like this after 100 miles!" then an I can hardly believe it chuckle. His brother was apparently an even bigger cycling geek than he was.
He was more and more flattering about my riding, and he boosted my ego so high that I continued to ride hard. "You should get into racing," he was saying. "You could be a Cat 2, at LEAST!"
I know I'm cocky about my riding, but I'm conservative about expectations about where I'll stack up against real cyclists. I may be strong in small-town races, but I know that there are women out there who ride like beasts. I figure that if 18 mph fitness is like running a 10-minute mile, 19 is like a 9-minute mile, 20 an 8-minute mile and so forth, my skill is about equivalent to 7-minute pace: pretty good for an age grouper, but that's warm-up pace for a champion. The best women in the world can do 40 km time trials at 23 miles per hour or faster, I don't even know what their speeds look like in pack riding. There's nothing I would like more than to be paid to ride my bike, but women don't get paid to ride their bikes. While even the lowliest male domestique gets paid $60,000 per year, even the best women in the sport are riding for little more than free bikes and smalltime prize purses. It makes me angry.

At the 75-mile aid station (roughly 100 miles for me) I ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a handfull of pita chips, the Straight Men Over 40 caught up and joked about how I'd dropped them, and so they wouldn't offer me a ride home anymore, and then Curly and I set off again. He now had me competing on an international circuit and I was getting a bit tired of it. Anyway, I was dropping him on hills, and he was having to ride pretty hard to catch up, my drafting advantage was gone. Then 3 riders sped by, lead by a woman, and I took off after them. Ain't no woman going to pass me!

They were riding a pace that made me work my ass off, but I was keeping up. When it was my turn to pull I rode till I was slack-jawed and breathing as hard as I could. I was going so fast that I hardly had time to point out the potholes before we were over them. I kept going for longer than anyone else had been pulling just to prove a point, and then the other woman took over, keeping the pace high. As I drifted back I heard one of the guys say to the other, "Where did these chicks come from?!" Those final 10 or 15 miles were the fastest I rode all day, holding an average of a little over 21 mph. We were riding so hard that we missed one of the turn markers on the road and everyone had to stop and figure out what to do. Thankfully, after that we slackened the pace, we were already at about mile 97 (122 for me) and it was time to cool down anyway. Curly was dropped.

Unfortunately, this group seemed to have a pretty abominable sense of direction. We found the course again, but before long the woman yelled out for us to make a right turn. I hadn't seen any turn signals. I was second-to-last and slowed down for the sharp turn, but the guy behind me didn't see us slowing in time. Suddenly his brake hood was up my ass and he was pushing me down the road. "HEY!!!" I yelled. The brake hood got out of my ass, and then rolled right back into it again. "HEY!!!" I yelled again. We made the turn, and immediately the front two started saying, "Wait, this isn't right!" I didn't even stop, I just turned around and rode right back out again, alone. They caught up and the guy who'd hit me apologized. "If you wanted to grab my ass, all you had to do was ask..." I said, trying to be nice about it, but now I wished I could drop them. I rode the final few miles with them, and then they sailed right past the high school. "It's over here, guys!" I yelled after them. They kept riding, and I just stopped and turned my bike right around. They never turned up in the parking lot, and I wonder what happened to them.

I shoved some chips into my face and made myself a sandwich before Curly rode in. He gushed a little bit more about my ability to drop him after 125 miles. It made me a bit nervous, half the people sitting around at the finish were women, and not the kind in pink fashion jerseys riding Bianchis either. Letting Curly talk me up was almost like bragging myself, and you never know who's listening. "Well, we'll see next summer," I said at a volume level with his (loud). "I've gotta work my way through the system first... There are lots of talented women out there." Then I made an excuse about not wanting my legs to cool off too much and hopped on my bike and headed for home.

There wasn't much skin left on my ass, and I had a generalized fatigue deep in my legs, but I had no problem riding the last 20 miles home. In fact, the biggest pain was the one in my ass riding over rough pavement, so I just clicked up a gear and stood up. Biking is easier on your joints, bones, and muscles than running and as long as I kept eating, I felt like I could have gone on forever. I pulled into my driveway after 146 miles, and got off my bike.

This week my legs have been tired and heavy, but not exceptionally sore. Still, I've been taking the train into work.