Hipster AF

Have you ever shipped a bike? I never had, but I’ve flown with my bike several times and each time I have sworn that I will never do it again. Whenever I rail on about what a royal pain it is to fly with a bike, some person seems to pop out of the crowd to recommend shipping it. “It costs the same amount of money, you get insurance, and you don’t have to deal with dragging it across the airport or finding a taxi/uber that will take the box in an unfamiliar city.” That sounded pretty sweet, so I marked my calendar for a week out from my trip and planned to ship my bike on that day. Here are some things that I didn’t think about when you ship a bike:

1.       You have to take off the rear derailleur to  prevent it from snapping off in the box. You also need a bunch of padding, zip ties, and one of those special plastic things to sit in your fork to prevent damage during shipment. I didn’t have any of that stuff handy and don’t trust myself to pull the derailleur off without breaking anything.

2.       Bike shops need a work order to put a bike in a box. They also expect payment for this service. This costs $60-75.

3.       Since the bike needs to both go into the box, and come out of the box on either side of 2 cross country trips, this means that you will be paying the above mentioned $60-75 four times during this trip.

4.       Some bike shops will not accept the responsibility of having FedEx pick up the bike in their store, so you will need to arrange to have that giant honking box picked up and taken to another location where someone can be trusted to be there for the FedEx pickup "some time before 6pm."

5.       Since you are probably not made of money, you will probably choose to ship the bike via ground, which means that it will take a week on either end of your trip to travel across the country. This means that you will be without your bike for about 3 weeks, 2 of which you will be home wishing you could ride and feeling like you're wasting your summer

6.       You will likely conclude that traveling with your bike is NEVER a good idea, and resolve to only do cycling events within an 8-hour drive. Luckily you live in the west, so all the good riding is within a 12-hour drive anyway.

While my bike was going through this ordeal (traveling from Nebraska to Connecticut, to be specific), my new friends invited me to go on a ride. “I would love to go,” I said. “But my bike is in a box on its way to Massachusetts.”

“Well you’ll just have to miss the marzipan croissants then…” Tom of Maine told me.

“Hang on, you didn’t tell me that there’d be marzipan!” I said. I have this thing for marzipan. I think it’s just the most delicious thing in the world (tied maybe with frosting), and like to pinch globs of it off a roll and eat it plain. I fucking love marzipan more than Oprah loves bread. “I do have a bike…” I told Tom. “But it’s my fixie that I use to ride to work. Do you think there will be hills?”

“Well there’s one hill on Lucas Valley Road, but it’s nothing for you. It’s real short. After that it’s flat all the way through Point Reyes”

The problem wasn’t so much the length of the hill, but that with only one gear if the hill was too steep for even a few feet I’d fail to turn over the pedals and I’d tip over. I had gearing on my bike that let me ride the 10 miles to work at roughly 20mph (48x14, I think), but the largest “hills” on my route to work were 3 freeway overpasses, none of which exceeded 6% incline or a block in length. What would happen if the hill exceeded an 8% grade? Were my legs strong enough to turn over that heavy gear against that kind of resistance? And how long could I stand up to a 5- or 6% grade if it went on and on for miles? Could I do it? Could I maintain the fast cadence that I would need to keep up to go down a hill at 25- to 30mph? The more I thought about it, the more these questions begged for an answer.

I got on Mapmyrun (a service I still prefer to Strava – because it allows me to maintain my privacy) and broke the hill on Lucas Valley Rd into quarter-mile segments  to see the gradient. Mostly the hill stayed in the low single digits, but there was one mile that Mapmy  showed as a 10% incline. Ten percent. For one mile. And then all flat until marzipan. 

Bragging rights. Friends. Marzipan. A chance to work on my weird jersey and glove tan lines…

I had to give it a try.

After driving an hour  to the meeting point in San Rafael, I had to pee like crazy, so while I was in the hipster coffee shop/microroaster, Tom of Maine asked if he could try my bike. “Sure!” I said. “Just don’t hurt yourself. Remember, the pedals don’t stop.” I wish I could have stuck around to see him try to ride my tiny bike, but I really had to go.

When I got back out, Tom asked me, “So tell me, what do you do when you’re on your way to work and you’re coming up to a stop sign?”

Was this a trick question? “Ummmmm… I slow down, brake a little bit…” I’m too old to ride without a brake. That’s just a useless risk. “…look in all directions to see if a car is coming, and I go if no one’s there. If there’s a car coming, I try not to clip out. I can’t really do a track stand that well, but I can pedal r e a l l y slow.”

“You don’t ride around in circles?”

“No, why would I do that? Then I probably won’t be facing the right way when the light changes.” You see, I’m not a hipster. I ride a fixed gear because it’s fun and because it’s less to maintain. Okay, fine, also because it gives me street cred. But on the biggest commuter bike trail in Silicon Valley, most people don’t even know the difference between an e-bike and a rollerblade, and they’re scared of spandex, so there's no cred to be had. So mostly I just ride it because it’s fun.

Lucas Valley Road, as the name suggests, is where George Lucas has his compound… er… “Ranch,” and it does go through a redwood grove that does seem like the setting for a fairy tale, but that’s where the famousness stops. It’s just one of those roads that everyone rides, and if you're from around here you'll find yourself on it someday or other. With my one gear I was having trouble riding at the boys’ warm-up pace, so I noodled on up the road doing my own thing. I wound up towing a stranger for several minutes, and when the road started to get steep enough that it was faster to be in a low gear than a big one he came around and said, “Your bike has no gears.”

“Well, no. It’ doesn’t," I agreed. I don't know why, but when people notice that I'm not riding a geared bike their first comment is always to tell me so. Like I might have forgotten it at home. He was using a similar tone to when I tell old grandmothers on the bike trail that they're wearing their helmets backwards. "My boyfriend back there, the one with the Irish accent? He took my road bike away and said that I couldn’t have it back until I firmed up my big, fat ass.” The stranger looked at me, nonplussed. The uncomfortable silence went on for too long. “My bike is being shipped out of state right now,” I admitted, to cut the tension. “My friends promised me that this was the only hill.” Some people have no sense of humor.
"Oh," he said. There were so many directions that that conversation could have taken, but I was not expecting it to go nowhere. I figured that he must have the personality of a raw potato, and was glad that I wasn't going to be stuck making small talk with him for the next half an hour. 

Shortly after that, the hill started in earnest, and my new humorless “friend” rode off out of sight as my cadence dropped to about 25 RPM. I had my Garmin screen set to show me the current incline, and I don’t know how accurate it is, but I was seeing numbers touching 11% and 12% for a few seconds at a time. It was like doing heavy single legged squats over and over. Every pedal stroke felt like it would be my last. I was sucking wind like a vacuum cleanter, and my arms and back were getting sore from pulling on my handlebars for leverage. Eventually I had to pull over. I sat and caught my breath for half a minute, and then was dismayed to find that the top was only around the next bend. George had passed me during my breather, and we sat at the top waiting for Tom (who had stopped off to buy a granola bar) while I sat there and gasped and waited for my hands to stop shaking. That was it. I’d done it! It would be "all flat" from here on.

We rode down the hill, and on for several miles until we reached one of those little towns that is no more than a crook in the road, that I’m always so surprised to find so close to large cities. I don’t know Marin County very well, but there was some discussion about going to Reyes Station (Tom’s idea), or follow the Marin Century route to Petaluma (George’s idea). Since the boys were technically training for the Marin Century, somehow George won out. I can’t blame him. They had a limited time to get the right training into their legs, and it would be shitty of me to insist that they do a junk ride because I’d insisted on joining them on the wrong kind of bike.

“Is it flat, George?” I asked.

“It’s the kind of flat where there’s an incline…” he equivocated. I gave him a dirty look. But the Irish have drier senses of humor than mine, and George was unfazed. So it was going to be one of those kinds of rides, where I didn’t know what I was in for, and bargained with the devil at every step that if I could get through this one part, then it would all be easy from there. Of course it never works that way, and shortly we hit another hill. Let me be clear: these weren’t enormous hills. They were short and not terribly steep, and it would have been a relatively easy ride on a road bike. But the next hill (which spent more time than the last at double digit inclines) had me digging deeper than I had in a very, very, very long time. I made it up this one again with only one rest break, but I could tell that I didn’t have another effort like that left in me for the day.

“Hey, you guys. You told me that you would wait for me at the top of the hills…” I gasped when they reached the top to find me waiting again. "But..." gasp "to wait for me..." suck "you would have to pass me" hork.

“Claire, you are officially my hero,” Tom said, ruining the smack talk I was hoping would keep me going.

“To be perfectly honest, I don’t think I have any more of those left in my legs,” I admitted. “The next one I’m probably going to have to do some walking.”

Indeed, the next one I did have to do some walking, because I found that if I couldn’t go on and had to pull off in a flat spot, it was very hard to get moving again. I would clip in my good leg at the top of the pedal stroke, and have until that foot hit the bottom to clip in and draw the pedals through the dead spot at 6 and 12 o’clock. Time and again, I would miss the pedal entirely, or get stuck in the dead spot and be forced to clip back out before my bike tipped over. Finally I managed to get clipped back in, and ride up and over the top. This time the boys were already off down the other side, and I had to chase to catch up. Thank god they weren’t being princes. I don’t think I could have been polite if I’d felt like I was the one holding everyone up.

Much to my relief, when I caught up with the boys again we were on the edge of town, and town meant food and drink. Another challenge of riding the wrong bike was that my fixie doesn’t have a bottle cage on it. I had a bottle in my jersey pocket, but the riding had been too up and down for me to trust myself to ride one-handed for long enough to grab a drink. Same story with food. We’d only ridden 27 miles, but they had been hot, exposed, and metabolically tough and I was ready to drink a horse trough of water and then eat the horse.

Giant sandwich installed in my gut, lubricated by about a liter of fluids, I was feeling more optimistic about the ride back. I don’t know if the next hill was the worst we saw, or if I was just the most tired. I made it about 2/3 of the way up before the pedals would turn over no more, and I had to put a foot down to keep from tipping over. I walked while I recovered and the boys passed me. But then when I was ready to ride again, I couldn’t remount. I tried again and again, but I just couldn’t get the pedals moving enough to get clipped in. I could have turned downhill for just long enough to get clipped in and then turned back around, but I didn’t want to give up a single inch of my hard-won elevation. I started growling and screaming, but that had no effect. The hill remained despite my aggressive posing. Eventually I had to keep walking to a spot that looked a bit flatter. But I still didn’t have the power in my legs for the 2 big pedal strokes it would take to get clipped in and moving again. I ended up walking probably about a quarter mile until it flatted out near the top before I could finally re-mount and save my dignity.

When I got to the top, the boys were long gone. But George had reiterated again and again that “at the bottom of the hill there’s a sharp left at Hicks Valley Rd, so don’t miss it.” I came down the hill to find George there waiting for me at the turn. “Where’s Tom?” I asked.
“I don’t rightly know. When I got here he was gone. I’m afraid he might have missed the turn and kept going straight.” Neither of us had cell service, which is the most lonely helpless felling in the world. We stood there for a few minutes trying to decide what to do, but what solution didn't involve a cell phone?! None. it is impossible to problem solve without a cell phone. George wanted to go looking for him down the wrong road. I was in favor of staying put.

Finally I admitted, “George, I’m too gassed to do any more hills than I have to. How about I stand here and wait for him in case he comes back through here, and you ride a mile or so up the road and see if you can find him?”

While I was waiting for the boys, a group of charity riders started to accumulate at the same intersection. You know those know-it-alls who have been riding for like a year and a half, have done a metric century or two, and fancy themselves experts? Charity jerseys and Izumi shorts and neon jackets covered in reflective shit? The folks who leave the visors on their helmets even though they don't own a mountain bike? You’ve seen them before… Well it was that group. 

“Yeah, dude. That went on fucking forever,” one of them said.
“Yeah! Ages and ages. It never ends,” said the guy with the more authoritative tone. He was probably the guy who had done two metric centuries since he started riding and was training for his first imperial century. He was probably authoritative enough to pump his own tires without letting all the air out when he was done.

“I think that’s the steepest thing I’ve ever climbed,” said the less annoying one.

“The steepest thing I’ve ever climbed is that bit at the top of Diablo…” said The Expert.

According to Mapmy, the road to the summit of Mt. Diablo reaches 27%

Okay, pause here: Mt Diablo, at just shy of 4,000 ft is one of the most ridden mountains in the Bay Area. It is not an overwhelmingly steep climb for the first 13.5 miles or so, but it has a very, very steep driveway about 200 yards long up to the observation tower at the summit. Diablo takes most novice riders about 2 hours to climb. If this guy had ridden Diablo, then what was he doing bitching about the 1-mile/500 ft pimple that we’d just come over? And was he really comparing the wall-like monstrosity at the top of Mt Diablo to the little incline we’d just gone over? What a twerp.

Finally, The Expert and his crew decided to ditch the guy they were waiting for and head back to the car. He was walking, you see, and ain’t nobody got time for that. They would go, get the car, and pick him up in Nicasio. I felt bad for whoever the poor guy was. Cycling is full of kind, accepting, socially-awkward people who just want to geek out about bikes and be your friend. Whoever this guy was, he had gotten in with the wrong crowd, and I hope it didn’t cause him to give up riding. Just as they were riding away, Tom came around corner from the direction we were supposed to be going. “Where the heck have you guys been? Where’s George?”

“George thought you missed the turn and went to go look for you. And here he comes now!” I was very glad to have found friends that not only would wait for me, but would go look for them if someone went missing.

While I had been waiting for the boys, in between eavesdropping on The Expert, another pair had ridden by, coming from the direction where George had gone to look for Tom. These guys were the real deal; fast, clearly racers, and the sorts of guys who could spend just as long talking about their Strava stats after a ride as they’d spent riding. They also had mustaches and their gear was of a brand that I won’t name, but that me and MY friends call “all douched up with somewhere to be.”  I described my friends and asked if they’d seen any of them.  They hadn’t, and they rode on. When the boys and I stopped for more water and a pee break  in Nicasio (it turns out that that was the name of the “town” in the bend in the road), the douchy Strava boys were there too.

“Did you find your friends?” one of them asked. They were douches, but they were kind douches. And anyway, I was wearing a pretty awesome hipster kit myself: all lightning bolts and swirls like the scene interludes in Saved by the Bell. I can understand why they would want to talk to me. I'm obviously very cool.

“Yup. Now we just have to go the 15 miles back to San Rafael.”

“We still have like 80 to go,” he brag-whined. “And we’ve ridden like 70 already.” I didn’t react to this. 150 miles, especially when you’re as fit as these guys are really didn’t impress me. And I was annoyed that he would make such an obvious attention grab. I was wrong. He was a douche after all. The mustache and hair long enough for a man bun (on non-helmet days) should have tipped me off.

The last time I’d ridden the road back to Lucas Valley was the time I had snapped my frame with my snatch, and had to ride a broken frame on a broken crotch for 40 miles (did I ever tell that story here?). While I was lost in the memory of that, the boys sat in my slipstream over some tame rollers. After one of them, Tom rolled up beside me. “Did you hear those guys?” he asked. “They were real douched up hipsters. They  passed you going the other direction when you were going  downhill. When I passed them I could hear something about gear ratios, and then one of them goes, ‘And she had no brake!!!’ I didn’t have the heart to burst their bubble, they were so impressed.”

We all rolled along, quite chuffed that someone in our merry band of misfits had impressed a bunch of hipsters. And an impressed hipster is no real hipster, so we had ridden the world of a handful of real hipster douches. I have to admit, despite getting stuck walking uphill a few times, I felt like I was achieving something significant and was pretty proud of myself. I knew we only had the one hill left, and I wasn’t going to have to do something humiliating like have to call an Uber or something. The final hill came, and my legs burned and spluttered through another several minutes of pain. I kept waiting for the road to get so steep that I would have to walk again, but then I reached the distinctive boulder that I knew was at the top, and pulled over to wait for the boys. As long as I didn’t have to dismount, I could still out-climb them, even with only one gear. Okay, I was going to say it. I was pretty badass.

When we pulled back up to the car after 56 miles and 4000 feet of climbing, I turned to my faithful companions. “Okay, I’ll admit now that it was a mistake and I shouldn’t have done it. But now that I have, I’m glad I did, and I’m glad it’s over.”

“That was quite impressive,” said George, without a tinge of irony in his voice. I would have preferred a little shit talking to take me down a peg, but if that wasn’t available then sincere congratulations were the next best thing.

The whole ride home I couldn’t get over how lucky I was to have started a network of riders who weren’t douches. And I was pissed as hell that it would be another 3 weeks before I got my real bike back. Cuz I sure as hell wasn't planning on doing something like that again.

Dying of thirst on the death ride

[This post was the victim of a "did not save." I'm sure the previous version - nearly finished - was a masterpiece. But it's gone forever. So this is what you get.]

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!

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!