Category Archives: Cycling

I just got back from eating a huge meal, which I felt I could indulge in because I rode my second century of the season today. It was a completely different experience than the one I did two weeks ago. Instead of riding alone, I rode with Hobgoblin and Fendergal, fellow blogger and bike racer. And instead of riding around the hills of Connecticut, this time I rode from Manhattan, beginning near Grant’s Tomb, into New Jersey and upstate New York.

We crossed the Hudson River on the George Washington Bridge, which was one of the cooler parts of the ride; I’d never been across the bridge outside of a car, and the view of the river and of the NYC skyline was spectacular. The ride then took us through suburban Bergen and Rockland counties, eventually taking us out to more rural areas where we could ride on quieter roads through pretty woods and hills. On the way back we rode along the Hudson River for a bit, and it was fun to be able to look out to my left and see the large expanse of water and the hills and trees on the other side of the river with their leaves turning orange. Then it was back into suburbia and back to the bridge and we were finished.

I had a great time talking with Fendergal and Hobgoblin about riding and racing; we also took malicious joy in making fun of some of the other riders, especially those with big heavy backpacks or panniers, which were totally unnecessary, and those who road badly, for instance the guys who kept playing leapfrog with us, passing us and then slowing down so we passed them, and then passing us again. Fendergal is wonderful to have on a ride because she told those guys to stop it, and they did. Such power! There was one guy who decided to ride with us who was wearing an AC/DC jersey and listening to his iPod. There really is no reason to be wearing an iPod on an organized century — why ride with other people if you are going to tune them out? Every once in a while this guy would start bopping around on his bike or would do this ridiculous-looking head-banging move. Strange.

And, no, I’m not always the nicest person when I’m on my bike. Yes, I can be a bike snob, although I’m not nearly as snobby and mean as this guy (or nearly as funny).

Now I can’t decide if I want to try another century, another one all on my own — or maybe even go for 120 or 130 miles, or call it a year and stick with short rides from here on out. We’ll see how I feel next weekend.

I finished off my summer with a 50-mile ride yesterday, my longest since I got sick. I’m training for distance right now, but also trying to get some of my hill-climbing ability back — not that I ever had all that much — so I headed for a hilly course (the Housatonic Hills course, for those of you who know the area — it’s about 12-13 miles from my house).

Things started off fine, although I ran into the beginnings of a parade as I rode through one town (side note: Emily, it was your town — were you there??); people were milling about on the edge of the road, cars were swerving all over the place, vendors were out with their big carts, so I did my best to dodge everybody and got out of there.

I had some nice moments. I passed Hobgoblin, who was riding in the other direction, and we stopped for a brief chat. I soaked up as much of the beautiful view as I could, the green and the warmth. Those things will soon be gone, but I’ll still be riding out there. I need to appreciate them while I can.

I had an embarrassing moment when I stopped in a little market/convenience store and handed the guy at the register $2, when he wanted $2.50. I didn’t know why he was looking at me funny. He laughed and said I’ve been working so hard riding I can’t think straight, which was pretty much true; I do get absent-minded when I’ve been exercising for a while.

It was shortly after this, though, that things got much worse. I was riding along, and all the sudden I heard a scraping noise and my butt dropped about two inches. The bike all the sudden felt very wrong. I stopped to see what had happened and saw that my saddle was at an odd angle; it was pointed up — the saddle had slipped. I didn’t have any bike repair tools on me, although even if I had, I’m not entirely certain I could have made the repair; I still suck at bike mechanics. I thought about heading back to the store and asking to use their phone (no, I have no cell phone) to call Hobgoblin and have him come get me, but I thought better of it. The bike was rideable after all, if a bit uncomfortable.

I was 14 miles from home at that point, kind of tired and annoyed, but I figured I could make it the rest of the way if I took it easy so as not to let the awkwardly-angled saddle cause me any muscle problems. I stood up as much as possible, and hoped that when other cyclists passed me (which they did, of course, in droves), that they wouldn’t notice the saddle and think I was an idiot who didn’t know what a bike should look like.

Everything was okay until I returned to the town having the parade. By now, they were in the middle of it. I thought I’d ride around it by taking a back road; I asked a police officer if I could ride through a road block they had set up, thinking I’d head in a different direction from the parade. He said sure, no problem, so I went ahead, and next thing I knew I was in the middle of the parade. The back road was no escape — it was the parade route itself.

If I were thinking straight, I probably would have turned around and gotten out of there, but I wasn’t, so I just kept riding. The parade was on my left and the spectators on my right, and if I thought the road was crowded the first time I went through, I realized it was really crowded this time. Little kids kept bouncing around dangerously close to my bike, and the vendors were even more in the way. People were throwing candy for the kids to pick up, and I kept accidentally riding over the pieces. I had to work to keep a line between the people parading and the people watching. A few people cheered for me. One kid yelled out “Go, Lance!”

And I just wanted to ride quietly home; the last thing I wanted was to make a spectacle of myself, with my ridiculous saddle and all! The spectators probably thought I was obnoxious for refusing to keep out of their way; I would have thought so, if I saw someone riding through a parade like that.

Sometimes it just all goes wrong, you know?

I think I may try to ride a century this fall — a hundred miles in one ride. In a more typical year, I would have ridden a century last Sunday and would be planning to ride another one or two in the next month. These are organized rides that run on the same weekend every year and that have lots of support — a marked course, food and water along the way, mechanical support, lots of other riders, and usually a t-shirt and other free stuff. I usually spend July and early August doing progressively longer rides to get ready.

But this year my health got in the way, and the typical season got disrupted. So instead I thought I might try to do one on my own, probably in late October or early November. My riding has gotten steadily better over the last month, so that now I feel like I’m back to normal, just about — I’m not in race shape, by any means, but I can ride as well as or better than I could last January or February before I got in race shape.

And I need something to work toward, some sort of goal. I don’t need to be training for races right now, as those don’t start up again until March, but I don’t want to just ride either — I’d feel too purposeless. So working toward a century should do the trick. As to whether I can actually complete one, that will depend on my health and my free time and the weather.

A good number of riders I know have enough endurance to just ride a century, without elaborate preparation, but not me. I’m perfectly comfortable up to about 50 miles, and after that I get tired fast if I don’t train. The training I do for races doesn’t help at all, because most of my races are usually relatively short — 20-25 miles or so for the ones I’m best at. I spend most of the training season working on intensity, not endurance.

So I’ll try to do a series of long rides on the weekends in September and October; the longest I’ve done since I got sick was about 38 miles, so I’ll do a couple of 50-mile rides, a couple of 60-mile rides, maybe a 70-mile one and hopefully an 80-mile one, and then I’ll be more than ready. I’m lucky to have a marked century route that begins and ends practically at my front door, as I can be bad at making up my own routes — this route heads south for a bit before circling back to my town, and then follows a northern loop for the rest of the ride. There are plenty of convenience stores and delis to get food and water, so I won’t miss the food stops of an organized century.

We’ll see how I do!

I’m used to bugs hitting and bouncing off my cycling jersey as I ride, and when that happens I’m just grateful they didn’t land on my face or — worse — in my mouth.  I’ve gotten stung in the mouth before, and it was no fun.  But today something else entirely hit my jersey.  I thought it was a bug, but when I checked to see if it had flown off my shoulder where I felt it hit, I noticed what it really was: bird shit.  This is the first time this has happened to me, and now I wonder why it doesn’t happen more often; I ride under trees all the time, after all.  I had another hour to ride before I made it home, and I could see it sitting on my shoulder every time I turned my head to the right.  Ick!

I don’t like not racing. I’ve been sort of sick for the last week or so and sat out the race today and I didn’t finish the race last week. I don’t know what’s wrong with me; I may have overtrained and now need a break — I rode very hard two weekends ago and may not have let myself recover sufficiently. Or I may be fighting off a virus, or something like that. I’m not sure. But my heart rate is unusually high and I feel weak and tired. I’m not good at backing off the exercise — all last week I wasn’t feeling quite right, but I ignored it and rode a couple times and did a lot of walking and some vigorous yoga. Maybe I’m in need of a real, serious break.

Anyway, while I generally like watching bike races, I don’t like watching them when I’m not able to ride myself. The riders look like they are having so much fun and the pack looks so pretty gliding around the course that I really want to join them. I went to the race this evening to watch Hobgoblin ride, and that was fine, I like watching him ride, but it’s also a reminder that I’m not able to do it myself. Other racers ask me why I’m not racing, and I have to explain, and a couple of them told me that they weren’t feeling well themselves but decided to race anyway — which was not exactly fun to hear. And then I listen to my teammates discuss the race afterward, and they are so full of adrenaline, having so much fun dissecting the dynamics of the race, and I’m jealous. Mostly, though, I’m annoyed because my training is all messed up, and I don’t know when I’ll feel like training again.

I didn’t write about Saturday’s race because it felt pretty uneventful — I rode with category 3 and 4 women and finished somewhere in the middle of the pack, a little towards the back.  I felt uncomfortable pretty much the whole race because I didn’t like the corners; once again I’ve discovered that I need to practice cornering.  I’m particularly bad when I have to make left turns, which this course makes you do; I’m not sure why, but I’m much slower and more awkward turning left than I am turning right.  And I witnessed a nasty crash in the middle of my race on one of those awkward corners — last I saw one of the women who went down was lying on her side with a neck brace on, waiting to be moved onto a stretcher to go to the hospital.  So after the race I rode straight to the car and we went home — it was late anyway, and I was eager to be done with it all.

Well, today I checked out the results online, and it turns out I won a silver medal — and it turns out that I was 22nd out of 34 finishers.  Here’s how both of those things can be true: the category 3 and 4 women ride together but they get scored separately, so although 21 people finished ahead of me, only six of them were category 4 riders, so I got 7th in my field.  And then this particular race awards medals to the top 3 Connecticut riders, and I happened to be the second category 4 rider from Connecticut to cross the line (the others were from Massachusetts or Rhode Island), so I won a medal!  But I don’t have it because I ducked out of there so quickly.  Oops.

I’ve been sitting in my study for quite a while now, reading blogs and aimlessly surfing the internet, wondering if I feel up to posting or even up to pulling a book off the shelf. See, I’m sitting here once again with aching legs. I feel like I’ve complained about the aching legs an awful lot lately. Today’s race was tough, although I had fun and felt okay afterward. But it was a road race with a good-sized hill, which always spells trouble for me.

Hobgoblin and I drove almost two hours, out to the edge of Connecticut at the Rhode Island border, getting up at 5:00 (5:30 in my case) to do it. The race course was beautiful; it was Connecticut countryside at its best, with rolling hills and lots of open space. There was no women’s race, so I rode with the Category 5 men — I was one of only two women out there. The race had a long neutral start — meaning that we rode a section of the course slowly, following a pace car that made sure nobody was pushing the pace. I’m not entirely sure why they do this, actually, except that perhaps it’s safer and more orderly.  The neutral start took us all the way up the course’s main hill, 1 kilometer long, and the race itself started at the top.

I was so grateful for that long neutral start, because without it I would have been dropped immediately. I did fine on all the rest of the course for the first lap, but when we came around to that monster hill the second time — the first time actually racing it — I got dropped. Sigh. Thank God I fell in with a few other riders right away, so I didn’t have to ride the rest of the race by myself — that would have sucked, because there’s no point in driving all that way to ride by myself, when I can do that any time I want at home. But I found 4 or 5 riders riding at about my pace, and we stuck together until we climbed the monster hill for the last time up to the finish line, when I got dropped again.

This is about what I expected to happen, so I wasn’t disappointed, just grateful to have found other people going my speed. I’ve been trying to work on my hill climbing, but I don’t think I’m working hard enough. I climb hills all the time, but it’s too easy to let myself back off rather than making myself push hard. Ugh — I see more hill climbing practice in my future.

Anyway, I wasn’t DFL, as the cyclists say, dead fucking last. That always makes me happy.