Nuf said

Whilst Zach works away in Dubai, Julie and Sasha came to visit.

Coffee and Lies #137 Far and Wide

This week was all over the place.  I won’t even try and link up the assorted events.  In no particular order here they are:

Ready or not, Cyclocross season is coming.  Following the abysmal failure of my training program last year and the sobering reality of heart ailments targeting my demographic I have embarked on a new training schedule using twenty one day cycles.  My training always takes on an increased urgency in August.

With my love of gravel riding and a new objective for 2016 on the horizon my motivation for racing Cyclocross is pretty low.  The last time it was this low I ended up on the podium at the end of the year.  I have no such aspirations this year. I am nothing if not jaded. I am in fact ready to abandon my Cyclocross racing for 2015 at the drop of a hat.  All I need are some discouraging results or an injury and my fate is sealed.

                               That thing on her wrist is the "before" picture....
Hottie had so much fun with her wrist surgery she decided to do it again and go bigger this time.  Tragically her summer biking season is over and the next bike she will be riding is likely her fatbike on the snow.  The snow is months away and thus you have an idea of the magnitude of her surgery. She is relearning to use her left hand for all things and I am relearning to vacuum.

Taking care of Hottie kept me from partaking in the annual team cross camp in the Methow.  Since we bought the cabin every weekend from April to November is a lot like cross camp so I think I will survive.   

A deep-winter full-blown Coffee and Lies secession 

                            Note how Jesus-like the Wizard of Coz appears

I was able to join in the Coffee and Lies ride here in town and with most of the fast guys over in the Methow the ride here looked the way we describe that ride to others.  It was a friendly ride.  Usually it is a life or death race and we lie and say it is a friendly ride.

Following the ride our coffee conversation turned unusually serious as the topic turned to heart problems. As aloof and dismissive as I am, even the great Evo could not steer the topic back to wax based lubricants. As KB put it, working out may help the mechanical issues in and around your heart but it may harm the electrical functioning.   Whoa- serious shit.

Last Friday there was a secret meeting of the executive committee and white smoke was finally seen rising from the chimney of Brad’s cabin following the final vote. McWoodie sent an email announcing the committee had stuck a pin in the 2016 calendar and declared it time to return to the continent for some serious cycling as we did back in 2012.

                                 A chip off the chip off the old block
My oldest son and his wife have spent winters in Moscow and after trying the other extreme and spending this summer in Dubai my daughter in law and grandson will be visiting us for a few days while Zach finishes up his internship in Dubai.  At the end of the month they will rendezvous back in Philly for his final year of graduate school. 

So there you have it.  Looking back and looking forward. Looking near and looking far.  There was laughing and seriousness.  This week had it all.

Hurricanes, Chickens and Dicks

Yeah.......Pretty cool
This adventure started out like so many others. A series of seemingly unrelated events aligned and I found myself in an interesting situation that I now feel inclined to share.

A theme for this ride was timing. That theme was kicked off on the Wednesday before when I was doing commutervals on my way into work. If you imagine one of those days when you hit every light red it was like that. Streets that are nearly always deserted had cars backing out of driveways with groggy drivers. It just kept happening and finally I made a game of it.


A half dozen men who sport the orange were planning to ride to the top of Hurricane Ridge and it sounded like a fun time. Once a year they open the road to cyclists. Perhaps a more accurate statement is that once each year they keep the freaking cars off the road for five hours and let the cyclists enjoy the view without the stench of exhaust or the threat of being mowed down by a Winnebago with a WALL DRUG bumper sticker.

I managed to meet up with the guys at the ferry just as they pulled up. I took the perfect timing as a positive sign. Despite the sign saying there was a two hour wait we got on the next ferry. Timing worked out again.

Once on the ferry it felt like we had all the time in the world. Find some ingredients for dinner, find our evening abode, eat, chill and sleep. It was nice not to feel rushed.

Big John had a friend with beds so we were able to crash near the ride start the night before and skip catching a pre-dawn ferry. The place was right out of middle earth complete with a forest dweller who offered us some vegetables right out of the ground. After a fitting pre ride dinner we crashed and crashed hard.

I woke a bit before sunrise and could hear my mates stirring. I checked the clock and it was one minute until the alarm was supposed to sound. The perfect timing continued.

Our morning unfolded like most do and before long we were dressed in matching costumes and anxious to get going. With road names like Chicken Coop and Kitchen Dick we knew we weren’t in Kansas anymore. I guess one of the selling points of living in Sequim is you can win a lot of bar bets with people trying to spell the town name. The street names are no less unique.


We followed the cars with bikes on them to registration where got our wrist bands and it was time to go. I’ve been doing races and Fondos for the last few years so the casual "start when you want" format felt odd. We rolled out and our ride followed the script we had all agreed upon. We would each ride to the top at our individual paces. We were free to go fast or slow as our conditioning, genes and mood dictated. The sorting took shape almost at once. John shot out first, his Pavlovian instincts quickly overruling any emotions or logic that might have slowed him. The Silver Bullet and I settled into a good tempo and we were locked in for the duration.

the

The Silver Bullet rolling just fine
I like to think that I do fairly well on long steady climbs. During my road racing career and on overly competitive group rides when we hit something that takes more than a minute to climb I am dropped straight away. It takes me a couple minutes for my body to shift into climbing mode. I don’t know if it is a cadence thing or what causes this but I’m good on short kickers and long steady climbs but in between I’m just crap.

On longer climbs like Cougar or Sauk I get dropped right at the bottom then I get in gear and soon pass some of the riders who dropped me. In addition, I had lost a couple of stubborn pounds so I was hoping that would translate into increased climbing prowess.

I watched my HR slowly climb and I felt good. I had ridden this road two years ago with only passing cars for company on the road. This day I had other riders around me so I could target them and pass them. Over the course of the day Barry and I would be passed by only four riders, one of whom we would later pass back so the net was three riders. Not bad for old men.

My legs started whining and I was still in zone four. I tried to embrace Rule # 5. This did not, however, result in any increase in speed. My HR held solid in zone four and would be there pretty much the entire climb. That was all I had this day.
The road soon emerged from the forest and the views opened up. Barry and I were passing people at a good rate. The riders included the full range. Fast and slow, skinny and large, young and old were all riding and enjoying and suffering as they chose. There were Schwinns and Pinerellos . Carbon, Ti, Steel and Aluminum were all present and accounted for. There were bike with racks and tubulars. This was a real smorgasbord of cycling.

Apparently the "bike only" rules were not well enforced and there were a handful of recumbents. Men and women with grey scraggly beards, tie dyed shirts and smelly wool shorts were plodding along. My observations indicate you have to be at least seventy years old to even buy a recumbent. It was disgusting. Flags and streamers and stuffed animals were attached to the filthy contraptions. I waited to see if any of the clowns were juggling. I followed the code and refused to acknowledge their existence. One of my mates offered some encouragement to a recumbent "driver" and I quickly coached him to ignore them in the future. That is what friends are for.

As the air grew thinner the views got better and better. We continued to pass people and the wonderfulness of not having to look over your shoulder or listen for cars was awesome. The bike-only environment was so refreshing.

We were getting closer to the top and as we rounded a corner I could see the road ahead was higher than I wanted it to be. I also knew that the high point I could see was not the high point of the ride. We continued to churn the pedals. Before long we were on that corner and then we could finally see the final turn. We had more climbing ahead but with the target in sight we kept pushing.

We could hear the faint sound of drums. As we got closer to the top the sound grew louder and it provided a needed mental boost. Soon we were rounding the corner and the grade was letting up. Our speed picked up and my chain zipped across the rear cassette.


As we rolled into the parking lot at the top with some speed there were people cheering. I noted many riders with their heads dropped, spent from the effort. For those who were in good shape this climb, though far from back-breaking, demanded a serious effort.

You're at the top of the road !
I looked around at the riders who had finished the climb their faces revealed the relief at only having a long downhill between them and done. This was not our plan today.

Someone told them they would get free beer for doing this.
Someone lied.
Some people are so easily fooled.
"But wait, there’s more! If you act now we’ll double the offer!" We found Big John and the three of us headed down looking for the others from our team who had driven over that morning and thus had started much later.

After a speedy descent we spotted our brethren and our fingers got busy shifting from big rings in front and small in back to the reverse. We then climbed it all over again with our mates. It was all about timing. We kept it "real" but still found ourselves passing riders. We were even passing some riders we had passed on our first ascent. Ouch !

At the top we took group photos and enjoyed the view. The Cheetah commented that he was going to do this ride every year. It was a pleasant change to do a ride that was challenging yet didn’t leave us physically destroyed.

Can you spot the black sheep ?
The descent was long. It was sobering to think we had just climbed all of this. Even more sobering to think we had climbed it twice. It kept going and going. As we descended the thousands of feet our water bottled collapsed because of the pressure differential and on an innocuous curve a team bottle fell out of the bottle cage of one of our group necessitating a short retrieval activity. Realizing what had caused the bottle to disembark I popped the valves on my own bottles and heard a "woosh" sound. Then as I returned to the downward ride I looked and saw a handful of strewn bottles on the side of the road. Lesson learned.

Like food, only not as good for you
Back at the parking lot we changed clothes and partook in the provided post ride meal.

We parted and I was glad I wasn’t the one driving. Soon we were stuck waiting for a submarine at the hood Canal Bridge which wasn’t all bad. It was all about timing after all. We elected to return via the Kingston to Edmonds ferry which saved my life. We got in line and relaxed. The Silver Bullet bumped into someone he knew and Big John and I did our best not to embarrass him too much.

We made it back in plenty of time for dinner so once again, the timing worked out just fine.

 

If it came in a can I would be first in line

Despite my confidence at telling my grandkids that all the cool things are hard, sometimes the hard things are depressingly hard. 

After a healthy recovery from the one-two-three, wait, four punches of the Leavenworth Fondo followed by the Ellensburg Fondo and then capped with the Rhonde of West Seattle and the “day after” throw down I waved the white flag and declared an out-of-sequence easy week. 

Hottie and I did some hiking on the weekend and I mixed in some volunteer trail work (using a Rogue Hoe which is among the coolest fit-for-purpose tools I’ve ever used).  I did a gravel ride and while I didn’t doddle I did not dig deep either.   Thus I completed a solid week of recovery.

Rested and ready I returned to my training plan which naturally includes intervals. 

For illustration purposes I shall herein summarize Joe Friel’s books:
1. Make a plan with Intervals
2. You gotta do them
3. They gotta hurt
I shall now add the addendum which is the summarization from his last book aimed at older racers:
4. You gotta rest more than when you were younger

Just like losing weight or cutting the grass at a football field; it isn’t the complexity of the task that is challenging; it is the difficulty of the task that is the challenge. 

I can ride 200 miles at a low to moderate intensity and I will be tired when I’m done but at no point will I hurt as much as I do when I’m doing hard intervals.  In case you’re wondering….  If intervals aren’t hard they’re useless.  If you are willing to pay the price, you’ll be faster and able to go fast for longer.

Now that we all know the secret why don’t we all belly up to the bar and order up a heaping helping of guaranteed-to-make-you-fast intervals?  Because they hurt like hell, that’s why! 

It is absurdly easy to tell someone to eat less and do more if they want to lose weight. It is hard as hell to be hungry and also exercise when you feel tired and are starving.  Even those blessed with the rare gifts of speed or endurance will see those gifts fade as they age.  What was once easy becomes harder and harder as we age.  Whoa, kind of a downer Evo….

What does become easier as we get older is the self discipline to make a plan and stick to it.  For the cynics amongst us, I will concede there is a fine line between self discipline and being in a rut.  Never-the-less I’m calling that a benefit.

On the plus side of the equation the high intensity intervals not only boost fitness but slow down the aging process in general.  I’ve been doing intervals on a bike for thirteen years.  My max heart rate hasn’t dropped a beat over those thirteen years.  Max heart rate isn’t an end unto itself, but an indicator of good health that says that my body isn’t THAT much different now than it was when I was forty years old. 

Yes it sucks that the benchmark is a forty year old body.
Those benefits are far from my consciousness when I am cross-eyed in zone five.  My body resists going to zone five by complaining all the way there.  Once my body knows it can’t get out of it the fighting stops and I do my time in the pain cave.  I do rejoice when I get to leave. 

Despite all the knowledge of the benefits, the familiarity of the routine and even any carryover fitness it is still hard and it still hurts every time.   I am shocked by how much it hurts. The lunacy of riding down the street at six in the morning in a skin tight superhero suit at my age and station in life, hits me between the eyes.  I was doing intervals on the track in high school forty years ago.  I can’t imagine that many of my high school teammates are doing them now.  What kind of an idiot does that make me?

I guess I hope it makes me a faster idiot.

Gravel roads lead to the coolst places !

With a name like 5130 it had to be good !

 Nothing magic, just another gravel ride. This time it was up the Chewuch and take a left. The grade from there was designed to scare off the faint of heart.  Once you get the first two kilometers behind you the grade mellows and the valley opens up.  The scenery is a changing as the width and steepness of the valley keep changing.

You can't tell from the photo but this "road" goes straight frickin' up.  I stayed on 5130

Yes; uphill......

I have failed as a photographer.  This road really does go straight up.  When I saw it I thought I would be walking my bike.  When you get to the steepest part, the road turns to the right and gets steeper.

This was my view just before the thunderstorm

It was an awesome ride.

Coffee and Lies #132 Ruts and Roots

                                                Cooler days....................
This past Saturday seven separate fools assembled on six Cyclocross bikes and one roadster to link together as much unpaved terrain as possible in West Seattle and surrounding environs. 

These journeys are the result of hours upon hours of exploring “where does this go” paths.  Stringing together these rabbit holes makes for an unusual, perhaps even contrived, route. We would be riding along a street and then slot through a narrow opening of chain link into an overgrown greenbelt or a narrow trail in a thickly wooded drainage. On the other side we would often emerge from an equally obscure portal.  At one point I wanted to refer to the course as the escaped convict route.  We weren’t quite jumping over fences and running through open doors of people’s houses, but it sure wasn’t riding along a bike lane either.

The early pace was as friendly as we warmed our legs in the rare July 4th sun.  Soon we were careening down loose dirt and gravel under a shady canopy of trees. Even in the shade the humidity gave the air a density that literally hit us right in the face. The combination of heat and humidity was a double whammy that would take its toll over the next thirty hours. 

As we made our way south it seemed our guide for the day, El Chefe’ was trying to earn the moniker “The Pied Piper of Pain.” He was the only one who knew the way and thus was solely responsible for our enjoyment or misery.  Depending on your idea of humor his mood could be described as either playful or sinister.  Some the trails had tree roots that required some rarely used bike handling finesse. 

                                                      Rural Gravel
While we could ride with a social effort on the downhills and on most of the city streets but the climbs on dirt and even some of the paved climbs required significant wattage just to stay upright.  The double digit gradients worn down our legs and the technical twisty trails made our arms and shoulders tired.  

Two early mechanicals slowed our progress.  While we gave thanks that we weren’t changing tires while shivering with frozen hands - the heat was beginning to take a toll.  My bottles were empty and my food dwindling. “We gotta stop for more water,” I begged out loud all the while wondering why nobody else had spoken up.  Did Leavenworth teach us ANYTHING?

                                                      Come on now................
We found some water and everyone topped off.  We inhaled muffins from a coffee stand and were back on our way.  The pied piper had more up his sleeve and we kept finding more and more ways to make our route more circuitous.  At times we could see the Space Needle to the north which made our turns east and west all the more ominous.  Another mechanical gave the ride a “Bridge too far” feel.  As much fun as the ride was the combination of heat, dehydration, distance and climbing made the idea of being done pretty attractive.

By now the sun was high in a cloudless sky and our legs were coated with the dust of an assortment of urban trails. We had bushwacked through thick foliage and shouldered the bikes when needed.  We had ridden through Hazard County and managed to avoid both shotguns and coon hounds.  We had been through neighborhoods of the rich and neighborhoods of the criminally famous.  We crossed over a dozen bridges.   I had leaves hanging off of my right shoe. Another flat tire was the icing on the cake. 

                            Don't try this at home.  If you're in France, go for it !!
We crossed Holiday parade routes and held our own on the Joe M crit course.  As our journey neared completion I could tell the heat had sucked the life out of us.  We had ridden for five hot hours. Our route totaled over 1,400 meters of climbing. There was pain in our legs. We parted with minimal fanfare.

After my shower I stepped on the scale. Despite drinking five bottles of water and eating a thousand calories of food I was four pounds lighter than when I started.  Dehydration was the flavor of the day.  I drank and drank and drank some more.

It was only after my re-hydration was well underway that I realized how baked my legs were.  It struck me that our bodies form a hierarchy of physical challenges to align with the greatest threat to our health.  When I was thirsty that took precedence over everything else.
 
Tux also got in over his head and Hottie had to take him to the vet to get put back together.  He is on the way to a full recovery.

After the best Fourth of July Barbeque dinner of my life I fell asleep oblivious to the fireworks around us.  In a spirit of bravado I got up Sunday to meet up for the usual coffee and lies ride.  I knew that in my depleted condition I wouldn’t think of mixing it up with the fast guys and a slow ride would exorcise the lactic acid from my legs.

Considering the warm sunny July day it was a freakishly small group that rolled out on Sunday morning.  A late night of fireworks and adult beverages had thinned our numbers significantly.  We picked up the Wizard of Coz and still were only four strong. 

I’m not sure how it happened, but soon we were moving waaaaay faster on the west side of Mercer Island than we should have been.  As we were churning along I looked down at my quads to see if there was blood coming out of my skin.  My legs gave me a Whisky Tango Foxtrot message.

We stayed together past the big hill and then burned off one by one until only Big John was left.  John doesn’t know what a recovery day is.  He was laying down the law and all I could do was whimper. 

On the way back John went off the front and I would like to say we let him go. In fact we could not have held his wheel if there had been guns firing at us.  Coz, The Cheetah and I traded pulls and it hurt.  Instead of sharp pain in my quads or hamstrings it was the dull total leg ache of too many miles AND too much intensity.  As I swung my useless sacks of meat in circles trying to keep up a high cadence I wondered if I had an addiction to pain.

On the final island climb I got into a smooth but painful rhythm and passed Coz and The Cheetah. Since it already hurt, hurting more wasn’t much of a stretch. At the top I dropped my head and coasted down to the shade.  It took an even greater effort not to fall onto the grass and curl up in the fetal position and cry.  I looked at my gloves hands and wondered if the real reason cycling gloves leave most of your fingers and thumb exposed is so you can suck your thumb when you hurt this bad.

We dodged several gaggles of Freds as we made our way back to coffee.   The procession back to the car post coffee was blissfully void of hard efforts.  The damage, however, was already done. 

Later as I watched the US Women take the World Cup I massaged my aching legs. I ran “The Stick” over my tender quads. I remembered doing the same with a metal water bottle in a hotel at the top of Alp d’Huez.  That had been one of my hardest days on a bike. I worried about how my legs would feel on Monday when the full impact of the weekend would settle into my quads. 


Although the Sunday effort had been hard the times were not fast.  I had expected to see some results from the pain on STRAVA.  This was not the case.  It seems my suffering had just been for the “fun” of it.

The Saturday ride was nothing in comparison to Leavenworth.  It was a hard ride but it was not epic.  It was the Sunday ride that was akin to taking a hard hit to an already black and blue bruise.   The hard effort on really sore legs just drove the pain deeper.   My bones hurt.

Am I in such a rut and I will go and ride no matter the circumstances?  Have I become so accustomed to pain that I either ignore it or dare I say even seek it?  How is it I can embrace the sweet suffering of cycling and yet remain so slow?  Like so many things in my life I expect I will have the answers only when it is too late to apply the late-in-coming wisdom…….

Midyear numbers 2015

We are half way through 2015 and I recently passed 4,000 kilometers ridden and I have climbed just over 50,000 meters. I don’t track it, but my guess is I also have about 50,000 meters of downhills as well. Whoo hoo.

All that I have learned about training says that at this stage of my life (old) and racing career (off the back) I should avoid focusing on distance. However, my “In for a penny in for a pound” mentality dictates that I track my training and through the miracle of Microsoft Excel it is all too easy to collect, tabulate and graph my progress. It is by sheer coincidence that I find myself hitting such round numbers here at the end of Q2.

I ran stairs earlier this week at sunrise wearing shorts and a T-shirt. If there hadn’t been anyone around I would have taken off my shirt; it was that hot. It doesn’t seem that long ago that I was running those same stairs at the same time of day wearing a jacket in the rain in the dark. Among the biggest differences between then and now is that in March I was alone at 5:45 and this week there were six people on the stairs at 5:45. Welcome to summer.

Although it has been hot, lucky for us it has been a moist heat.

In conversation with El Chefe’ he theorized that impact from these Fondos is both significant and cumulative. This concept fits well with the reality of my dead legs over the past ten days. I felt rested, ready, strong and lean at the start of both Ellensburg and Leavenworth but I now feel soft and slow. The temptation is to fight through this phase. Wisdom says to take advantage of the break from Fondos and keep the intensity low for a week or two.

The emergency remodel of the southern half of our downstairs has mushroomed beyond my control. I did what I could but in the end I called the insurance company and they sent in the troops. I'll keep you posted on how this goes. It is a whole new world for Evo. In the meantime I will say that with a claw hammer, a wonderbar, a carpet knife and a drywall saw you could dismantle an entire house. If you throw a sawsall into the mix, you can be one destructive badass.