Go Somewhere

You know those bikes with the broad seat and the scooped frame and the upright wide handlebars? Those are not the epitome of bike-dom. I feel this needs to be mentioned because I've seen those bikes in advertisements and romance photos and greeting cards. You'd think they were top of the line or something*.

I found a few examples online. (In both, there's only one bike between the two of them... (?))

I've never actually seen someone who looks like she's having fun ride one of those bikes. A fun bike is one with drop-down handlebars a light, durable frame, a narrow seat -- something aggressive and fast. People can certainly own whatever bike they want, and cruisers have some advantages for beginners (easier to balance, e.g.), but going in for a bike as a prop rather than as a toy/ vehicle of transportation, exercise and enjoyment is selling the experience short.

*Of course, their presence in advertising has nothing to do with their quality as bikes. They're meant to induce a nostalgia or to vaguely reference a simpler, more serene life. Things like aggressive handling or speed have no place in this intended world.

I was having a hard time breathing, which is not super uncommon when one gains 6,000 ft in elevation, but my particular anaerobia was caused more by anxiety. Driving through the Colorado Rockies with my mom and our friend Terry, I was in yelling distance of the time when I was going to have to get on my bike and ride between 60 and 100 miles each day over mountain passes and through arid wastes.

One time, I cried on my bicycle for 20 out of 78 miles as I rode with my mom around Copper Triangle, triple bypass of climbs, because my butt hurt so bad, it was taking so long, and the wind was in my face. I was about to get a week of that shit.

Mom had to have a root canal two days before our bike trip. Terry and I tried to remind her to take her pain medicine every few hours so the effects wouldn't wear off. A few times she forgot to take her pills, and when pressed she admitted that she had a second heartbeat in her mouth.

The truly terrifying thing about going with Mom and Terry is not their sky-high athleticism -- at 24 years old and having spent considerable time training (I did my homework), I hold my own in the muscles/cardiovascular department -- it's that these women don't fucking quit. Riding with them meant that I couldn't suddenly get a head case and hitch a ride on the sag wagon; it meant that regardless of how much time it took us, regardless how many hours of sitting on cruelly hard and narrow ass-apparati and breathing in scents of roadkill, we were going to ride into camp on our little bicycles.

One of the passes we rode over was where, almost exactly a year ago, I had helped spread the ashes of a friend of mine that died. I thought about him as we climbed 13 miles of dirt road to the summit (average speed: 4 mph). I have dreams off-and-on that he is alive, and nobody's even that impressed because the whole death thing was just a misunderstanding, but in the most recent one, the image of him talking to me was overlaid by my memory of his ashes floating down the small creek where he used to camp.

Up there the sun warms you like a campfire. The side of me not sun-blasted is cold from the sparse air and chill wind, while sunny side is just about dying of heat. A bit like how Mercury feels, I'd guess.

Getting to the top of that pass, I made sure to dodge holes and tried to stay clear of accordion-style divots or places where there was too much loose dirt. I plugged in my tunes and measured my pedal strokes to Gorrilaz and Fleet Foxes. I talked to Mom, stayed behind her, and fought not to think about how long it was taking me.

And it will sound simplistic -- if you have better advice, more complex, instructive, or hopeful, follow that instead -- but all that's for it, I think, is to keep your head down and just keep pedaling. At this point, I don't know what else to do.

Cadel Evans is Coming to Town

I had never boxed my bike before. I watched You Tube videos of men vaguely explaining what they were doing while they disassembled their bicycles into unrecognizable components. The pedals came off, the wheels came off, the handlebars dangled limply by the brake cables, seat posts were truncated. They lay in sad pieces while the men admonished, "Now the trick is putting it back together."

Shortly upon arriving in Chicago, I needed to take a train to Colorado to start a week-long bike tour with my mom and our friend, Terri. Late, Mitch had to drop me off on the corner of Union Station right downtown. He tried to pull as close to the curb as he could, but the street was three-deep with idling taxi cabs. Everyone was honking.

I had partially prepared my bike for boxing (in order to take it on the train it needed to go in a box), and its front wheel was off loose in the trunk. In the middle of the road, I grabbed my backpacking back pack -- full of stuff for my three-week stay -- my over-sized purse, my maimed-looking bike, and the front wheel. My train was leaving in 50 minutes.

Inside, there were lines everywhere.

I did make the train, and I almost cried only once. Down in the guts of the station, I bought a box, had to take more things off my bike and was gently scolded for my tardiness. "This should have been finished ten minutes ago." Story of my life.

On our drive to Grand Junction, the start of the ride, Terri (a cycling buff) told me that a pro cycling tour was beginning in Colorado Springs on the 22nd. I want you to understand the import of this: CADEL EVANS WAS COMING TO COLORADO.

(Cadel Evans...!)

And the Schleck brothers and about 130 of the best cyclists around the globe.

Mitch and I got to watch the Tour de France because it was on at the time we quit our jobs. It was wonderful: we'd sleep in, get up, eat breakfast, flip on the Tour, and pack and clean and veg. Cycling is the only sport I've watched where the athletes complete the stages utterly exhausted. These are very fit men, but they can't get subbed out. They roll across the finish and their pit crews have to hold them upright so they don't topple off their bicycles. It's amazing mental fortitude.

My mom likes to refer to the Tour athletes as "the skinny butts."

I got many miles of distraction out of the fact that the tour was doing some of the same route that we were. Cottonwood and Independence Pass were each a day of riding for us. The pro riders are going to do it in one day (stage 2, this Wednesday). Here are the elevation maps for those days:

The thirteen miles to the summit of Cottonwood Pass are a dirt road. We were told that the road had been treated with something to make it less dusty. But nothing had been done to make that road smooth. The last six miles I spent at a good clip of five miles an hour, and I spent that time thinking how disappointed Cadel was going to be.

He's not going to be happy with those washboards. I'll bet he hits that pothole.

Independence Pass was the longest day of the ride. 8 hours and 50 minutes spent on my bike seat. Also my first century. :)


The only day I broke my cool was the end of day five. It was a 80-mile day with one of the smaller mountain passes. The last twenty miles we were riding downhill but against a strong headwind. It was over ninety degrees as we peddled for the very small town of Hotchkiss. We stopped under a rare tree and I believe I told my mom that I hated Hotchkiss more than any other town on earth. The only good thing about the debilitating headwind was that it kept brief the wafts of the abundant baking roadkill.







(Pictured above) Day 3, in Gunnison, we woke up to frost on our seats and handlebars and a temperature of 31 degrees.

When we got back to Colorado Springs, we started to cruise daily on our bikes looking for pro cyclists. Teams came a week early in order to adjust to the altitude -- 7,000 feet being as high as many peaks in Europe. They'd ride in their matching jerseys, going two or three across, taking up the right lane (usually being able to keep up with traffic just fine).

Mom and I got in the paper when we were on one of these recon missions:



The day of the Prologue (which was a time trial, each rider starting by himself, one minute apart from the riders around him), mom and I sat on the outside curve of the most technical part of the race.



The above picture is Andy Schleck.

Nobody crashed on this less-than ninety degree turn on a tilt. The closest point to disaster was when a spectator's full diet coke bottle rolled into the middle of the turn in front of a cyclist. He avoided it.

I could smell burnt rubber.

Each cyclist was led by a motorcycle and followed by a team car with spare bikes stacked on top. (Except for this one cyclist, and we still don't know why he didn't get a team car.) Between riders people would chat and banter, except for after the second-to-last rider. Cadel was the last rider to go, and for the time before his ride, the crowd was silent. The video at the end of this post is his run around the corner.

Pictures below this are of some Garmin cyclists warming up and of the finish line area.

Moving

Motion is relative. Isn't that neat?

Stuff about the earth rotating so that, in comparison to the core, we are moving really fast. We don't feel it because everything around us is moving about as fast. Feeling comfortable in a car going 80 because the cars around you are doing 80 and so is your dashboard* and your friends passed out in the back.

*Maybe "our" dashboards. I don't mean to limit things.

Growing up, my family drove from Colorado to Indiana every year for Christmas. It would take us about 21 hours driving and a few more sleeping in a Walmart parking lot. I remember being confused when I was very young: there is a house and street in C Springs that looks enough like my grandma's house and street (which is in Indianapolis) for me to mistake them. I didn't know why it took us so long at Christmas time to get there when, otherwise, we drove by it all the time.

And even still it's an odd feeling to spend hours in the car, feeling motionless, waiting the arrival of some far destination, to finally get there and feel ever presently Here. I've been telling people that I am moving to Chicago, and what I'll experience is Chicago moving to me. Motion is relative.

Before Spokane moves away from us, Mitch, John, Christa, and I have to pack and clean. Nowhere in Newton's laws of motion did I read anything about taking a Spackle knife and hazardous chemicals to the black mold/bacteria living between the shower tiles. Or not knowing what to do about people always leaving -- an exodus from the spot that is me. How to deal with constant loss due to motion. I did not read that.

I like how on a bicycle it feels like I'm moving. The earth is going under my wheels. I can feel the 15ish mph wind in my face. And when I'm riding with someone else, it feels significant that we have zero mph between us. Nobody's sleeping.

Moving to Chicago (via MN to drop off John and Chri$ta) on Saturday, then catching a train to Denver, riding my bike with my mom a week in CO, train back to Chicago. New place. Don't be afraid to call. I'll always be here.

The Big West by Bicycle

Well she's chuggin down the track, chuggaluggin down the track. -Jalan Crossland

I went on the fourteenth anniversary ride of the Tour De Wyoming last week. They've never covered the same area twice on this tour, meaning that 13 areas were more appealing than our route. We covered southwest Wyoming, southeast Idaho, and northeast Utah. We rode 350 strong into towns as big as Kemmerer (home of the first JC Penney, the locals won't hesitate to tell you) with 2600 people and as small as Garden City, 400, and Cokeville, 500, to stay the night. They sell Pepsi products in Cokeville, incidentally.

Bike tours, as far as I know, create an interesting social atmosphere not unlike church camp for adults. Some people sleep in tents and some in the gyms of the schools we camp at. The average age was about 50. I couldn't tell most people apart. They were primarily skinny, gray-haired, and wearing helmets, sunglasses, and brightly-colored spandex. At one rest stop I fumbled my Gatorade all over some lady, and I'm not sure if I saw her again or not.

One day we had such a bad crosswind that my mom complained about snot coming out of her left nostril and hitting her right eye.

Muscularily the 370 miles were taxing, but the worst part about riding that far was the "saddle sores" a.k.a. how much that damn bike seat hurt your crotch. (I also had troubles getting my leg over the top of my bike frame. I grabbed my foot in order to help it over for a couple of days.)

One of my compatriots (to be remained annonymous in order to restore some of her privacy) had such bad saddle sores that she could only ride the first three days. The last three she rode the sag wagon. To sag: v. to ride in a car, to be compared to an old woman's breasts. In our small bike community, news like this gets around. It's difficult to find things to talk about in the dinner line. Some staples were the Tour de France, the ride just completed, the ride coming up tomorrow, and saddle sores. These lovely well-meaning strangers would ask my compatriot how her crotch was doing. One man gave her some balm for chaffing and some other balm for bruising. "Is it like an open wound?" He asked her, "because if it is you probably shouldn't use the bruise balm."

She told us later that it was probably the only time that when a stranger broatched the subject of her nether regions, he would not only not get slapped, but would be thanked profusely. She's an introvert, and I think the whole experience was a bit much.

And I actually found myself sad on that last day. No more waking up at 5 a.m. in the dark to pack up the tent and stand in breakfasts lines (these towns had no notion of the meaning of haste) to ride 50 or 60 or 70 or 80 miles in the middle of nowhere. No more looking at road kill, skunks mostly, or cruising down empty hills. No more looking up (ouch, my neck!) to see the bobbing silhouettes of my fellow cyclists somewhere down the road. No more being caked with aspalht dust or burned by the sun.

And I dream of a trailer in Bolser, Wyoming with tires on the roof, dear. And you by my side. And we can pitch horse shoes and stray cats on Sunday. Yeah, we can have hot wings and bourbon for breakfast. Ah, we can watch Flinstones and draw unemployment. Yes, I dream of Bosler when I close my eyes.

Wish Me Luck

I’m leaving today for a week-long bike trip across Wyoming. I’m afraid the only thing I’ll be thinking this next week is that my butt hurts. Pedal, butt hurts, pedal, butt hurts. The whole thing sounded like a lot more fun a couple months ago when the plan was to be in GREAT SHAPE.

On the way to Fort Collins yesterday (where I’m calling from), Mom and Terry told stories from previous cycling trips. In Iowa, they had to shower in the state fair sheep barn. There were no sheep in it at the time. Terry said it was a huge building, bigger than a gymnasium, and had black trash bags hung across the middle to separate the men from the women. You walked in and there was this crowd of naked women with intense bike tan lines. There were PVC pipes hanging down with little holes in them providing the water. And then a woman with a ghost-buster pack came through spraying for mosquitoes. “It looked like Auschwitz,” Terry said.

They also talked about tornado-grade storms, Vaseline use, and getting lost. They told me that they’d put down the tent each morning if my cousin, Becky, and I ran to get in the coffee truck line each morning.

At least there’s coffee.