Hittin’ It hard

Are you kidding me? I just start to feel vaguely like I might be working myself up to some level of fitness and endurance and riding at least three times a week and that a minimum of 100 miles a month is a good goal for now and … and … then my dear wife and I go away for a long (much needed) weekend. The normally mild (boring) April weather turns blast-furnace hot and nasty for days on end, and I’m supposed to leave town again this weekend and won’t be able to ride for another three days of the week and pretty much all of my forward momentum – pun intended – to cycle on a consistent basis has hit a big ol’ brick wall.

So now the battle will be to not let one week with only one ride (last week) turn into this week with no rides, and another week, and another week, and then I’m right back at square one.

I remember reading once how long an athlete (now, that’s funny!) can go without training/working out before his/her muscles and stamina are back to the way they were before training began. I think it was something like 3 weeks max away from training before you’re starting all over again. I’m sure it’s quicker the older you get. With me, it feels like it must be about 3 days. But as I said in the last post, that problem is mostly in my noggin’.

And so, today is supposed to be yet another 100 degree scorcher (I love L.A.—not) and I somehow seriously doubt my wife and son will feel too much like suiting up in black spandex and sweating our collective brains out, gasping for lungs-full of superheated L.A. basin air with its inversion layer soup of toxins and pollutants, rolling our skinny bike tires over taffy-soft blacktop that radiates the sun’s heat back up at you in shimmering thermal waves. Care to join me?

And so another day will pass unridden. I guess it’s days and weeks like these for which they invented indoor trainers. I just can’t help but think that – after investing hundreds of $$s in a trainer, it would only sit unused and collecting dust and clothes hangers just like the majority of treadmills and rowing machines sitting unused in bedrooms and basements around the world.

Thankfully, tomorrow is another day and the crack weather forecasters on TV (weather forecasters on crack?) are predicting that our daytime highs will drop nearly 20 degrees. I sure hope so. I’ve got a lot of time in the saddle to make up in order to ride around the brick wall that’s in front of me.

Ride on.

The 3 most dangerous pounds

I’ll be the first to acknowledge that I’m in lousy shape (and yes, ladies and germs, round is a shape ... rimshot! ) Granted, I don’t know many guys my age and weight who can ride a bike 10 or 15 miles or more and not end up writhing in agony on the pavement, clutching my chest with both hands and doing my best Redd Foxx/Fred Sanford impersonation.

So, I’ve got THAT going for me at least. But on my ride late yesterday afternoon, somewhere around mile 6 or 7, I realized that my biggest obstacle was my own head. That old saw about “mind over matter” is really true when the matter is feeling like your legs just can’t push the pedals down and around one more time, and your lungs want to explode in your chest and then some skinny-minny-clown with lead weights in his back jersey pocket so he won’t get blown around by the breeze whizzes past like you’re standing still and disappears around the corner as your vision begins to gray-out and an annoyingly shrill whistle starts sounding in your ears and you can’t feel your fingers on the handlebars and your mph numbers on your cycle-computer steadily drop from 16 to 13 to 10.3 (I’m going uphill, okay?) and all you really want to do is stop, get off your bike, do a two-handed heave of the thing into the scum-lined cement trough of the nearby Arroyo Seco waterway, sit on the ground and cry until some good Samaritan comes along driving a mobile-masseuse-on-wheels-van and helps you inside to make all the pain and heartache go away.

Where was I? Oh yeah … I was not having a good ride. Especially when a couple of former riding friends (from a few years and a hundred pounds ago) found me huffing and puffing and just barely surviving and decided to ride alongside and grill me for miles about how often I was riding and how many miles was I going to do and why don’t I do more than that and is this how slow I normally ride and … you get the idea. The next accessory going into my tool pouch is a 9mm Beretta.

All that is to say, I’ve learned that you can ride the same route, the same number of miles and one day it will be uplifting and energizing and fill your soul with great hope for a physically fit and mentally enlightened future. And the next day (like yesterday) the very same distance and route can just kick your existential butt and make you want to post your bike on Craigslist as soon as you drag your sorry self home. It’s all a matter of what’s going on up there in that attitude manipulating brain. Call it the “inner game of cycling” if you will. Sure, I have no doubt that, if and when I shed a whole bunch of this extra weight I’m carrying around, I’ll always have those three-some-odd lbs. inside my skull that will play a huge role in how much I do or don’t enjoy any given ride.

In other words, like many other sports, cycling isn’t only about endurance and strength or aching feet or near lethal saddle sores – there’s also a whole lot of it that’s simply all in your head. Ride on.

At least my tires are skinny

I need to fess up. I’m a roadie snob. Can’t help it. Having ridden both mountain bikes and road bikes over the past many years, I’m a certified, carbon-fibered, speed-loving, asphalt-riding roadie, through and through.

Maybe it’s because mountain bikes are typically ridden over – duh – mountainous, hilly, rough, steep, rocky terrain. You know, the kind of ground that can wreak serious havoc on over-the-hill bodies like mine. Oh sure, hitting the hard pavement doing 30 to 35 mph is no walk in the park, either. In fact, a good road-riding friend of mine (several years older than moi, I might add) had a close encounter with the highway a few years back. He doesn’t remember what made him fall, but he woke up in an ambulance on the way to the hospital with a badly broken collar bone that required many months of recuperation and physical therapy to heal. To this day, he can’t raise his arms above shoulder height without pain.

But at least most asphalt or pavement is relatively flat – as opposed to dirt trails with sharp, jagged rocks, sharp pokey branches and life-threatening drop offs – to name just a few of the hazards. On the road, you only have to worry about tires blowing out at high speed, cars, broken glass, cars, pedestrians crossing in front of you, dogs, cars, squirrels (don’t ask), wheels that taco on sharp corners and (did I mention?), cars.

Okay, so maybe road bikes aren’t that much safer (and maybe even worse) than mountain bikes. But there’s just something cool about being able to cover so much distance on two wheels under your own power. And as futile as trying to ride a skinny tired, rigid-framed road bike on a dirt trail would be, it’s also kinda goofy to see guys on their mountain bikes huffing and puffing along an asphalt road – much of their energy being used up and wasted bouncing up and down on their bike’s spongy suspension, along with the rolling resistance of fat, knobby tires against hard pavement.

I must say, it’s a small victory when I’m able to ride right past some younger, in shape guy and leave him in my substantial turbulence (think Boeing 747 passing a hang glider at 30,000 feet), even though I know perfectly well that my speed is only due to the type of bike I’m riding. For a fleeting moment, I can pretend to know what Lance feels like blowing past Carlos Sastre on the Alpe d’Huez.

Of course, any serious road biker could clean my corpulent clock even if they rode a Huffy tricycle. But I can dream.

Here’s another plus to riding road bikes over mountain bikes: when you break down on a road bike, there’s a good chance you can call a friend to come pick you up in their car and be back home nursing a cold one in the time it takes a mountain biker to stumble the first mile back down the trail carrying his bike on his shoulder.

Mountain bikes? Only about 30 pounds psi in the tires. Like a kiddy bike. Road bikes roll on an impressive 110 pounds psi. Pump that! I’m talkin’ serious air pressure, dude.
Oh, and one last reason to look down my sweat-dripping nose at people of the mountain bike persuasion is that these poor souls don’t get the pleasure of wearing clown-colored, tight fitting jerseys that zip up the front like an ultra-cool dentist’s smock along with body-hugging lycra pants that … well, that are ridiculously tight. You’d ride away real fast, too, if you were wearing a getup like that. Ride on.