My friend Cliff is Mr. Consistency

On Father’s Day my friend Cliff invited me to go riding. He’s such a nice guy that I am always pleased when our schedules line up and we had a great time together.

After the ride I realized something about him, though. He’s *always* super-fit.

We met about three years ago when I was pretty darn fit myself. We did a hard ride together out Highway 1 and up the Bolinas Grade. I could tell we were evenly matched because we were breathing equally hard on the climb.

Since then, I have had a new baby, a new job that added 2 hours of car commuting to my day (since jettisoned) and sundry other distractions. I’ve connected with Cliff a handful of times since that first day and he’s basically ended up waiting for me (he’s too nice to actually ride away, so he just soft-pedals 5 yards in front) every time since that first day.

I’ve had plenty going on in my life for sure, but I know he doesn’t just sit around. He’s figured out how to manage his life and his obligations so that he gets in his weekly mileage and stays really fit. As a result he is Mr. Consistency and I’m off the back. Cliff is my new role model.

Psychosomatic Injuries

Went for a ride this morning. When my riding partners mentioned the planned route I realized I would be out at least one hour, and possibly two, more than I had anticipated. I thought about my wife at home, who had been out late both nights prior. Thought about one of my children, who had a fever last night and was up at 2:30 AM. Thought about the other kid, who was merely up at 4:45 for no very good reason.

The more I thought about these things the more I realized my achilles tendon- the good one, not the one that was already injured- was starting to feel strained. This got me more and more worried as I rode. The last thing I needed was to rehab both tendons, and the first one got bad in the first place on a completely ordinary ride where it just started feeling sore and I kept going, thinking it would be better once I got some ice on it at home.

Finally, I decided it wasn’t worth the risk and told my riding partners I was turning around. The AT continued bothering me for a few more miles, but then the most amazing thing happened- before I even got halfway home the pain went away completely!

I take two important lessons from this: first, listen to your body. Second, and probably more important, listen to your conscience. When it tells you to keep a ride on the short side, it isn’t joking around.

The One Million Foot Club

Numbers and statistics in sports are meaningless, I keep telling myself. Focusing on quality is the key to happiness and success-worrying about numbers just leads to stress, distraction and feelings of inadequacy. On the other hand, I like to climb up things and that kind of activity lends itself to keeping track of how much you’ve climbed- or maybe it’s just me that needs to keep track.

I like ski mountaineering, though I do hardly any of it, and the basic idea there is to climb up mountains and ski back down- hence counting vertical feet lends itself readily to understanding the difficulty involved in various adventures. A while ago I climbed and skied Shastina in Northern California, a 5,400-odd foot effort that left me pretty much wrecked the next day.

I really like climbing mountains on my bike too. I rode all 17,000 or so feet of the Death Ride two years ago and I was pretty wiped out on the last long climbing stretch.

All of which lets me appreciate the amazing achievements of Greg Hill and Mark Weir that much more.

Greg (short bio by Andrew McLean here) lives in Revelstoke, BC and last year (05-06) skinned (and hiked, presumably) 1,000,000 vertical feet. That’s really a lot of climbing, and a whole lot of skiing. Best guess is he put in 150 or so days on skins. This year he is trying to up the ante by putting in one hundred 10,000+ foot days. Competing at the 24 Hours of Sunlight probably helped his total- I checked the results and he skied 32 laps of 1,502 feet each for a total of 48,064 official vertical feet. Wow.

The one thing I find amusing about it is that Hill is Canadian, hence metric-oriented, so using vertical feet is really a gimmick. Climbing 304,000 vertical meters doesn’t sound nearly as exciting.

Mark Weir has been described as one of the most well-rounded cyclists out there- a downhiller who discovered he likes to ride up just as much as down. Last year (2006) he climbed 1,000,000 vertical feet- technically he did it in 11 months. Like Hill, doing it once only seems to increase his desire to do it again better/differently (you see? this is the problem with being numbers-obsessed!). He says that in 2006 about 220,000 feet of the gain happened on his road bike and he thinks he can do it all on the mountain bike this year.

My accumulated vertical on skins is pretty easy to calculate most years – zero. <sigh> In an effort to be (more) like Mark, I have started keeping track of my cycling vertical much more closely. For the year to date I am at 17,800 feet in six weeks- I only have to put in 20,462.5 feet every week for the rest of the year to match him. Hmm . . . tracking numbers is definitely overrated.

Why I like to Ride Early in the Mornings

For a variety of reasons, I tend to go riding a lot earlier in the morning than most other people. Mostly it lets me get the ride “out of the way” and move on to work, family and other stuff. There are definitely fringe benefits, though. Here is a short list:

1) Rushing out the door to meet my riding partner only to discover that the batteries are dead in my bike light, headlamp and taillight. (Sorry, wrong list).

2) Sunrise over San Francisco. Some day (maybe soon!) I am going to bring along a decent camera to get a good picture of the sun rising over the city. My window of opportunity here is fairly short- outside of the middle of winter the days get too long to catch it from a good angle.

3) Finding ice on the road. In the Bay Area, still there at 9:30AM. You don’t get to see this too often.

4) Spotting a flock of wild turkeys in the road. There were about a dozen of them just milling around in the road. I tried to take a picture of them too, but they wouldn’t let me get close enough.

5) No cars whatsoever for about a 10 mile stretch. Oh wait, there was one park ranger truck. Still, that’s a pretty nice thing on a road ride.

How Two Nuns Bore Witness to the Loss of My Descending Skills, and How I Gradually Got Them Back

Generally I rate my descending skills in any kind of vehicle as piss-poor, if not worse. I attribute this mostly to one bad crash I had many years ago. I was coming down a steep road not far from my house in dry conditions when I hit a slick patch. I don’t remember anything about the crash, so I can only speculate based on what the nuns told me when I came to in the back of their car on the way to the hospital.

You may not have had the experience of waking up in the back of a car being driven by nuns, so you will have to take my word for it that it is quite disorienting. Actually, waking up in the back of any car would be disorienting under the circumstances; the fact that it was being driven by nuns made it somehow both extra-surreal and entirely fitting.

In any case, I remember sitting in the back of the car, everything slowly coming into focus both in my vision and my memory. I remember thinking “who am I and what am I doing here”, then slowly remembering who I was and gradually realizing what had happened. The nuns explained that they found me wandering in the road and helped me (and my bike) into their car. I had clearly hit my head pretty hard- I must have been conscious for several minutes, but in some kind of shock/concussion state. Freaky.

Since that day, I have been very careful about descending in any kind of vehicle- bike, car, etc. Especially if I see water in the road I slow way down. I read a story- I think it was Frankie Andreu talking about the Tour de France where he recalled being off the back and at risk of elimination on a bad day in the Alps. Fortunately Sean Yates was with him, and when they got to the top pointed to his back wheel and said to Frankie “stay there”, before using every millimeter of roadway getting to the bottom inside the time limit. I always think of myself as the guy hanging terrified onto Sean’s back wheel on the way down the mountain.

At the same time, I end up riding the same roads week after week, and living in the Bay Area most rides are more a question of “hilly or really hilly” than “hills or no”. What I have realized is that years of practice doing the same thing over and over can actually have some benefits! In particular, Camino Alto in Mill Valley is a road that I end up going over on about 50% of my rides. My completely wild guess is that I have ridden it several hundred times.

In the direction I usually go, it is a gradual, slightly winding climb up, followed by a shorter, steeper set of hairpin turns on the way down. On a good day I don’t even need to hit the brakes at all going down the hairpins. Even on a bad day I just feather a bit going into the corners, then hold a steady line through.

I really didn’t even think about trying to ride it no-brakes. One day I just realized that I was doing it. I started to pick apart the actions my body seemed to unconsciously know how to do and realized that I could scrub speed by leaning over a little harder and cutting angle a little tighter. Picking a smooth, even line keeps the speed up; cutting in slightly drops a little off. With all that practice, I have been able to work on keeping a stready line in wet conditions as well, and I have gradually brought the speed up on those days too, at least a little.

Another thing I have worked on is seeing my line through the corners. I realized that cornering toward the right is no problem for me. My vision & my brain just naturally follow the road through the corner. Toward the left is another matter. I end up staring straight at the side of the road at the apex of the corner, then end up slamming on my brakes in order not to end up in a heap at that spot. I figured this out a few years ago and ever since I have concentrated on taking left-hand corners where I force my eyes to follow the yellow line all the way around the corner. Know what? It actually works! My left-hand cornering has gotten much better.

My last trick is remembering to breathe. As much a possible, I try to focus on breathing steadily and let my body do what it seems to know how to do better than my brain. If I don’t I have a tendency to hold my breath, which doesn’t work so well.

A couple of times now I have gone riding with different people and discovered that I was the fastest descender in the group. This was a cool feeling, though Sean Yates was definitely not present.

Still, my biggest achilles heel is wind. I had another crash where I came around a downhill corner fast straight into a really strong crosswind. It almost knocked me over and I straightened up, only to ride off the side of the road and wipe out in some gravel. Now I completely chicken out if there is any wind. Even if there isn’t, I get to a certain speed and become terrified that a wind might suddenly pick me up and knock me over.

Any tips out there for dealing with this fear?