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rebeccmeisterYesterday morning at some point when I was still pretty bleary-eyed and exhausted, I started writing the story of this ride in my mind. By now, I have already forgotten many of the details, but I'm going to tell the story anyway, start to finish, in written form, to complement the voice-post narrations. This is going to be really long, so you don't have to read it. It might be useful for me, though, which is why I'm writing it.
Where to begin? Well, I suppose I'll start with how we slept. We got everything ready to go Friday night, before going to bed. I had one bag full of clothes to change into after the ride, one bag full of snacks to pack onto the bikes, and one bag full of all of the bicycle accessories I'd need to reattach to the bike at the starting line. My bike was also completely ready to go, with air in the tires and freshly re-wrapped bar tape. Sleeping was difficult Friday night; I always default to my old rule of trying to get sleep the night before the night before and was grateful that I'd slept pretty well from Thursday to Friday. I still had lab reports looming over my head Friday morning, so sleep wasn't quite as restful as I might have hoped, but it was something. Anyway, back to when we woke up.
The alarm went off at 3:15 am, and I immediately lept out of bed and donned my riding gear, which was also set up and ready to go by my bed. I put on some coffee, and pretty soon![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
scrottie dragged himself out of bed as well. It was even too early for him to drink coffee, so we put the coffee into various mugs and were ready to go by the time R rolled up at 3:30. We were on the road by 3:36, much more efficiently than at the beginning of the previous brevet, and so we reached the starting line with about forty minutes to spare. S was concerned that he didn't have anything goofy to wear or carry with him on the ride, so he meandered over to Wal-Mart to investigate the options while R and I finished our preparations.
R noted that we should get our registration finalized sooner rather than later, so we picked up our cue sheets and brevet cards, and finished prepping our bikes. It wasn't until shortly after the official start time that we realized that S had forgotten to sign in, so he turned around and headed back to the start. R and I maintained a relatively easy pace, although we also wanted to stay with the group this time at least for the early parts of the ride. After he got his card, S stuffed it into a jersey pocket and turned back around to catch up with us. At some point shortly after that, his card fell out of his pocket. Another rider noticed what had happened, so S turned back around to pick up his card again. Then, sometime soon after that, he got a flat. We weren't even five miles into the ride, and it was still dark, but there's nothing a person can do except stop to remedy the situation. So much for riding with the pack.
After S fixed his flat (which went relatively smoothly, thank goodness), we were on our own on Jimmy Kerr Boulevard, the roadway leading to Picacho Peak and beyond. S asked if we wanted to catch back up to the main group, but by then it was no longer worth it to us; we would need that energy later. We headed onward to our first stopping point, 26 miles in, Picacho Peak. There we met up with Su and hung out for a few minutes, eating some snacks, and drinking some drinks. To our surprise, we were not at the complete back of the pack; three riders loaded down with full panniers came up behind us, right as Su was getting ready to pack up and head to the next checkpoint.
From Picacho, we continued along the frontage to Marana Road and our first Circle K visit. By that point, I was starting to feel like it was time for some breakfast; an egg sandwich would have been delicious. But the Circle K did not have any such thing, so after a fruitless hunt I settled for a bottle of chocolate milk and some cheese crackers. Then it was time to hit the road again.
I was okay like that for a few miles; we negotiated the turns around the Marana Airport and reached the road leading to Saguaro National Park, and then things took a turn for the worse. I can't quite tell you what combination of things led to my downfall, but I'm guessing it was a lack of a solid breakfast meal. I started to cramp up pretty badly. It felt like that feeling a person gets when he or she is running and gets a stitch in his or her side, a pretty sharp and pressing pain on my right-hand side at the base of my ribcage.
In the previous two long-distance rides I've done (the 200-miler and the last brevet), I've had similar feelings at about this stage in the ride, 70-90 miles in, and I've been able to recover by stopping to lie down by the side of the road. This time, however, that didn't seem to help. We stopped twice by the side of two different intersections so I could lie down and try to get my body to sort itself out. After the first time, I was okay for two or three minutes on my bike before the horrible pain came back. The second time, the pain didn't completely go away, but my legs still felt strong and so I decided we should keep pushing onward to the next stop in Saguaro.
I felt terrible for that segment of the ride, but the pain reached a pretty consistent level, so I kept going, albeit at a greatly reduced speed. We saw lots of roadies while riding through Saguaro. Eventually, we reached the next stop, along Kinney Road, where I could tell Su how things were going just in case I need to take some sort of drastic measures. R got out the foam pad that he'd brought along for napping purposes, and I took another break and ate some food. While sitting, the pain subsided, but as soon as we got back on our bikes, it was back. I hobbled on towards the next stop, 24 miles further down the road. Along that segment, we chatted with a pair of road riders out for a pleasant Saturday ride, a mere 40-50 miles in the warm spring sunshine. One of them tried to talk to me, but eventually I had to tell him that it was taking all of my abilities just to concentrate on riding, so he could go talk to someone else but I was busy.
By the time we rolled in to the Circle K in Old Tucson, I told S and R that I felt like I was being stabbed in the side and I needed to stop. My innards seemed to start rearranging themselves at that stop, and then R and S got to talking about stopping for an early lunch as it was a little after 10 am by that point. We looked around a bit, and they spied a taco bus across the street from the gas station that already had smoke billowing out of it and that was playing music over the loudspeakers. I wasn't feeling great, but I wasn't feeling terrible, so I said it sounded like a good idea to head on over. Once we got inside, a burrito started sounding all right, although I wasn't particularly hungry. Then I ate the whole thing and really started feeling better. I guess my stomach needed some solid food to process so the rest of my gut could untwist and go back to digestion as usual.
Then it was time to keep heading south on Mission Road, past the most vast mine tailings I've ever seen in my life. For the next 20 miles or so, it was mine tailings on the left, scrubby trees on the right, and potholes along the roadway. I'd been using a lot of energy reserves just to hold on up until that point, so I wasn't exactly feeling fresh. That section of roadway entailed a bit of moderate climbing, with a headwind to boot. For a brief while, R and S tried to pull, with me following behind to conserve energy, but the conditions were such that they weren't able to maintain a consistent pace to help me out.
It's really hard, when one is a little out of whack, to try and match another person's pace. So eventually, I stopped trying to keep up, and fell about 20 yards behind. Occasionally, R and S would look back to see where I was, but there wasn't much they could do so I yelled at them to keep on going and I would meet them at the next stop. It's a good thing nobody could hear my internal monologue at that stage, because I was saying some pretty ugly things to myself. It's better to be able to just focus on oneself under such circumstances and not have other riders just out of reach. They headed on. I rode onward and caught up to them several miles later when S stopped to change out the batteries in his GPS. From there, we had a brief downhill stretch to our next lunch destination in Green Valley.
In Green Valley, we discovered that we'd caught back up to a few other riders; the Wizard had stopped for a lengthy lunch, and two other riders, M and F, were just about to depart. We'd met M and F on the previous brevet; they were ever so slightly faster than us, so it was encouraging to see them again. After our second lunch, we rolled down the frontage road alongside I-19 for a while and admired the hillsides covered in bright yellow-orange California poppies. They're an incredible sight. At the bottom of the hill, we almost missed our right turn to head to Arivaca, and then espied a coffeeshop. It was a bit early, but I knew that S would be wanting some coffee an hour or two after lunch, so we ordered a quadruple espresso at the coffeeshop and stowed it away in my coffee mug.
Then it was on to Arivaca. The roadway to Arivaca was full of rolling hills, with gradual elevation gain, just the kind of terrain where I prefer to maintain a moderate pace instead of trying to keep up with hill-sprinters like R and S. So I told them to go on ahead. After a little while, I noticed that there was somebody following me. It was a random road rider we'd seen at the coffeeshop; apparently he decided we might show him a nice ride to Arivaca. He stayed on my tail for the entire distance to Arivaca, following closely behind and a bit to my right on the relatively flat parts, and staying mostly behind on the uphills. He never asked if it was okay for him to follow, so I just took care of my own business on my way to Arivaca. Eventually I crested a hill and spied R and S, about five miles before our stop. I shouted at them that I would keep going and then began the descent to Arivaca.
Once my shadow and I reached Arivaca, he introduced himself and told me somewhat patronizingly that he had a thing or two to tell me after I'd had a chance to go to the bathroom. I was too polite to tell him to eff off, so I had to listen to a few minutes while he critiqued my riding style. Eventually, Su told him that I needed to prepare for the next segment of the ride and so he needed to leave. I'm so glad she did so because I didn't have the wherewithal to say as much, and conversing with him was taking up too much of my time and energy. That's how I learned that it's best to avoid engaging roadies in conversations while working on a brevet.
Arivaca was a little past the halfway point; 133 miles down, 120 miles to go, and downhill miles at that. At the start I had decided that my mindgame was going to involve thinking that the challenging riding would start after Arivaca; miles before Arivaca would be just a warmup, distances I'd covered before. But the first half of the ride was rough, and it was 4 pm by the time we got to Arivaca, 11 hours after we'd started. The afternoon sun felt pretty nice, and we allowed ourselves to relax and rest for a while. R took a nap, and managed to eat and nap at the same time. Eventually, it was time to keep going. We still had a few more rollers to ride through, so R and S stayed mostly behind me to let me do what I needed to do to get through the hills.
Then we reached State Route 286, and took a right turn to start heading north, back towards Casa Grande. As we came around the turn, we were initially buffeted by a strong headwind. Fortunately, the roadway pointed downhill, so we were able to maintain a decent clip despite the wind. Soon, we reached mile 157, a little under a century of riding to go. At about that point, the sun went down, so we put on a few more layers of clothing and got ready for more night-riding. The wind died down with the sunset, so we probably picked up even more speed. We just kept cruising along down the hill, down, down, down, until at last we reached Three Corners at around 8 pm. We spied a family restaurant and went in to have a bite to eat. The kids sitting at the table next to ours stared and stared at us like we were three superheroes who had just walked in. They had probably never seen people like us before. The restaurant's soup was amazingly (saltily) delicious, and it felt so good to relax a little. Only 80 more miles to go from there.
We rode some more, back along the western boundary of Saguaro National Park. We paused occasionally to stretch and check our coordinates, then we rode some more. We finally found ourselves back on Marana Road, back at Circle K. We ate, we stretched. We bumped into M and F again, just as they were ready to head onward. We got really tired. We got back on our bicycles. We knew the stretch from Marana to Picacho; R and I have covered that section of road multiple times. It's flat, and very slightly dowhill.
Picacho seemed like something out of an apocalyptic movie; dead quiet at midnight, with a cold wind blowing. We stopped, stretched a little, ate a little, got back on our bikes. We rode. We saw blinky lights in the distance, and eventually came upon M and F, crawling towards the end of the ride. We were deliriously tired, but we kept pedaling. We knew this road. We knew we didn't have much longer to go. We knew we just had to make it to the I-10, the rest was just a right-hand turn and another mile or two up the road. We found the turn. We rode. R was excited, getting so close to the finish, I just kept my legs going, kept breathing as best I could. There it was, the Wal-Mart parking lot. There we turned, there we went, there was Su's pickup truck, the finish, there was R's wife J, standing and waiting for us, throwing her arms up in the air. The finish.
J brought us food. I think we looked at it. I ate a bunch of cookies, the most delicious cookies I've ever eaten. I took off my disgusting spandex and put on comfortable clothes. We crawled into the car, cold, and S and I dozed on the whole ride back to Tempe. We showered, we crawled into bed, we slept.
We rested for most of Sunday. Now I will get back to work today.
I will probably say more later, about how mentally challenging this was. We'll see.
Where to begin? Well, I suppose I'll start with how we slept. We got everything ready to go Friday night, before going to bed. I had one bag full of clothes to change into after the ride, one bag full of snacks to pack onto the bikes, and one bag full of all of the bicycle accessories I'd need to reattach to the bike at the starting line. My bike was also completely ready to go, with air in the tires and freshly re-wrapped bar tape. Sleeping was difficult Friday night; I always default to my old rule of trying to get sleep the night before the night before and was grateful that I'd slept pretty well from Thursday to Friday. I still had lab reports looming over my head Friday morning, so sleep wasn't quite as restful as I might have hoped, but it was something. Anyway, back to when we woke up.
The alarm went off at 3:15 am, and I immediately lept out of bed and donned my riding gear, which was also set up and ready to go by my bed. I put on some coffee, and pretty soon
scrottie dragged himself out of bed as well. It was even too early for him to drink coffee, so we put the coffee into various mugs and were ready to go by the time R rolled up at 3:30. We were on the road by 3:36, much more efficiently than at the beginning of the previous brevet, and so we reached the starting line with about forty minutes to spare. S was concerned that he didn't have anything goofy to wear or carry with him on the ride, so he meandered over to Wal-Mart to investigate the options while R and I finished our preparations. R noted that we should get our registration finalized sooner rather than later, so we picked up our cue sheets and brevet cards, and finished prepping our bikes. It wasn't until shortly after the official start time that we realized that S had forgotten to sign in, so he turned around and headed back to the start. R and I maintained a relatively easy pace, although we also wanted to stay with the group this time at least for the early parts of the ride. After he got his card, S stuffed it into a jersey pocket and turned back around to catch up with us. At some point shortly after that, his card fell out of his pocket. Another rider noticed what had happened, so S turned back around to pick up his card again. Then, sometime soon after that, he got a flat. We weren't even five miles into the ride, and it was still dark, but there's nothing a person can do except stop to remedy the situation. So much for riding with the pack.
After S fixed his flat (which went relatively smoothly, thank goodness), we were on our own on Jimmy Kerr Boulevard, the roadway leading to Picacho Peak and beyond. S asked if we wanted to catch back up to the main group, but by then it was no longer worth it to us; we would need that energy later. We headed onward to our first stopping point, 26 miles in, Picacho Peak. There we met up with Su and hung out for a few minutes, eating some snacks, and drinking some drinks. To our surprise, we were not at the complete back of the pack; three riders loaded down with full panniers came up behind us, right as Su was getting ready to pack up and head to the next checkpoint.
From Picacho, we continued along the frontage to Marana Road and our first Circle K visit. By that point, I was starting to feel like it was time for some breakfast; an egg sandwich would have been delicious. But the Circle K did not have any such thing, so after a fruitless hunt I settled for a bottle of chocolate milk and some cheese crackers. Then it was time to hit the road again.
I was okay like that for a few miles; we negotiated the turns around the Marana Airport and reached the road leading to Saguaro National Park, and then things took a turn for the worse. I can't quite tell you what combination of things led to my downfall, but I'm guessing it was a lack of a solid breakfast meal. I started to cramp up pretty badly. It felt like that feeling a person gets when he or she is running and gets a stitch in his or her side, a pretty sharp and pressing pain on my right-hand side at the base of my ribcage.
In the previous two long-distance rides I've done (the 200-miler and the last brevet), I've had similar feelings at about this stage in the ride, 70-90 miles in, and I've been able to recover by stopping to lie down by the side of the road. This time, however, that didn't seem to help. We stopped twice by the side of two different intersections so I could lie down and try to get my body to sort itself out. After the first time, I was okay for two or three minutes on my bike before the horrible pain came back. The second time, the pain didn't completely go away, but my legs still felt strong and so I decided we should keep pushing onward to the next stop in Saguaro.
I felt terrible for that segment of the ride, but the pain reached a pretty consistent level, so I kept going, albeit at a greatly reduced speed. We saw lots of roadies while riding through Saguaro. Eventually, we reached the next stop, along Kinney Road, where I could tell Su how things were going just in case I need to take some sort of drastic measures. R got out the foam pad that he'd brought along for napping purposes, and I took another break and ate some food. While sitting, the pain subsided, but as soon as we got back on our bikes, it was back. I hobbled on towards the next stop, 24 miles further down the road. Along that segment, we chatted with a pair of road riders out for a pleasant Saturday ride, a mere 40-50 miles in the warm spring sunshine. One of them tried to talk to me, but eventually I had to tell him that it was taking all of my abilities just to concentrate on riding, so he could go talk to someone else but I was busy.
By the time we rolled in to the Circle K in Old Tucson, I told S and R that I felt like I was being stabbed in the side and I needed to stop. My innards seemed to start rearranging themselves at that stop, and then R and S got to talking about stopping for an early lunch as it was a little after 10 am by that point. We looked around a bit, and they spied a taco bus across the street from the gas station that already had smoke billowing out of it and that was playing music over the loudspeakers. I wasn't feeling great, but I wasn't feeling terrible, so I said it sounded like a good idea to head on over. Once we got inside, a burrito started sounding all right, although I wasn't particularly hungry. Then I ate the whole thing and really started feeling better. I guess my stomach needed some solid food to process so the rest of my gut could untwist and go back to digestion as usual.
Then it was time to keep heading south on Mission Road, past the most vast mine tailings I've ever seen in my life. For the next 20 miles or so, it was mine tailings on the left, scrubby trees on the right, and potholes along the roadway. I'd been using a lot of energy reserves just to hold on up until that point, so I wasn't exactly feeling fresh. That section of roadway entailed a bit of moderate climbing, with a headwind to boot. For a brief while, R and S tried to pull, with me following behind to conserve energy, but the conditions were such that they weren't able to maintain a consistent pace to help me out.
It's really hard, when one is a little out of whack, to try and match another person's pace. So eventually, I stopped trying to keep up, and fell about 20 yards behind. Occasionally, R and S would look back to see where I was, but there wasn't much they could do so I yelled at them to keep on going and I would meet them at the next stop. It's a good thing nobody could hear my internal monologue at that stage, because I was saying some pretty ugly things to myself. It's better to be able to just focus on oneself under such circumstances and not have other riders just out of reach. They headed on. I rode onward and caught up to them several miles later when S stopped to change out the batteries in his GPS. From there, we had a brief downhill stretch to our next lunch destination in Green Valley.
In Green Valley, we discovered that we'd caught back up to a few other riders; the Wizard had stopped for a lengthy lunch, and two other riders, M and F, were just about to depart. We'd met M and F on the previous brevet; they were ever so slightly faster than us, so it was encouraging to see them again. After our second lunch, we rolled down the frontage road alongside I-19 for a while and admired the hillsides covered in bright yellow-orange California poppies. They're an incredible sight. At the bottom of the hill, we almost missed our right turn to head to Arivaca, and then espied a coffeeshop. It was a bit early, but I knew that S would be wanting some coffee an hour or two after lunch, so we ordered a quadruple espresso at the coffeeshop and stowed it away in my coffee mug.
Then it was on to Arivaca. The roadway to Arivaca was full of rolling hills, with gradual elevation gain, just the kind of terrain where I prefer to maintain a moderate pace instead of trying to keep up with hill-sprinters like R and S. So I told them to go on ahead. After a little while, I noticed that there was somebody following me. It was a random road rider we'd seen at the coffeeshop; apparently he decided we might show him a nice ride to Arivaca. He stayed on my tail for the entire distance to Arivaca, following closely behind and a bit to my right on the relatively flat parts, and staying mostly behind on the uphills. He never asked if it was okay for him to follow, so I just took care of my own business on my way to Arivaca. Eventually I crested a hill and spied R and S, about five miles before our stop. I shouted at them that I would keep going and then began the descent to Arivaca.
Once my shadow and I reached Arivaca, he introduced himself and told me somewhat patronizingly that he had a thing or two to tell me after I'd had a chance to go to the bathroom. I was too polite to tell him to eff off, so I had to listen to a few minutes while he critiqued my riding style. Eventually, Su told him that I needed to prepare for the next segment of the ride and so he needed to leave. I'm so glad she did so because I didn't have the wherewithal to say as much, and conversing with him was taking up too much of my time and energy. That's how I learned that it's best to avoid engaging roadies in conversations while working on a brevet.
Arivaca was a little past the halfway point; 133 miles down, 120 miles to go, and downhill miles at that. At the start I had decided that my mindgame was going to involve thinking that the challenging riding would start after Arivaca; miles before Arivaca would be just a warmup, distances I'd covered before. But the first half of the ride was rough, and it was 4 pm by the time we got to Arivaca, 11 hours after we'd started. The afternoon sun felt pretty nice, and we allowed ourselves to relax and rest for a while. R took a nap, and managed to eat and nap at the same time. Eventually, it was time to keep going. We still had a few more rollers to ride through, so R and S stayed mostly behind me to let me do what I needed to do to get through the hills.
Then we reached State Route 286, and took a right turn to start heading north, back towards Casa Grande. As we came around the turn, we were initially buffeted by a strong headwind. Fortunately, the roadway pointed downhill, so we were able to maintain a decent clip despite the wind. Soon, we reached mile 157, a little under a century of riding to go. At about that point, the sun went down, so we put on a few more layers of clothing and got ready for more night-riding. The wind died down with the sunset, so we probably picked up even more speed. We just kept cruising along down the hill, down, down, down, until at last we reached Three Corners at around 8 pm. We spied a family restaurant and went in to have a bite to eat. The kids sitting at the table next to ours stared and stared at us like we were three superheroes who had just walked in. They had probably never seen people like us before. The restaurant's soup was amazingly (saltily) delicious, and it felt so good to relax a little. Only 80 more miles to go from there.
We rode some more, back along the western boundary of Saguaro National Park. We paused occasionally to stretch and check our coordinates, then we rode some more. We finally found ourselves back on Marana Road, back at Circle K. We ate, we stretched. We bumped into M and F again, just as they were ready to head onward. We got really tired. We got back on our bicycles. We knew the stretch from Marana to Picacho; R and I have covered that section of road multiple times. It's flat, and very slightly dowhill.
Picacho seemed like something out of an apocalyptic movie; dead quiet at midnight, with a cold wind blowing. We stopped, stretched a little, ate a little, got back on our bikes. We rode. We saw blinky lights in the distance, and eventually came upon M and F, crawling towards the end of the ride. We were deliriously tired, but we kept pedaling. We knew this road. We knew we didn't have much longer to go. We knew we just had to make it to the I-10, the rest was just a right-hand turn and another mile or two up the road. We found the turn. We rode. R was excited, getting so close to the finish, I just kept my legs going, kept breathing as best I could. There it was, the Wal-Mart parking lot. There we turned, there we went, there was Su's pickup truck, the finish, there was R's wife J, standing and waiting for us, throwing her arms up in the air. The finish.
J brought us food. I think we looked at it. I ate a bunch of cookies, the most delicious cookies I've ever eaten. I took off my disgusting spandex and put on comfortable clothes. We crawled into the car, cold, and S and I dozed on the whole ride back to Tempe. We showered, we crawled into bed, we slept.
We rested for most of Sunday. Now I will get back to work today.
I will probably say more later, about how mentally challenging this was. We'll see.
no subject
Date: 2010-03-29 08:00 pm (UTC)Love,
Dad
Nice Ride Report
Date: 2010-03-30 05:26 pm (UTC)LOL
F
Re: Nice Ride Report
Date: 2010-03-30 06:35 pm (UTC)Re: Nice Ride Report
Date: 2010-03-31 03:01 am (UTC)F
Re: Nice Ride Report
Date: 2010-03-31 04:34 am (UTC)Re: Nice Ride Report
Date: 2010-04-02 01:33 am (UTC)Re: Nice Ride Report
Date: 2010-04-02 05:37 pm (UTC)I actually went on a bike-touring trip through Sonoita to Patagonia a few years ago, so I remember those hills pretty well--it's a beautiful part of the state and I'm excited to get to see Tombstone.
no subject
Date: 2010-03-31 07:50 am (UTC)It's an amazing accomplishment. Congrats. :)