When not to ride

This weekend is the Hawkeye 1000k.  I had really wanted a 1000k ride under my belt before PBP and Bob was going.  Though the Cascades it isn't, Iowa is a pretty state and I looked forward to this ride a lot.

The first thing to go wrong was 6 days before the start, Sunday I discovered my bottom bracket had bad bearings.  Not good.  I rushed it to the bike shop where they assured me it could be fixed by Tuesday (drive to Iowa was Thursday).  Then on Tuesday, I came down with some kind of colitis leading to spending 1 day curled on my bathroom floor in a ball; I also found out I had another bacterial infection in my lungs and sinuses, time for antibiotics.  Wednesday, I roused myself in the afternoon to pick up the bike.  Alas, the new BB had backordered.  With 2 hours until close, I frantically drove around town trying to get a new one.  Finally found one, got the bike back and fixed at 9:00 pm.  I had also now used up the remainder of my sick time and was burning vacation being sick.  I still felt a little queasy and weak and realized that I was probably dehydrated.  I was desperate to hydrate so we drove to Iowa with lots of water.

Got to Cedar Falls and had a challenging birthday dinner for IronK.  This was planned since if my stomach was bad enough to cramp before the ride started, it was going to be a bad thing.  Weather report was forecasting a heat wave coupled with high humidity.  The heat index on 2 days was going to be 100-115 and that is in the shade.   I slept somewhat poorly, waking up on the verge of my stomach cramping.  I finally rose with Bob at 4:00 am and had breakfast.  It nearly reappeared.

At that point, I realized that my stomach was not going to be 100% for the start of the ride and neither was I.  Melissa, Super Domestique, and IronK both pointed out that Paris is the goal this year, not Iowa.  I could do some serious harm to myself if I couldn't absorb the water and electrolytes I needed on this ride. 

Sometimes, you have to acknowledge, however painfully, that the cards are simply not in your favor.  I recently berated a friend for going on a 70 mile ride while ill during an excessive heat warning.  He wound up sick as a dog for a week.  I was not going to put myself in that situation with no sick time left and only 5 weeks before PBP.  The next 3 weeks are my final weeks for training, not for recovering from this ride.

So I pulled the plug before the start.  I hauled IronK out of bed and into the car in her pajamas.  I just couldn't bear the thought of watching everyone else ride off without me.  We drove off before the riders left at 5:00 am.  It was a hard, but correct choice.  I got back and took it easy and am feeling much stronger, though the stomach still isn't totally chipper.  Gary has a new bike and so tomorrow we will beat the heat on my 100k permanent.  I can test out my equipment then and enjoy the time on my bike instead of baking on it.

To ride as we do requires not only physical prowess, but wisdom and understanding about just how difficult this sport is.  Any ride over 100 miles is a big deal not matter how many 200ks you have done.  You must always respect the distance or face the consequences. 

To sleep or not to sleep, that is the question

This weeekend is the Apple Valley 600k.  I have never ridden this ride, but the weather is looking very nice and several people I know will be there.  It is now September and temperatures have dropped off recently.  Unlike the Rochester 600k (in which I rode through the night with naught but a tiny nap), this one I ponder riding through.  The low temperature will be in the 50s with at least a possibility of the high 40s.  This doesn't make a ditch nap very appealing.

I've heard a couple of conversations from first time riders regarding whether or not to ride all night vs stopping for a few hours of shut eye at some overnight.  I've now done it both ways and I have to agree with the RUSA handbook's assessement.  Consider why you are doing the 600k.  If it is another brevet or the culmination of an SR, take the break and increase the pleasure.  However, if your goal is a 1200k, at least once ride it through without sleeping.

It is a mistake to think that you will finish any faster if you ride through without sleep.   The profound fatigue that sets in when you have been working your heart for over 20 hours or will slow you down considerably.  During my sleepless 600k, times were as follows:

• First 200k: 8:45 total
• Second 200k: 12 hours total (did include 1 1/2 hour break for shower)
• Third 200k: 14 hours
• Total time: 35 hours

I will also say that the last hundred miles took almost 10 hours.  The fatigue around dawn seriously damaged my ability to digest food properly.  That took an even bigger toll as the day progressed.

In contrast, during the Cascades, I completed the first 600k in a total of 36 hours which included a 4 hour sleep stop and much more climbing on a torn hamstring.  Though the first 226 miles were only 18 1/2 hours, the final 150 miles took 19 hours (which includes the 4 hour stop).  Frankly, the second day was a really nice ride that I will always remember in a postive way.  The second day of the Rochester ride was really pretty hard to enjoy.  I was happy at the end, but kind of cranky (heck, I'd been up for a day and a half).

There is also a safety factor involved in being so tired at a late hour, especially around bar close and beyond when many drunk drivers are lurking and you may not be at your most alert. It can also be hard to find open services (like water or food) so it isn't something that is a decision to be made on the spur of the moment. If you really want to try it, know in advance what all your options are for the late night part (this might mean calling conveniance marts in advance or researching motel options in case you can't quite make it).

So for Apple Valley, my plan is to stop for 4 hours.  This allows about an hour of time to shower and change and 3 hours of sleep - enough to rest and recover, but not so much that I start stiffening up.  I will follow the advice of one of my Seattle friends: never leave an overnight control less than 2 hours before it closes.  I suspect that this rule won't be a problem, I know the route for the most part and expect to get to the overnight by around 11:oo pm and leave at 3:00am.  I will be striving for maximum enjoyment of the ride and the people on it. 

I recently chatted with a friend from the Cascades who DNF'd due to extreme fatigue.  He recently completed a 1000k in North Carolina and, unlike the Cascades, he included short naps along with the overnights.  For him, this made all the difference between enjoying the late stages of the ride and finishing and DNFing from the fatigue.  There is a low point to every brevet and if you are feeling horrible, that low point may become more than it takes to keep you moving.  Don't quit without eating something, drinking something, resting or napping a little and having a chat with a stranger (who may think you are nuts, but may remind you how amazing it is to even attempt such a ride).

Dealing with "the-body-part-that-must-not-be-named"

There is no issue more talked about in cycling than this one (and we all know what it is).  I set two challenges to myself.  The first is informative, to describe the various problems and strategies associated with this most tender of parts and the second is linguistic, to never use the same euphemism twice.

There are serveral categories of posterior agony that I have experienced over my long history.  The first I had to deal with hits most cyclists every spring when one has not been on a bike for a number of months or when they extend saddle time well over what they are used to.  It's that dreaded feeling that instead of riding, you must certainly have been instead locked in a room with 1000 tiny gnomes beating on your pelvis with cold-iron hammers: the spring-ache, the gluteal impaction, the oh-my-god-my-*@#-is -killing-me sensation.  Despite that fact that you can have many issues that are more serious, this one will almost certainly keep you off your bike if you let it.  This particular issue kept IronK off a bike for almost 2 years.  The second is the dreaded saddle sore or even worse an outbreak of them that will bring back any memories you might have of your days with diaper rash.

Spring-ache, for me, is generally the result of either being out-of-shape (after the winter) or from doing a ride that is more than about 25% longer than I am used to.  My first and, in my humble opinion, the best way to minimize the issue in the spring time is to not quit riding in the fall.  This doesn't mean to hammer your brains out all winter.  It just means that you either leverage not so bad weather and learn to ride in sub-par conditions like cold or rain for brief periods of time or you ride indoors.  Even if it is once a week, your derriere will thank you for it when spring comes and you are dying to pedal off into the great blue yonder.  Base training in the winter will also help the rest of your body.  In particular, I have found that core strength is almost as close to silver bullet as you can find for a variety of problems.  You abdominal muscles are the ones that stabilize you on the bike, if they are very strong, you ride faster and more comfortably on both ends.  Stability ball exercises, push ups, and planks of all shapes are really worthwhile in the off-season.  If I did nothing else all winter, I'd do them.

Saying that you solve the out-of-shape problem, the next fact is that when it comes to brass tacks, the points at which your body comes in contact with the bicycle are the most common places to have problems.  The sweet cheeks are the contact point with perhaps the highest amount of continuous weight applied while riding.  There are forces of friction to deal with as well as the fact that it's a tender spot;  you can run around barefoot on rough ground easily, imagine using even fine-grained sand paper for TP and you get the picture.
For me, getting the right saddle and getting it fit correctly were two processes that took a long time, but fixed the probelm.

Finding a saddle for riding mega-miles is both time consuming and can be expensive.  I had the same saddle that came with my bike until I started riding over 80 miles.  Up until that point (about 5-6 hours of riding), I could put up with just about anything.  I've heard it said that any mistakes in fitting or equipment in the first 50 miles won't really come back to haunt you until about 150.  I must have bought at least 4 saddles before settling into one I really liked for rides over 250 miles.  When I say "really liked" it doesn't mean that I like sitting on it for fun either.  Basically, there are 3 kinds of saddles:

1. Ass-Hatchets:  These are generally the ones that are too narrow.  From the rear, it looks like they might cleave your pelvis in two with a good bump.
2. Butt Grinders:  These are too big.  You have so much in contact with then that they find ways of rubbing against everything.
3. Ball-Busters:  These have some problem with the way the saddle is shaped in the front. And no offense to male species but just because the female version of the family jewels is a bit smaller and doesn't have a flagpole makes it no less painful, even small diamonds are worth as much as big rubies.

 Finding the right saddle is about finding a balance between the 3 types that harms your personals the least.  Try many saddles, and if at all possible ride them for the longest distance that you can.  Borrow from friends, order online with a return policy, get a demo from a bike shop.  Just try many and probably no one can really advise you beforehand.  I sat down at a rest stop next to someone with a Brooks saddle once and asked him how he liked it.  His response was "I love it and wouldn't ride anything else, but I did have to break it in".  "How long did that take?", I asked.  "Oh, about 5,000 miles.  Up until 5,000 miles I thought it was going to kill me".  My feeling is that the saddle broke him in, not the other way around.  I've not tried a Brooks, people rave, but I'd like to not put in 5,000 miles-of-pain.  I'm a coward.  But perhaps others have an easier time with them.

The second really imporant part of the saddle is its position.   You must have the fit perfect and be willing to change it over the course of a ride.  What works at the start when you are fresh may need some adjustment after hours in the heat.  First,the saddle must be the correct height.  If it is too high, you will rock on it and the friction will become a problem.  If it is too low, you will have added considerably to the already large weight on your glutes and wreck havoc on your knees.  When the saddle is a perfect height for me, I feel as though I am suspended over the bike with each pedal stroke taking a little pressure off each side.  I have also found through experimentation that I prefer a level saddle at the start, but at the end of about 200 miles, tilting the saddle just a tad downwards helps me to avoid rubbing when I am tired and my core isn't holding me in place as well. 

One of my favorite tricks for ensuring that my saddle is in the right position during a long ride is to ask the person riding behind me to critique.  After all, they have a far better view of your tokus than you do and millimeters count in the game of position.  Also, pay attention to the knees, they are an early warning that something is wrong with the saddle.  Too low and the fronts of my knees hurt, too high and the backs of my knees hurt.  I have seen no less that 3 riders, including myself, completely fall apart because the saddle was millimeters too low.  In almost every case, it's been due to slippage during a brevet or other really long ride.  Rain, in particular, is very good at loosening connections on the bike.  So is fresh chip-seal.

Road Pixie's Advice to the new Randonneur/Randonnueuse

Recently, Road Pixie went to the annual TCBC recognition dinner. Normally, I hate these things, but BigG was going along with other friends, so I thought it would be fun. The idea of riding such long miles turned out to be deemed a little off the wall even by bike club enthusiast standards. In fact, the number one exclamation used was something along the lines of "How can you sit on bike saddle for 250 miles without turning your nether regions into hamburger?" When I thought about the answer, I realized just how personal and multi-facited the answer really was.

So I thought I would post some of my more hard-fought discoveries with the caveat that all these apply to me and not necessarily anyone else. Let's face it, after about 10 hours in the saddle (or doing anything), everything is personal. So what works for me, might not work for you. That said, following posts will detail not only what I tend to do now, but how I arrived at what I do. Perhaps that may help others in starting themselves down the path of endless miles.

I've noticed that many tips and hints are organized by a general category (clothing, nutrition, bike fit, etc). That does work, but what I have found over the years is that those are categories of solutions instead of being categories of problems. One of the hardest things for me was to figure out what the problem actually was. On the surface, it seems so simple; cycling is a physical activity, so ride miles, get a better bike, get the bike fit, eat right all seem obvious. What I found was that the various solutions all have different impacts on the different problems and sometimes solutions are complementary and sometimes they contradict each other.

In order of importance, here are the problems that I have had to deal with as I went from riding a few miles to many, many miles at one time.

• Head
• Stomach/Metabolism
• Legs and feet
• Butt/Posterior
• Upper body (that's waist up)

The following posts will detail the strategies that I used to address these problems. It was only after I really got them under control that I realized just how personal the combination of solutions was to get all of the problems balanced. Utlimately, if you want to ride 600+ miles on your bicycle in 70+ hours, you are not going to feel fabulous all the time. In fact, at some point on every ride, there will likely be a massive low in at least one of these areas. So understanding how to prioritize a fix is critical and developing your own personal ability to identify the problem and the most optimal fix at the time. Training for long distances, for me, was more about figuring out how to problem-solve than it was about getting in shape.

How to survive really foul weather (and still have fun)

I've done heavy duty exercise in all conditions for many years (and not just cycling). I did once spend a solid 5 days in the pouring rain the BWCA once and I have cycled at temps down to minus 23F and been comfortable. Brevets are somewhat challenging sometimes because you have limited space and a long time so things can change quickly and unexpectedly for the worse; that somewhat hosed me on my first one when temps dropped 10 degrees lower than we expected. I added a rack to my bike after that one so that I could carry extra clothes and stash others.

But on my last brevet of the season, an October 200K in Rochester Minnesota, I was toasty warm and never had any issues with either the cold or the rain, both of which were ever present. Since I am lucky enough to actually have a thermometer on my bike (a feature I highly recommend), I can say that the day started out at 42 degrees once we were away from the Rochester heat island. It rained lightly, but continuously until about 2:00 pm at which point the showers started to come and go. It rained harder in Rushford, about halfway; I expected that since valleys hold clouds. It warmed up to about 46 and stayed there for most of the afternoon with brief surges. The wind picked up considerably at about 3:30. I had my clothing perfect for the weather (having honed it with year round commuting). Here is everything I had on and my comments:

1. Wool cycling socks (high ankle) with plastic bags that I added at Stewartville. I had regular cycling shoes on which are highly vented so I added wind blockers. For me, the wind covers are great, but if I zip them up, they really constrict blood flow to my feet so I like to leave them half zipped. So the plastic bags extend up into the tights and make sure the rain water flows into the shoes, but doesn't get directly on my feet. It then drains through all those air holes. Happily, wool insulates when wet so the sweat doesn't make my feet cold. Also, I tend to completely loosen the buckles on my shoes so that I have lots of wiggle space. The wind blockers ensure that this isn't a problem.
2. I had a pair of specialized equinox gloves that I bought at my LBS. These had a lot of neoprene in them and worked well. These were wind-proof and breathable and were warm even when soaking wet. I have also cycled with my 2mm scuba gloves (which are made to insulate using the water as the insulation).
3. I had regular cycling shorts on with bib tights over the front. I bought these a few years back for winter riding. They are neoprene on the front and regular lycra on the back. The venting of the back ensures that they draw any sweat away, but the front blocks everything.
4. I had a long-sleeved cycling jersey that had some wind blocking abilities on top. I added a thin vest for more wind blocking and a waterproof, breathable jacket on top. I got the jacket from REI and it's great but I notice that Novarra (the REI brand) has cheap zippers, so I am careful with them. Pit zips are a really nice feature so that you can open them and vent/dry when it isn't raining.
5. I had a cycling beanie on my head and a lycra neck wrapper (also from LBS). I brought my balaclava, but didn't need it. I eventually put a shower cap over my helmet. My helmet is so well vented that as long as the cap doesn't wrap my head, it still vents. In really pouring rain, keeping a ton of water off your head is a good idea. In light rain or scattered showers, it's optional.

In the years of commuting (pouring rain, thunderstorms, snow, sleet, etc). I have several cardinal rules for dressing:

1. If you are not cold for the first 3-5 minutes of the ride, start taking things off. You are overdressed. Overdressing is the number #1 cause of being cold while riding. Another way to think of it is that if you are standing around waiting for the ride to start, you should be quite cold. Have an extra jacket for this period and throw it in the car right before you leave.
2. It's more important to block the wind than to block the rain. You generally don't need much in the way of insulation until you are at or near 32. Your body generates its own heat, your clothing needs to ensure the wind doesn't blow it away. Along with this is the importance of not wearing anything totally impervious to water from the inside out. Breathable fabrics ensure that you move the sweat away from your skin. Modern base layer fabrics work this way - they keep the side facing your body dry while the outside saturates with water and slowly evaporates. If you wear a rubber suit, the base layer can't get rid of the sweat. Then you have the problem that any time you stop, you instantly get shivering cold.
3. Leave anything with cotton at home. In mountaineering, the saying is "cotton kills". Cotton gets wet and sucks the heat out of you. It also dries poorly.
4. Layers don't work unless they are thin (makes them easier to pack too). I only wear true fleece (and it is only about 5mm thick) when it is under 20 degrees. Above this temp, it's generally too thick. Thin wool is in vogue, but there are all kinds of fall jerseys that block wind. Always plan that the temps will be at least 10 degrees less than the forecast.
5. Protect your core first. If your core is warm, your extremities take care of themselves. Wear a wind vest, even if it is under your jacket.
6. EAT - your body uses lots of calories to keep you warm. The amount you eat at 40 degrees and raining should be greater than what a summer ride is on the same course. I looked at my records and found that I burned about 150 calories per hour more on this brevet than on the 400K in late August riding at about the same pace. Who doesn't need an excuse to eat peanut butter cups? And don't forget to drink - in the cold rain, you don't get as thirsty, but you still have to drink to avoid dehydration (more trips to the restroom though since you are not going to be sweating so much so avoid drinking too much).

Everyone should read about the symptoms and stages of hypothermia which are on the net somewhere. Shivers are your body's last defense so if you are shivering and suddenly stop shivering, it's a really bad thing (unless you have come into a warm area or done something else to warm yourself up). Time to knock on someone's door and beg for mercy.