The Seven Stages of Cycling Grief -- Part One

Last Saturday, Jeff Bauer and I had a really nice long ride together. This week, I paid for it.

We rode from my house, heading down to Franklin to pick up some friends. The rain started early, but it kept things cool as we headed over to the Natchez Trace and down towards Fly. The sun even came out when we stopped at Garrison Creek, and Jeff tried to catch a wayward kitten.

I'm not sure what he would have done with it, however, unless he'd been able to stuff it in his saddlebag.

Leaving Fly, after enjoying the world's best $1 sandwich, it started raining on us again. We took the Fly Gran Fondo route over the unpaved sections of Leatherwood, then down Hoover's Road to Greenfield Bend. The rain came in hard here, and Jeff and I ended up starting our way east towards my house. We had 130 miles in, most of them in rain or spray, when we finished. On the plus side, it kept the temperatures fairly comfortable.

My band, The Kickstands, played a party that night, and then Sunday I flew down to Naples, FL. I started to notice some discomfort in my lower regions Sunday evening, and the flight back early Monday morning was downright painful. Tuesday was agony at work, and I went to the doctor's Wednesday.

Apparently, doing 130 miles in the rain when you haven't done over 100 miles in the past two months can be bad. I now had a golf-ball sized hematoma above my right ischial tuberosity.

If that whole "tuberosity" thing isn't gross-sounding enough, should you go to Wikipedia and look all of that up like I did, you'll see that it really just means that I had a ridiculously swollen bruise on the right portion of my tush that gets compressed when I sit down. And when I say "ridiculously swollen," I am not kidding. When the doctor saw it, he literally said "Oh, my goodness."

You do not want a doctor looking at your tush saying "Oh, my goodness."

Now, Alan Gosart -- one of the sage heads of ultra-cycling (and I don't just say that because said sage head is covered with gray hair, so he almost looks like Dumbledore) -- once gave me a bit of advice regarding swollen things "down there." He said to just go ahead and bite the bullet and stab it with a safety pin.

"If you want to ride your broom, Harry, you'll have to do something about that saddle sore."

"Unless you have magic, Robert, pour rubbing alcohol on everything first."

Sorry. Gotta stop laughing here, first.

Anyway, I should have taken Alan's advice. Instead, I let the doctor torture my taint and go "Oh, my goodness" over it, and then decide to do the medically sound thing: Nothing.

Well, okay, not nothing. He gave me an antibiotic, in case it either is or becomes infected, and he gave me some anti-inflammatories. Then he told me to take hot baths, use a heating pad, and put a warm compress of epsom salts on it.

Great. I've got a thing that makes it really painful to sit at all, and you want me to try to sit in a hot bathtub, or sit on some heating pad? And, let me tell you, it's not much more fun lying around naked on your belly with a salty washcloth drapped over your posterior.

"And I guess that I don't have to tell you," the doctor added, removing his glove with a snap. "Stay off the bike for at least a week."

Well, okay, he probably didn't need to tell me that. There was no way that I can sit on a bike with this thing, anyhow ... probably. Unless I kind of shifted waaaaay over to the right.

And that, my friends, is a perfect example of the First Stage of Cycling Grief: Scheming.

The Solo Century Strategy

OK, show of hands here. Who out there wants to do a 200K in triple-digit temperatures?

Anybody? Hello?

Lately, in middle Tennessee, that's what we've been getting. Not all day, mind you, but about noon the "feels like" temperature is going to cross over to 100 F (-42 Kelvin, for my Canadian readers).

For normal humans, this is inconvenient. For randonneurs, it is death.

Well, maybe that's overstating it. What it really means is that we either 1) do brevets at weird hours, like starting at 6 pm and riding a double century overnight down the Natchez Trace so we finish the next morning before it starts to get hot, or 2) ride the rollers or trainer inside for eight hours, or 3) not ride and slowly let the endurance that you built up riding in sub-freezing temperatures during the winter leech out until you are incapable of doing more than a measly metric.

Hmmm ... maybe "death" isn't too strong a word.

A lot of my friends -- particularly the guys that are going to Paris in August -- have been choosing option 1. I keep having conflicts of one type or another, usually involving me being out of town for the weekend. Since I didn't ride the rollers or trainer much during the winter, I refuse to resort to that now, so that I have been choosing option 3 the past weeks.

Fortunately, I knew that I was going to spend two weeks at the beach this month, and knew that I would be able to get out and ride long a couple of times then. The first week, I was going to hang out with my brother, John, and my mom, and the second week RandoGirl and the RandoDaughter would join us. Fun in the sun!

But, as you have probably already deduced from my above use of the future imperfect (or is that the past pluperfect?), my plans went to spit. My brother and mom had something else come up, and I needed to do some things around the house, so the two weeks at the beach turned into one week of vacation in town, followed by one week at the beach. Of course, when life gives you lemons, you've got to trade them for limes and take them to the beach to drink with an icy alcoholic beverage. When life gives you a week at home with errands to run, and your endurance cycling fitness has fallen precipitously, you've got to go do a couple of solo centuries.

Now, everybody knows that the shortest brevet is 200K, or roughly 125 miles. But if you can ride 100 miles by yourself -- or, really, anything above 85 miles -- you can go out and do a 200K. I call this the Solo Century Strategy.

I couldn't get to a lot of the house things Monday, and had been forced to blow most of the weekend doing other house things, so when I awoke at 5 am I decided that this was a good day to knock out 100 miles before lunch. Twenty minutes later, I was on the road.

It was a balmy 78 degrees as I headed down through light early morning traffic in to Franklin and on to Long Lane, past the Williamson County agriculture center, and past the now-thick cars looking to get onto I-65 at Peytonsville Road. I wanted to see if Henpeck Market -- the penultimate control on my Dog Meat Permanent -- was open again. As I rolled in just before 7 am, a little over 20 miles into my ride, the place was hopping.

It was completely remodeled, right down to the menu. They no longer have the Tomato-Basil soup, which Peter Lee used to love. They also don't have all of the fresh-baked goods, nor the excellent pasta salad. I was kind of bummed by these changes.

Instead, they have an ice cream bar, and pizzas and hamburgers. I ordered a short stack of pancakes with bacon.

Things change, and you've got to be able to let go of the old stuff and try the new. I'll always miss the old stuff, but I would be willing to ride back to Henpeck Market for more of those excellent pancakes.

From there, I continued west towards Leiper's Fork, taking Bear Creek up towards Theta before turning back south on Sycamore to Johnson's Hollow Road. It was getting hot, and I had 40 miles in, so I picked up the Harpeth River Ride route in Burwood and on to Thompson Station. I topped off my bottles with ice, then headed through Bethesda, over Pulltight Hill, and up to College Grove. I filled bottles again, then went east and north via Rocky Glade, Hill, and Patterson, before turning on to Rehobath Road.

There are some roads that are worth the trouble it takes to get there. Rehobath is one of these. The Patterson end of it was great, but at the other end it comes out on Murfreesboro Road where there is no shoulder and two lanes full of fast cars. Knowing that there was just under a mile of that up ahead, I still had a great time rolling down the smooth pavement of Rehobath and through the gentle shady descent on this lovely quiet lane.

At the Almaville Market, I again topped off my bottles with ice before rolling on to Independent Hill. The heat and my lack of conditioning was getting to me as I climbed this road towards McCanless, promising myself that the break that I would get with the gradual downhill trend on Sanford Road would be worth the steep pitches. It was.

I had met my minimum mileage before I got to Nolensville Road, so I stayed on that up to Brittain, Waller, and then Concord Pass. The bike computer hit 91 when I stumbled off the bike into my garage back home, just past noon. After a shower (and a brief collapse on the bed, forced to a painful end by a nasty leg cramp), I checked the weather online. It was 104 degrees.

Maybe next time I'll just do the overnight double century.