Pain, pain, and more pain

This is a tale of pain. Lots and lots of pain. The pain was incurred during the Planetarium Ride on August 11th but to begin the story properly we must go all the way back to August 10th.

My dad came down from Milwaukee the afternoon of the 10th. After dinner we decided to go to the local bike shop. I wanted to see if they had a replacement bladder for my CamelBak. The old one had developed a leak around the closure. At any rate, I ask the salesmen where they are and he shows me what they have (which was not what I needed). While I looking at what they have my dad approaches the salesmen and asks in his very loud voice "Hey DO YOU HAVE ANY CHAMOIS BUTTER?" Does he not realize some questions are best asked in hushed tones e.g. "psst... buddy you got any chamois butter?"

Anyhow... now might be a good time to mention I had not been doing a ton of riding since our Reno trip but I wasn't too worried. I had been doing 60+ mile rides all summer so it didn't seem like the 70 mile ride would be a big deal...

This might also be a good time to mention that temperatures for the next day were forecast to be in the high 90's with a heat index of 100+.

As a follow on to that I might mention I HATE riding in extreme heat and/or humidity. It just seems to sap energy out of you like nothing else.

Also, because the starting location for the ride was over an hour away we had to get up at 4AM in order to make sure we could start riding as early as possible (6 AM).

Did I mention I hate getting up super early the day of a ride? Can you see where this is all leading?

So we arrive at the middle school where the ride was to depart from dark and early. The temperature is in the mid 70's at 6:00AM and the humidity is about 1500%. OK, I may be off by a percent or two but I don't think so.

We get our registration packet, get on bikes and head out. The ride starts out with a long stretch of mostly uphill riding (I should mention here that I hate rides that start out uphill). Nothing felt right, I felt like I was riding in jelly. I was sweating like mad and could barely manage 12 mph (which later in the ride would seem like break neck speeds, cue the ominous foreshadowing music).

But after the first rest stop I started to feel alot better. The terrain seemed to have an equal amount of uphill and downhill sections and the route was quite scenic. Plus as the sun rose it knocked a lot of the humidity out of the air and it started to feel quite pleasant.

This lasted until about mile 42. At mile 42 two things happened. Number one a certain portion of my anatomy which we won't mention by name but will say it rhymes with nomad (the right one if you must know) began to hurt. Luckily it only hurt when I pedaled (by that I mean bad luck seeing as I was continuously pedaling and still had 29 miles to go). Number two was that the temperature began to soar. In fact it was so hot the tar on the road started to bubble and you could hear the bubbles pop as our bikes rode over them. It was HOT!

My dad on the other hand was looking down right chipper. He looked ready to take off on Lance's wheel if the opportunity presented itself. Every time he looked at me, however, he got a really worried look on his face and gave me encouraging comments like "You want me to call the SAG wagon?" or "You don't look very good."

I don't remember much of the rest of the ride except for constant pain and the urge to stop and just chuck my bike into the nearest field ( I think the only thing that stopped me was I didn't have the strength to chuck a pebble much less my bike). Even when we got within two miles of the finish I wasn't fully convinced I was going to be able to ride the whole thing. My speed had dropped to the point where as I leaned over the bars trying to ignore the pain and heat, I could watch ants slowly pulling away from me. I tried to latch on and draft behind them but those ants are just too fast...

Finally, we arrived back at the start point and I slowly got off my bike and made my way inside for the lunch. I've never been so glad a ride was over in my life.

A visit to the old haunts

The last week of July found our family all together in Reno, NV for my sister's wedding. I grew up in Reno, living there from 1980 - 2005 minus six years while I was in the Navy. I'll always love Reno especially given the plethora of recreation options, my favorites being biking and snowboarding.

Monday (July 30th) I was able to get together with one of my best friends, Ken, for a ride up Keystone Canyon. Ken and I started biking at about the same time. We both started out mountain biking and didn't get into any serious road riding until much later. Over the years we've accumulated a proverbial butt-ton of great stories riding together. Most involve something bad happening to Ken or something stupid happening to me.

A couple of quick examples before continuing... One of our first mountain biking trips was to Mammoth Mountain a few hours south of Reno. (Cue sound of angels singing) Mammoth has some of the best riding (both mtn biking and snowboarding) I have ever seen. Miles and miles of singletrack await and even better you can take the lift up and ride down which is great since the summit is at an oxygen deprived 11,000+ ft.

We timed out trip to coincide with the NORBA championships which at the time were held at Mammoth every year. The first day we got to see all the greats of that time including Ned Overend and Julie Furtado. At the bottom of the run they came down a short but pretty technical section that was followed by a little rise. Ken was explaining to me how it really wasn't that big a deal just let it flow through the technical bunny hop off the little rise and off you go. I had never seen Ken bunny hop anything prior to this trip so I challenged him to give me a demonstration. One thing you need to know at this point is that if you tell Ken he CAN'T do something he will do one of two things:

A. Do it and prove you wrong
B. Hurt himself in the process of trying to prove you wrong

In this case it was a combination of the two. He nailed the technical section, completed the bunnyhop, but landed off balance and veered off the trail into a section of fencing laying of to the side. Luckily the injuries weren't too serious and we were able to ride the infamous Kamikaze trail the next day where I did an endo and landed on my head (thank goodness for helmets).

Another time we decided to rent full suspension bikes to see what they were all about and take them up to Squaw Valley for a day of fun. Upon reaching the top of the mountain, as is usually the case, we immediately missed one of our turns and ended up in some pretty gnarly terrain. Ken took off ahead of me and made it all of a quarter of a mile before I looked up and found him rolling around in pain on the side of the trail. A ditch (he later referred to it as a small waterbar but trust me it was a ditch) ran right across the trail and he though he could let the suspension absorb it. This in the day when 2" of rear travel was great. Despite the intense pain he wanted to ride his bike back down. Fortunately the front tire was extremely tacoed. So the Squaw Valley staff brought him down on a quad while I rode down. Then we got in the car, drove to Tahoe City, returned the bikes (he had to pay for the tacoed tire as well), drove back to Reno and straight to Washoe Medical Center. Nothing major... just a punctured lung and broken collar bone.

But I digress, back to the current story... Ken picked me up at 7:15ish and we headed off to Keystone Canyon parking in a nearby subdivision. I immediately realized I had already committed my stupid act for the ride when I went to put my riding shoes on and found in my rush to get out of our rental house I had grabbed one riding shoe and one of my brother's sandals. Great... Luckily I was using Ken's wifes bike and it had pedals with wide platforms around the cleats so I would be able to get by with tennis shoes. Ken was also riding a full suspension he borrowed from a friend of his.

I have to admit I was pretty worried about this ride. As is the case with most rides around Reno, Keystone is almost non-stop uphill until you turn around and come back down. Plus we were starting at roughly 3700' higher than here in IL. But I figured I could probably hang and if nothing else now I can blame any substandard performance on my lack of proper shoes.

So off we went. Keystone was a bigger blast than ever. It was a great day for riding and it was great to ride with Ken and catch up on what was going on in Reno. We had barely started when we came across a pickup truck rolled onto its side. A notice from the local police dept. indicated it had been stolen and driven down the canyon until they rolled it.

The bottom part of the canyon wasn't too bad. It's not too steep and except for a couple of short technical sections that I've ALWAYS had problems with I was doing pretty good. Then we got past the radio towers and into some of the real climbing. It was like someone had sucked every atom of oxygen out of the atmosphere. My heart was pounding, my ears were pounding, and despite the fact I was breathing in 76 Liters of air with each breath I was light headed. I'm sure my hear rate was 185+. Knowing Ken always wears his heart rate monitor I asked him at the top of this climb what his heat rate was. 150 he tells me. 150!!! I don't think he realized how close he was to being hit over the head with a rock and left to die in the desert at that point!

But soon we got to the section of very tasty downhill singletrack towards some old mine tailings. It was a blast and I was really starting to like the Marin full suspension I was on. After the downhill it was one more lung busting climb up a fireroad to the pond that is our official rest / turnaround point for the ride. The road was EXTREMELY dry and very loose powdery dirt. Traction was hard to come by and right before the pond it gets really steep. More dizziness and heart pounding ensued but finally we made the pond. Some type of large bird (heron maybe) was flying around the pond as we crested the final section.

We headed over to THE tree to catch our breath and take a breather before heading back down. As we were discussing how deep we thought the pond was Ken told me to take a look at my 11... er... 1 o'clock. I looked in that direction and there standing in the shade of a tree just a stone's throw away was one awesome buck. He had an 8 point rack and was just standing there looking at us. Ken called out and told him we weren't going to hurt him and, as if he understood, the buck walked out of the shadows down to the lake and started drinking and drinking and drinking (apparently he was thirsty). He then took a long look at us and slowly turned the other way and walked up and over the hill. It was one of the coolest things I've ever seen.

Having had our fill of wildlife we headed down the trail. Now I REALLY started to like the full suspension. Almost the entire ride back to the car is downhill. Let me say here I'll never be accused of being the fastest on any section of downhill, but with that full suspension, I felt like I was breaking the sound barrier the whole way down. Being able to just fly downhill and keep going downhill for literally miles is one of the great things I miss about Nevada.

As we descended the bottom portion of the trail, Ken decided to make the ride a complete success by performing a nice endo on a little technical drop. To further top it off he then got mad at the little drop and headed back up the trail so he could come back down the drop again this time cleaning it quite nicely.

All in all, it was a great day that made me really miss being able to ride virtually any type of terrain you want within minutes of Reno and even more so, being able to ride with a good friend like Ken. There are alot of things I love about riding, being able to challenge yourself to make it up that climb or clean that technical section... but riding with someone else who shares your love of cycling just makes it all that much better. Maybe that's why I haven't ridden since I got home... or maybe it's the 95 degrees w/ 90% humidity we've been having. Probably a combination of the two.

Note: I just read that two days after we rode Keystone a mountain lion was spotted in the lower reaches of the canyon. Story can be found here: http://dhreno.wordpress.com/2007/08/03/mountain-lion-sighted-in-keystone-canyon/