Bikes that do the work for you

I'm being honest when I say that the number of times I've ridden a "road" bike can probably still be counted on two hands. My first two bikes were "touring bicycles" — lower-end Ibex Corridas that I rode over thousands of miles of pavement, but they had flat handlebars and relaxed geometry and couldn't really be called road bikes. I have a fixed-gear commuter that is also a hybrid of a road bike, but my experiences with drop-handlebar, high-tire-pressure, lightweight road bicycles are still limited to a few borrowed and rented bicycles on a few random rides.

I do ride pavement. I just ride it on a mountain bike. This has always worked just fine for me in the past because I lived in climates where the weather turned roads to debris-strewn obstacle courses for much of the year, and on the rare days that they were clear, I was probably out pursuing high-country dirt anyway. For my style of riding, a road bike just seemed excessive — a boutique bike, like a high-wheeler or a unicycle ... fun to play with but ultimately unnecessary.

Only now I'm living in the Silicon Valley, covered in a seemingly endless maze of smooth and winding pavement. While there are trails and open space areas here, this is decidedly roadie country. I see them everywhere — when I'm walking to the store, when I'm sitting at the coffee shop, when I'm ambling up the road on my bouncy bike. They always look so graceful and effortlessly fast, and strangely overdressed in their matching neon yellow jackets and tights. I make a solid attempt to chase them with the bouncy bike, but it usually isn't long before the gap grows larger. Since I didn't know any better, I blamed myself ("I'm slow. Oh well. Hey, is that a singletrack trail on that hillside? I better check that out!")

Beat has been telling me that I need to try road biking. He has a beautiful carbon Calfee that he doesn't really ride either, at least not since he saw the light and gave up triathlons for ultrarunning. Beat could tell you more about its wheelset and components — all I know is that it's black and weighs about as much as Pugsley's seatpost. I had been eyeing it enviously all month. Finally, today, we went to Sportsman's Basement to buy a pair of shiny white and silver road shoes, and Look cleats. Equipped with the proper attachments, I no longer had an excuse not to try out the Calfee. Beat had to ride his own bouncy bike, a Santa Cruz Blur. We decided on a route that Beat remembered as "short" from his triathlon training days, and set out.

Road bikes make me nervous. I always feel so squirrelly, teetering on those tiny wheels while I obsess about getting my foot in and out of the clipless pedals (which is always humorous because as soon as I stop thinking about it, it becomes second nature and clipless attachments have never actually caused me any problems.) We set out on Foothill Boulevard, spinning super easy. At least I thought we were spinning easy. When I looked over at Beat, he was working up a solid sweat.

At mile 11 we hit the top of a rolling descent and Beat said I should surge ahead because it would be more fun for me. "OK!" I exclaimed and clicked up the shifters. I put a little extra power into each stroke — not enough to really raise my heart rate, but just enough to power up each roller. After about what seemed like five minutes, I dropped back into the valley. I stopped on an overpass above a roaring Interstate 280, quite bewildered. "This doesn't look right." Several minutes later, Beat caught up to me, wheezing. I had overshot the turn by three miles. Yes, three miles. Beat seemed really annoyed about it for some reason.

We made it back to Old La Honda Road and started up the narrow, winding corridor. This too was an easy spin so I took photographs and said hello to other climbing cyclists who did not seem inclined to chat. The Calfee climbed so effortlessly that I started to suspect there was in fact a small electric motor attached to the frame somewhere. I looked for it but could not locate it. A few more relaxing minutes passed and we were inexplicably at 1,800 feet on Skyline Drive. We put on arm warmers and launched into the most physically taxing and difficult part of the ride, the steep descent. I clenched my teeth and throttled the brakes, never quite trusting those tenuous tires to actually stick to the road around each tight corner. Finally, I held my pedals parallel and pushed my butt behind the saddle. This mountain bike pose did help a bit with my confidence.

Then we rode home. It was like a few more minutes. Beat rode beside me and said he felt knackered. Really? I looked at my GPS. We had ridden 41 miles and climbed 2,700 feet. On my mountain bike, even on pavement, that would be a tough afternoon ride. No wonder Beat was tired.

Beat asked me how I liked the road bike. I had to admit it was fantastically fun, but also kind of boring, too. Beat enjoyed a good, solid ride on his knobby tires. He got to work twice as hard while I meandered along on his light, fast road bike. I mean, what's the point of a bicycle that does all the work for you?

"The point is to go faster and farther," Beat said.

"Oh," I said. I get it now. Faster and farther. Next time, I'm going to try that.

The rough stuff

I've had a trying week of working around a couple of minor medical maladies — unrelated to cycling and running, but a disconcertingly consistent source of fatigue and pain all the same. My mind is also swimming with seemingly dozens of project ideas that I am overanxious to dive into, and the result during my "workday" is near-constant distraction — I sit down neatly at 8 a.m. to start up one thing, only to jump to another, and then another, until suddenly I look up and it's inexplicably 4 p.m. and I wonder if I've actually done anything productive at all. One thing I am actually accomplishing is that I'm nearing completion of a Tour Divide manuscript I feel fairly good about. I still need to comb through it to incorporate a few more of my editor's very good ideas, flesh out a few areas and cull others, but it's close.

I've been mountain biking and running this week as well, but in shorter blocks of time with limited intensity. Thursday was the first day I felt healthy enough to embark on a longer ride, so I set out to find a trail near my house that I haven't yet tried, the Table Mountain Trail. Beat and I had tentative evening plans and I told him it would be "two, two and a half hours tops." About eight miles into Steven's Canyon I was hit with yet another medical malady — monthly hormone poisoning, which for me usually results in two or three hours of semi-debilitating waves of nausea. Bad timing. It wasn't terrible at first, so I pushed the cramps to the back of my mind and started up the singletrack.

The Table Mountain Trail is designated uphill-only to mountain bikes, which means unless I want to break a law, I'm committed as soon as I enter it. I should have known better when the first quarter mile involved a knee-deep creek crossing and a near-vertical push 100 feet up the muddy bank. But from the top of the bank, the root-clogged trail looked fairly rideable, so I continued. The steep trail only became more eroded as I climbed, until I was trying to keep my tires out of wheel-eating trenches as I mashed up a 15-percent grade on a trail surface about as wide as a pencil. All the while, the nausea kept hitting in blinding waves. Several times, I had to stop and take swift gulps of air to mitigate what felt like an urge to pass out. (Note: These episodes are normal for me but are so short-lived that they almost never hit when I'm working out. The strenuous nature of the trail also seemed to make it worse than usual.)

I walked and then trudged, and all the while the Table Mountain Trail just kept reaching for the sky. I don't know why I expected the trail to top out at 1,800 feet before veering onto the Saratoga Gap Trail, because that is not what happened. I continued to attempt riding the eroded mess between my nausea episodes, until I really did feel physically spent. I had no choice but to trudge up the trail as it rose to 2,600 feet. Two hours had already passed when I was only halfway around my loop on Skyline Boulevard. That's when the building thunderstorm finally opened up. A stiff wind drove the chill of the already 45-degree air (that's spring in California for you, I'm told. Eighty-six degrees one day and 45 the next.) Suddenly these harsh, tiny shards of hail started pelting from the sky. If I didn't know better I would have sworn it was sleet or freezing rain. Either way, it hurt. Stinging and cold. I was not happy. Not happy. I beat a quick retreat down the road.

Beat, who also has been sick all week (we think it's the infamous Fairbanks Plague that was going around up there) couldn't understand why I was so shattered when I walked in the door. "You were only out for three hours," he said. True, true. But sometimes you just need a really rough ride after a rough week to put things in perspective. I'll remind this to myself when I'm finally back to normal and the summer heat has returned. Being healthy in the sunshine really is pretty darn awesome.

Ride map here.

Beat's WM100 report

Beat just finished up his White Mountains 100 race report, with a spot-on observation about the competitive dynamic of these crazy winter races:

"65 racers collect at the Wickersham Dome trailhead to participate in the White Mountains 100. About half are bikers, half skiers and then there are the crazy seven, the foot people, “walkers” as the local news article had called us. That term is a sad mix of insult (at least in a 100 miler) and omen, evoking visions of elderly with walking aids that reflect just how we would feel in a day or so, when we would be reduced to just that — walkers.

The dynamic among the groups is interesting. From what I can tell, Bikers are here to compete most and foremost with other bikers, and to make sure the skiers know their place. Skiers come here to race each other, upstage bikers and hope for soft trails that would give them the edge to do so. Both think walkers are crazy and stupid for choosing such a poor form of winter travel, but there is a spark of admiration, an acknowledgement that indeed, walking is the most pure, the hardest, the most painful, the most mentally challenging. We, on the other hand, simply enjoy the fact that we get the most fun per dollar of our entry fee. Twice as much, usually."

Read the rest of Beat's report here.