Shoes, Ships, and Sealing Wax

That which does not kill me

When I hear the term Nor'easter I picture a hardy New Englander in one of those bulky cable-knit sweaters and an oilskin slicker. That image is incompatible with spandex shorts and sherbert-colored bike jerseys, but we went out and rode through the tail end of the Nor'easter anyway.

I don't want to sound like I'm bragging, but just getting on the bike yesterday put me ahead of half the 6,000 registered riders. (Maybe it shows I'm in the dumb half of the population.) The weather was just shy of "We can't ride in this, it's too dangerous." If it had just been me, I would have bagged it (untrained, uninterested in an early season case of pneumonia, etc.), but a friend of mine bought her first bike this spring and trained her tail off. She was looking forward to doing this ride, and I couldn't bail on her. I did warn her, though, that I didn't think we'd be able to finish, and she was prepared to get on a SAG bus.

And indeed, around 5:40 p.m., with the route about to close, we did end up in the back of an SUV, but that's because somewhere between mile 64 and 65 we got lost. (The exact mileage is a question mark because our computers crapped out in the rain. All the electronics crapped out at some point, even my red blinky light.) If we'd made our correct turn, we would have crossed the finish line on our bikes, and since we did more than 100 km, I consider the ride a sucess. An amazing success. A success I wasn't expecting.

The only reason I was able to do it was that we rode the slowest freaking ride in the history of bicycling. Part of that was because we rode into a 17 mph headwind, part of it was on purpose to keep my heartrate low. No lactic acid, no pain.

Well, actually I had plenty of pain. Cold and damp are not my friends, not with tendonitis and arthritis. Naproxen stopped being my friend when it started to eat through my stomach. And the bike saddle, well, that's where my total lack of training was most obvious.

But there were high points, like realizing I was riding along a cyprus swamp, the pie at the pit stop, and mostly, finding out that I won't die if I push myself. I really thought that by the end of this ride I was going to be selling my bike for scrap, but on the way home today I was actually thinking about what I want in my next bike, so that I'll do better if I ever decide to pursue this craziness again.