On Empty

With the road season just about over, and cyclocross mania just beginning, this would be a good time for me to sit back and be a lurker for a while. I've taken more than my share of blogging pulls this summer as you clowns have just sucked my creative wheels with your once a week posts. But we're not competing. That's just a warning. I may sit in for a while this month and let all the cyclomaniacs produce the content. Before that though, I'll share the details of a rare solobreak mistake this weekend, in the hopes of helping you, of course, because I'm a kind, nurturing, benevolent mofo.

You all get the advice to eat enough on rides, blah, blah, blah. Bonking sucks. Even running low on food stores on a ride will make you wish you stayed home. Doing it on a big group ride is even worse. This is why I rarely make this mistake. But it happens to the best of us sometimes. Saturday it was a reminder for me of why to always, always, always have enough fuel. We had a big group ride and cookout planned for Sunday up in southern NH. I spoke with the Cronoman on Saturday, and he gave me the details of the hard solo ride he'd done that morning, because "Sunday's ride was going to be a rolling trackstand" or something like that. I voiced my disagreement. Duane does not drag me all the way up there for an easy ride. This was going to be Tuesday night worlds on a Sunday morning, just longer. I headed out and did two hours with about fifteen short sprints sprinkled in just in case it turned out we were in some once-a-century planetary alignment and the Cronoman was right. Of course he wasn't.

Sunday I got up early and packed a bag with the food I'd need for the drive up, and on the ride. I have two Trader Joe's reusable shopping bags with the Hawaiian print motif on them, and in one I put all my stuff. I took off early so I wouldn't need to rush, but for some reason I wasn't all that hungry. About an hour from home, I reached into the bag to retrieve a peanut butter and jelly Mojo bar, and to my surprise there was nothing in the bag except an old newspaper and a few plastic shopping bags. I'd taken the wrong bag on my way out the door... Fuck. Thinking quickly, I stopped and bought a dozen donuts to share in Duane's driveway while the team assembled for the ride. I ate two. Duane said three hours, but I had my doubts, so that should be enough, right? Plain water in the bottles. Declined gels when offered. Out we went, sixteen riders total.

I rode up in the front of the double paceline with Duano 90% of the time. I wanted to get my moneys worth out of this effort. Duane was going well, so for amusement I half-wheeled him on most of the rises to push the pace and listen to him start to breath hard, but he never, ever quits. He pointed out a few properties he'd scooped up at bargain prices in the recently depressed market, and we wound our way north along fairly rural roads. After two hours he warned of a tough grade and I threw down a little and jammed it with the Cronoman and Zencycle. After the regrouping some others joined in. And now I was starting to get hungry... I bummed a few Clif Blocks off Duane, but it was a temporary solution. And it now looked like the ride would indeed be over three hours, as we weren't heading back yet. And the natives were getting restless. I started following wheels. Fast forward a bit.

A short time later, the race simulation began, the group shattered, and about seven of us were duking it out on the roads that led back to Duane's. I was now officially starving. Spending the first two hours of the ride pushing the pace on the front no longer seemed like such a great idea. I sort of knew the route back, but getting dropped was not an option here, as there are three short hills near the very end, then the ride traditionally ends in a sprint on the old WMSR road course. I could not crack, but it's been a long, long time since I tried to ride hard with no fuel in my system. Oddly enough, the hills were my friends. This group was not exactly Pantani, Rooks, and Theunnise. On the flats I was suffering though. Going through South Hampton I hit up the Cronoman to see if he had any food left. Doing so required a complete meal of pride to be swallowed and digested first, as when it comes to bonking, he's a rainbow jersey wearer, and I bust his balls about it all the time. He says yeah, I have some gu, and pulls out a flask. Yuk. Like his water bottles, it's been gnawed on like a Labrador puppy's chew toy...GROSS. But I'm desperate, and I squeeze about a hundred calories worth out of it and give it back. That should do it.

Over the hills I'm cramping and Big John is pushing the pace. At one point I was nearly dropped on a flat crosswind section, but I hung on. Onto the finish road, Duane told me to watch Zencycle. I wasn't sure of exactly where the sprint was. We had been going 35-40 kph for the last hour, and now it was cat and mouse time. Normally I'd have attacked, but I knew I had barely anything left and thirty seconds would seem like ten minutes right now. Duane jumped to lead me out but I thought that meant the finish was right there so I went around and buried it, but zencycle was on me like a laser and easily took the sprint to the rusty mailbox ahead of me and Big John. I survived. And there were still donuts left... Don't go hungry, it sucks. Thanks for reading. Now it's your turn to pull.