It doesn’t make intuitive sense, but cycling on a flat road for many miles seems to be tougher than going up and down hills over the same distance.  Such, at least, was my experience on Saturday, as we rode nearly 60 miles out of Vacaville.  There was quite a challenging ascent at about the 10-mile mark — but after that: flat, flat, flat.

Which turned out to be really hard!  Hard on your butt, for one thing: you tend to stay in the same exact position on your saddle, instead of the natural adjustments you make when ascending and descending.  Hard also on your genitals.  And on your hands, strangely.  Hard, certainly, on your leg muscles, which — especially with a headwind, which we had for most of the day — are engaged all the time, rather than intermittently as in an up-and-down ride.  But mostly, I’d say, it’s hard on your brain: there’s a numbing quality in doing exactly the same thing over and over, and in seeing pretty much the same stuff again and again.  I tried thinking of interesting things — like solutions to the problems in the screenplay I’m working on — but my mind would always snap back into zombie mode.  It was as if I had become just another accessory on my bike, a thing whose job was simply to turn the pedals around — a cycling automaton.

Though, to be fair, I did see some notable things: A peacock, for instance.  Also, a baby deer.  And, disturbingly, a dead cow.  Well, it looked dead: it was lying on its side, with its legs sticking straight out and another (living) cow staring down at it.  Also, I learned that people in Vacaville apparently like to combine such activities as truck-driving and dog-walking with the activity of marijuana-smoking: at one point, a truck went by in the other direction with a bunch of people in it looking really, really happy — and it was going slower than we were on our bikes!  The fumes in its wake were pungent and medicinal.

Most notably, toward the end of the ride, a power line came down.  Fortunately for me, I’m in the slowest group — it was a faster group, just ahead of us, that bore the brunt of the downed line.  Actually, it was one particular rider in that group — Mark, who is doing his first Team In Training ride, like me, but is a vastly stronger cyclist.  The rider in front of him observed the surreal sight of a power line coming down, and called out “Wire!” just as a thick cord literally grazed the top of his helmet.  On hearing this, Mark, while zipping along on his bike, instinctively looked down at the ground (for a wire).  And this, Mark thinks, may have saved his life: with his head tilted down, the power line struck him in the crown of his helmet, rather than in his face or neck.  The helmet pulverized; Mark, fortunately, came through with only some nasty-looking facial bruises (and maybe a broken nose).  Amazingly, he wasn’t thrown off his bike; he just kept cycling.  When I got back to the parking lot that was both our starting and ending point, Mark was being tended to by a teammate, who was applying band-aids in a big “X” across his face.  Showing Clint Eastwood-esque toughness, Mark refused an offer of painkillers.  He also expressed relief that his expensive sunglasses hadn’t been broken.  (People from Marin are really protective of their shades!)

So on this ride, nothing happened for a long time, and then something really did happen.  Though what happened was so much better than what might have happened that it kind of took my breath away.  Turns out, the flatness I’d experienced had been a gross misperception on my part: all that time, the future was veering drunkenly toward us, killing cows and downing power lines; it almost took Mark away from us.  So what was flat, really?  Certainly not Vacaville.  (How could a town be flat when half of its inhabitants are high?)  No, the flatness, it seems, was — is — in me.

You can support my upcoming ride in the “Solvang Century” by making a contribution on my TNT fundraising page.

Below is a map of Saturday’s ride: you can click on it for more info.

Posted: January 30th, 2012 under Curing Cancer, Cycling, Flatness, Team In Training, Vacaville.
Comments: none

Apparently the people who choose music for fitness classes are doing a lot of “mashing.”  This seems to involve scrunching a bunch of well-known songs together into one, continuous track.  But it also — if I’m hearing correctly, as I sweat along in my spinning class — seems to involve (at least sometimes) replacing the original recordings with other ones, ones that perhaps can better release endorphins in the exercisers, or preserve a strictly robotic beat, or both.  This is tremendously depressing — which is a strange feeling to have alongside the chemically induced elation that I’m getting from my exertions — and not just when it happens to songs I deeply care about.

At a recent group spin, I heard “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’” — not the Nancy Sinatra recording, which swings, but a kind of mechanical version sung by a featureless female voice over a featureless synth instrumental track.  It sounded a bit like the original, in the way a McNugget tastes a bit like chicken, but the spark was gone: it wasn’t fun anymore, it was rote, a cog in a machine.  Now, “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’” is not a song that has dominated my life, or is even particularly meaningful to me — but damn it, the original recording was fun!  And it also reminds me of the goofy/cool video that Nancy Sinatra did of it (I think I saw it playing in some bar once), in which she is wearing what I — in my total ignorance of couture — will call go-go boots and doing a little watch-me-work-it dance step in front of a greenscreen (actually, its primordial forebear, the purplescreen).  Whereas this synthetic, denatured, mashed-up version brought to mind … oh, I don’t know, maybe a really relentless toaster.

But then, just when I’d pretty much given up on actually enjoying the music at this spinning class — rather than just sweating to it — a Prince song came on (“Alphabet Street,” I think).  When I heard the opening riff, I thought: Oh, please dear God, don’t “mash” this song!  And that’s when the instructor — who had been calling out instructions about pedaling and resistance and posture and such — said something wonderful: “I couldn’t mash this.  I thought about it, but then I realized: you don’t mash Prince.”  And indeed, the song, as originally performed and recorded by Prince, played from beginning to end.  And okay, maybe it was the endorphins speaking at that late point in the class, but I felt a sudden spiritual lightness.  Perhaps the Earth would not soon become the “Earth,” carbon-melted and ruled by untaxable corporate persons.  Perhaps humanity was about to slow down for a moment and take a purifying dip in the waters of Lake Minnetonka.  Perhaps there would still be time to breathe.

Because she was right: Prince is unmashable.  So why not the rest of us?

*        *        *

Last weekend’s training ride out of Vacaville on Saturday was canceled, for fear of rain — which didn’t materialize, as it turned out.  I joined an optional, ad hoc ride on Sunday, out of Orinda — at which it did rain, heavily, covering my glasses with heavy raindrops and the road with soggy branches.  It was fun, actually!  But due to the weather, we cut our ride short — meaning that we “only” went for 24 miles (though they were hilly miles).  Tomorrow we get a re-do of Vacaville, whose name always makes me think of a great Penelope Houston song called “Out Past Vacaville” — which can’t and won’t be mashed, not ever.

Thanks to a whole bunch of wonderfully generous people, I have met the original $2,500 fundraising goal for my upcoming ride in the “Solvang Century” on March 10.  But you can still make a donation to Team In Training — run by the venerable Leukemia & Lymphoma Society — on my TNT fundraising page.  Let’s go for $5,000!

Below is a map of last Sunday’s rain-shortened make-up ride; you can click on it for details.

Posted: January 27th, 2012 under Curing Cancer, Cycling, Spinning, Team In Training.
Comments: none

Last Saturday we went up Mt. Diablo.  I didn’t much like the sound of Mt. Diablo — especially as I’d just come from the BART stop of its pacifist cousin, Pleasant Hill.  We made it to some sort of station, at which point the really cool, gnarly cyclists continue upward to the peak.  Coach Bumpster, however, was quite firm that I had to head back down: other riders had already gone all the way up, and everyone was now accounted for.  I feigned disappointment at missing out on this chance to struggle to the very top — but there’s something to be said for having stuff to look forward to.  I mean, if Neil Armstrong had already walked on the moon as part of (say) his fifth birthday party, then getting there as an adult probably wouldn’t have been so exciting for him.

The descent last week almost got too exciting for me.  I was trying to keep up with some of the faster riders (meaning: pretty much everybody else) and on a sharper-than-expected turn found myself being centrifugally pulled off the paved road and onto the gravelly shoulder.  It was a weird feeling — being almost not-in-control — but before I had time to think about it I’d gotten the bike back on the road.  Yikes (almost)!

Today’s ride is said to be long (60 miles) but, for the most part, “pancake flat.”  It may also be covered in syrup: rain has been general over the Bay Area.

You can make a donation to Team In Training in support of my upcoming “century” ride in March — and thus support the fight against blood cancers — on my TNT fundraising page.

Below is a map of last Saturday’s nearly diabolic training ride; you can click on it for the almost gory details.

Posted: January 21st, 2012 under Curing Cancer, Cycling, Team In Training.
Comments: none

Did it — I’ve biked my age in miles, and a bit more!  Last Saturday’s training ride, starting and ending in Half Moon Bay and hugging the coast on Route 1 and swinging inland through farms and some rather gnarly ascents, went for 53.1 miles.  And no, I didn’t bike around the parking lot at the end for that last 0.1 mile!  (Though I probably would’ve if I’d entered the lot at 52.9 mi.)

There seemed to be a headwind for the entire ride, which I know doesn’t really make sense — given that our course was pretty much circular — unless you think of the wind as pursuing a personal vendetta against our cycle team, which I do.  The scenery — especially along the ocean — was beautiful, though in my case the experience of beauty while cycling comes through a filter of lactic-acid pain: let’s say it was beauctical.

The coach of my sub-group (we are the slowest cyclists) is a legendary rider whose name is Susie — but, perhaps because half of the coaches and mentors happen to be named Sue, she goes by “the Bumpster.”  The Bumpster is relentlessly, charmingly, impossibly cheerful.  I think this is because the Bumpster is an incredibly sweet person, but her unfailing high spirits can seem, well, bizarre in the context of the extreme discomfort most of us are experiencing.  “You’re doin’ great, sweetie!” the Bumpster will call out as you strain to inch up a ridiculous incline.  The truth is, she is doing great: the Bumpster, who is older than me and exudes a grandmotherly vibe, is renowned for all the tough courses (with names like “Death Ride”) that she has repeatedly conquered.  The Bumpster never stops; the Bumpster never falters.  However, I must say: the Bumpster lies.  Yes!  I’ve noted a sneaky tendency on her part to make a claim that, say, the toughest hills of a course are behind us when, in fact, much tougher hills are ahead of us — as she well knows, having cheerfully ridden over all these hills many times before.  And I’m not the only one who’s noticed this.  After the 53.1-mile ride on Saturday, I heard the Bumpster talking to some coaches about a ride they were going to take the next day.  “It’ll be easy,” she was assuring them — “just a nice, little 40-mile ride.”  The other coaches rolled their eyes as she walked away; one of them explained to me that the Bumpster habitually understates the length and difficulty of the rides she leads: “little,” “easy” jaunts turn out to be quite challenging.

After we’d gone 40 miles or so, the Bumpster informed us that we’d already ascended about as much as we were going to climb over the entire Solvang Century in March.  And just as I was allowing myself to relax into a small sense of accomplishment, she told me that I should join the quicker group ahead of us for the remainder of the ride, which was going to be taking a longer, and hillier, route back than our own group.  “Really?” I said.  I was shocked.  Smiling (as always), the Bumpster said, “You have it in you.”  And instinctively I realized: when the Bumpster tells you to do something, you do it.  Because when it comes to endurance cycling, the Bumpster knows.  Ask anyone who’s ridden with her, and they’ll tell you.

If you’d like to make a donation to Team In Training in support of my upcoming “century” ride in March — and thus support the fight against blood cancers — you can go to my TNT fundraising page.

Below is a map of last Saturday’s training ride; you can click on it for details.

Posted: January 13th, 2012 under Curing Cancer, Cycling, Team In Training, The Bumpster.
Comments: none

On New Year’s Eve, the day my brother Jake turned 39, I rode 39 miles on my bike.  Thirty-nine years of age seems incredibly young to me, whereas 39 miles seems like a really large distance to bicycle.

Jake called me just after I’d finished my ride.  He and his wife, Ket, were having fun down in Palm Springs; I was having fun in San Rafael.  The main thing on both our minds these days is our gorgeous little niece, Elsa, born in London on Dec. 13 to our sister Amy and her husband, Jeff.  Elsa is not yet even 39 days old, and already she’s been to Europe!  Clearly, she is an adventuress (a word?)!

We lost our father in 1983, and lost Sue — my stepmother, and the mother of Jacob and Amy and Sam (until Elsa, the baby of the family, at a mere 35) — in ’91.  They are never far from our thoughts.  (Nor is my dear mother, Bernice, who is recuperating from a hip-replacement that itself needed to be partially replaced.)

Dad was 59 when he died, 55 when he had the stroke that devastated him.  So 55 has been a totemic number for me as I — the eldest of his children — have approached, and then passed, the age of 50 myself.  I wish I were like my father in so many ways, except for one: he didn’t take good care of himself.  I want to take good care of myself.  Which, mostly, is why I signed up with Team In Training to do this century ride in March: to give me a structure that would help me — force me — to get fitter.

But of course the purpose of the organization itself is to fight cancer (blood cancers, specifically).  And so a spirit of remembrance hangs over our training rides.  Saturday’s ride was in memory of Kevin Maurer.  I learned that he had died from Acute Myeloid Leukemia (a cancer that grows in the bone marrow) just two days after my darling new niece was born; that he was only 51; that he left behind a wife, Julie, and three daughters; that he worked for US Airways in North Carolina; and that he was a big Notre Dame fan.

I have found that the experience of hearing about people who’ve died of cancer, and of riding alongside people who have survived cancer or are even in the process of trying to survive it now, is less sentimental one might suspect.  Which is not to say that people aren’t feeling deep emotions.  But, to me at least, there is an overall sense of determination, of plowing forward.  Actually, that doesn’t quite capture what I’ve been feeling at these rides: it leaves out the sense of joy — a paradoxical thing to feel as we note the absence of those whom we and others have loved, but it’s there.  It’s there as we glide under the Redwoods that will (I hope) outlive us; it’s there in the camaraderie of our teamwork; it’s there in the realization that we, for now, are still here, with our dreams and our loves and our memories, alive.

Next week, I heard, our training ride will go for 55 miles.  That’s a bigger number than 39 — though smaller, to be sure, than some others.

If you’d like to make a donation to Team In Training, in support of my upcoming 100-mile ride in March, you can go to my TNT fundraising page.

Below is a map of last Saturday’s training ride; you can click on it for details. It says I burned 1,145 calories, but believe me, it felt like at least 1,146.

Posted: January 5th, 2012 under Curing Cancer, Cycling, Elsa, Team In Training.
Comments: 1

The man working in the booth at the Pleasant Hill BART station yesterday morning was writing in a composition notebook.  His hand, which gripped a pen, was twisted in a way that suggested he suffered from some kind of palsy.  He wrote in clear, non-cursive print.  The man had white hair and seemed kindly — in fact, was proved to be kindly when I asked him where I could find the base of the bridge that goes over Treat Blvd.  He told me how to get there (it was just around the corner) and then said, “Have a great ride!”

I wondered, as a wandered off, how he had known that I was about to go cycling.  Then it occurred to me that I was wearing a bicycle helmet, as well as a shiny cycling jacket, padded cycling shorts, elbow- and knee-warmers, and cycling shoes.  Also, I had a bike. …  And yet, from inside myself, I wasn’t yet a cyclist — and thus it came as a surprise to be recognized as one, even with all the accoutrements.

It was cold — in the 30s — as I waited at the base of that bridge.  Then Richard, one of the coaches with Team in Training, swung by on his bike to lead me to where the rest of our group was riding.  (They had started a few miles earlier.)  And as soon as I began pedaling, I warmed right up.  Well, except for my fingertips.

This ride would take us through Martinez and into Crockett, and it promised to be incrementally tougher than the previous ride.  But I felt prepared, somewhat: the day before I’d bought “clipless” pedals, along with the shoes that connect to them.  The “clipless” name seems a bit misleading, as what distinguishes these pedals is that they have clips on them — but no matter.  The idea is that, with your feet stuck to the pedals, you can use more of your leg muscles when pedaling: you can pull up with one leg while you’re pushing down with the other one.  In general, you are made into a more-efficient cycling machine, with less of your precious energy being wasted.  The problem, potentially, is that if you don’t get your feet disconnected from the pedals before you stop (by twisting your heels outward), then you will fall down.

Fortunately, Richard kept me distracted and entertained with conversation, and so I kind of forgot to be scared.  One coach always goes behind all the other cyclists, so no one will get lost.  I felt kind of guilty slowing him down by having to ride with me, but he assured me that this was all part of the coaching gig.  In a way, I guess, coaches are the Jews of cycle teams: they suffer so that the rest of us may glide into the future.

This ride was longer, and hillier, than our previous ones — but it felt easier to me because of the clipless pedals: there still was pain, especially during the long ascent — but it was a more under-control pain.  In endurance training, I’m learning, you live for increments: a bit more lung capacity, a smidge slower heart rate.  In fact, that’s what makes the long distances doable: breaking them down, mentally, into increments.  You’re not biking for 35 miles, or 100 miles; you’re just pedaling one more time.  And then another.  And another.  And, God, another.  And eventually you reach the top of the hill, or the end of the whole ride, and it feels as though someone else did the biking, someone tough and strong and resolute — someone, in other words, who is not you (if you’re me).

I didn’t fall down, not once.  Nor did I crash when going downhill, even though there were a bunch of switchbacks and I was going quite fast (for me).  I also found places to pee that were semi-hidden from the road — though the wind kept changing directions, making it quite tricky to pick a direction to pee in.  I stayed hydrated (if you’re not hydrated, you won’t need to pee) and ate all three of the somewhat yucky sports bars that I’d stuffed into my jersey (note to self: try packing some peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches for next week’s ride).  I thought of people suffering from cancer and wished them well in their treatment — and suddenly felt blessed that I was physically able to go cycling on this fine day.  I saw some cows and some horses, and two wild turkeys.  Once, going downhill after the longest climb, I sang a Ramones song quite loudly (no one was around to hear).

After the ride, I rolled my bike back into the Pleasant Hill BART station.  The guy from the booth was walking around, checking the ticket machines or something.  “How was your ride?” he asked.  “Great!” I said.  “It was my longest ride yet!”  He smiled, and walked off, limping in a way that he probably has for his whole walking life.  I carried my bike up the stairs and waited, huffing, on the platform.  And I have to say: I kind of actually felt like a cyclist!

Thank you to everyone who’s donated towards my upcoming (March 10) ride of the Solvang Century!  If you’d like to make a donation yourself, which would support finding a cure for blood cancers, you can go to my TNT fundraising page.

Below is a map of yesterday’s training ride; if you click on it, you can get lots of extra info.  I note from the linked-to website that experienced cyclists have nicknamed one of the steepest segments of this ride the “Get me the hell out of Crockett climb” — which sounds just about right.

Posted: December 26th, 2011 under Curing Cancer, Cycling, Team In Training.
Comments: none

We were warned, leading up to last Saturday’s training ride out of Sunol, that we would encounter the “infamous Wall.”  I didn’t like the sound of “infamous” and I didn’t like the sound (and initial Cap) of “Wall” — but as it turns out the Wall was optional.  Which was great, because even without experiencing the Wall (apparently, it’s a steep drop favored by cyclists who are braver and better than I am) I found the ride quite difficult.  In cumulative climbing terms, it was a smidge less gnarly than the “Three Bears” ride of the week before — but the tough part was that the first half of this 30-mile ride (my longest yet, by five miles or so) was pretty much all up.  There was some up, and then some more up, and then a lot of up.  Up became all that there was, or at least seemed to be.  Been up so long, looked like flat to me.  Down was a distant, perhaps faulty memory from back in the mists of time, when the universe was young and down possibly prevailed.

And at some point I got it.  I’d been going up and up and up, and my leg muscles were yelling at my brain to tell them to stop pedaling — and my brain just said … no.  And my legs shrugged (figuratively) and just kept going — slowly, mind you, incredibly slowly, first-gear slowly, but still they didn’t stop.  And what I got was this: that training for an endurance event involves rewiring yourself, so that what would previously have caused your body to shut down now only pissed you off.  Suddenly there were two of me: the one who, quite reasonably, desired to stop; and the other one, the stubborn brutish me who just … kept … going.  And the wanting-to-stop me, 52 years old, regarded the newborn up-up-up me and decided, for another day at least, to back off.

At the top I was told to stop, to have some food and water, and then, after a few minutes, I headed back down.  I’m the slowest person on the team, I think, but heck, I’m on the team!  Which is cool.

If you’d like to make a donation to support finding a cure for blood cancers, you can go to my TNT fundraising page.

Below is a map of my ride; if you click on it, you can get a whole bunch of detailed info — more, no doubt, than you would ever wish to see.  In the spirit of total transparency, let me admit that when I rolled back into the parking lot where we’d started, my little bike-computer thingie showed that I’d gone 29.9 miles; so, yeah, I biked a few times around the lot so I’d get to an even 30.  And you know something?  I’d do it again!

Posted: December 20th, 2011 under Curing Cancer, Cycling, Team In Training.
Comments: none

Wow — a really challenging training ride yesterday!  I took my bike on BART to the Orinda station, where everyone was meeting in the parking lot.  I heard an experienced rider say that there were two bike rides out of there — an easier one to the east, and a difficult run to the west.  I silently made a wuss-like prayer for the eastward route.  But we went west — over the hills that are known locally as the Three Bears.  There’s Papa Bear (the biggest one), and so on.  And I thought I heard someone say that the hills went from Papa to Mama to Baby — in other words, from hardest to easiest.

Things went pretty smoothly at the start of the ride.  Eventually we hit a decent hill — and I asked the nearby cyclists if this was Papa Bear.  Oh no, came the sad reply.  Not even close.

Later we got to a much steeper hill.  Was this Papa Bear, I wondered?  Negative.

By the time we’d covered over 15 miles of what had been billed as a 25-mile ride, I started thinking that maybe we had already gone over Papa Bear — that maybe the other riders were just messing with the minds of us newbies.  Then we really did hit Papa Bear.  And oh, it was steep!  And it seemed to last forever!  I just stayed in my lowest gear and kept pedaling.  The rest of my group was out of sight — some ahead, some behind (amazingly) — and for the longest time all I could hear was my own breathing.  Every once it a while, a guy from our team named Mike would drive by in a truck and ask me how I was doing; my guess is that, besides getting my actual answer, he was listening to hear that I could still speak normally.  (Indeed, my voice sounded strangely strong and cheerful to my own ears, considering how much I was exerting myself.)

Then — finally — there was a long, steep descent, thrillingly fast for me (though I kept tickling the brakes so I didn’t get out of control), and we were back at the Orinda BART station.  A woman with a nice British accent was leading a few riders in stretches; I joined them, and was instantly glad I had, as my legs felt like petrified tree stumps.  But I had made it over the Three Bears!  Apparently, the order was actually Baby, Mama, then Papa.  I felt like Goldilox, and I was ready to head home for some porridge (read: cheeseburger) and a nap in our just-the-right-sized bed.

If you’d like to make a donation to support finding a cure for blood cancers, you can go to my TNT fundraising page.

The map and data from yesterday’s training ride are below.

Posted: December 11th, 2011 under Curing Cancer, Cycling, Team In Training.
Comments: none

To a leftist, the stationary bike is a revelation: you’re not going backwards!

I rediscovered this last week, when I took my first “spin” class at the local Y — part of my training for the 100 miles I’ll be cycling on March 10, as a member of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s Team In Training.  (You can donate to support my ride here.)  It was the first aerobics class I’d taken since probably the ’80s.  When I got there, the regulars had already reserved their favorite stationary bikes by draping a towel over the handlebars: it looked like an orderly convention of short, mechanical nuns.  Then, as the workout time approached, the towels were replaced by their people, and the instructor, Amanda, showed up.

Amanda has lots of energy: I imagine that as she was being born, she shouted out a cadence so her mom could speed up her contractions.  I hadn’t anticipated that we’d spend much of the class riding up out of our saddles — this took something that I expected to be difficult and made it cartoonishly hard.  But I got through it!  And — especially in retrospect — I really enjoyed it.

The music was hard to take, though.  I’d never actually heard any of Lady Gaga’s oeuvre before, and was amazed at the sameness of it (at least, to my as-yet-unGagafied ears).  Also — partly through my exertions and partly through the hearing loss I incurred at a terrific 1983 concert by the Violent Femmes — I couldn’t make out the lyrics.  At some point, as I pedaled along frantically, I lapsed into a surreal mental state in which I imagined that Lady Gaga was singing about the struggle of the individual to feel at home in a community, as experienced by one lonely member of the Workman’s Circle who’d just moved into the socialistic “coops” of the Bronx in the mid-20th century.  But maybe she was really singing about sex.

In any case, I’m going back for spinning seconds this afternoon.  Wish me well as I go nowhere fast.

P.S.: My training-ride cycling stats will return to this space next weekend.  I had to miss last Saturday’s ride (in Marin) because I was performing in Michigan.

Posted: December 6th, 2011 under Curing Cancer, Cycling, Team In Training.
Comments: 1

Went on my second training ride yesterday, at 8:30 a.m. in Danville.  I think I have now reached critical mass in biking accoutrements: I was wearing my bike jersey, padded bike shorts (with baggy non-bike shorts over them, to maintain my street cred and preserve a certain mystery regarding my genitals), riding gloves, elbow and knee-warmers, a brightly colored windbreaker (which I kept stuffed into my jersey), and of course a helmet (to protect my memories of lying in bed on Saturday mornings).  I have, however, drawn the line — for the moment, at least — at the special shoes with clips in the bottoms that attach you to your pedals: for one thing, I’m afraid I’d keep falling over; for another thing, they’re effing expensive.

Before we started rolling, we were introduced to a guest rider — a man who spoke movingly of having recently lost his wife to cancer.  He’s a police officer — and as he spoke (and I cried some), my mind, strangely, leapt to the cop who infamously pepper-sprayed a group of peacefully protesting students at UC-Davis last week.  And the empathy that I’ve been feeling for those students, and for their families and friends, somehow also extended to that cop.  Because here before me, speaking with great emotion, was someone else in his line of work; and because I cared about the man who was speaking to us, I also, somehow, cared about another man, whom I’ve loathed from afar.  I saw us all as fragile organisms, whose lives can be made meaningful only by love.  And I wanted to do my tiny part to fight cancer, so that people may love and be loved for as long as possible, as well as my tiny part to try to repair the delicate political organism that — improbably, in this beautiful but mostly uncaring universe — has somehow joined so many of us together in relative peace.

During our 20-mile ride, another cop (a close friend of the man who had spoken to us earlier) took it upon himself to tutor me in the art of reaching for one’s water bottle while riding one’s bike.  He’d noticed that I hadn’t been hydrating while riding, and pulled up alongside me to explain how important it is, on long rides, to drink water steadily; otherwise, he said, you start cramping.  I, in turn, explained my fear — that if I took one hand off the handlebars to reach for a water bottle, disaster would ensue.  But he kept at it, encouraging me to go through the process repeatedly, step by step.  And it worked!  (I didn’t die.)

You (or, at least, I) feel pretty vulnerable zipping along on a bike over a hard road.  But riding in a team, you start to feel that success might be possible.  People warn you about road hazards (gravel, glass, potholes) with hand-signals and shouts.  They show you how to drink water between stops.  They keep alive the memories of their loved ones, and so help you keep alive the memories of yours (on both rides I’ve done so far, my thoughts have often drifted to such recollections — maybe, in part, because bike-riding brings back sense-memories of earlier days).

Yesterday was 20 miles or so.  On March 10 it will be 100 miles!  Who knows what thoughts I’ll have?  I have little idea — but I’m pretty sure that I won’t cramp up.  Thanks, fellow human!

If you’d like to make a donation to support finding a cure for blood cancers, you can go to my TNT fundraising page.

Below is (are?) the data from yesterday’s training ride in Danville.

Posted: November 27th, 2011 under Curing Cancer, Cycling, Team In Training.
Comments: none