Cyclocross at Biltmore

Yesterday Nina and I tried what was a completely new experience for both of us: watching a cyclocross race. It was held at the famous Biltmore Estate, which is just a couple of miles from Nina's house. Cyclocross is sort of like a steeplechase for cyclists. It's cross-country, meaning mostly not on pavement, but with nasty obstacles thrown in, like giant mudholes, and hills that are too steep to ride.

Nina has a new camera, and we both thought it would be fun to try our hands at fast action shots. It gave me a new appreciation for professional sports photographers. It is not easy to anticipate what will be worth taking a picture of, when it will happen, how to frame the shot to capture both the action and the competitor's face, and do all that while being aware of light/shadow conditions, obstacles, extraneous elements, and a hundred other things.

We watched a 45-minute race that actually included separate men's and women's races with staggered starts. We paid no attention to who was winning, but just enjoyed watching them negotiate tricky spots on the course. Much of our time was spent at a nasty series of hairpin turns coming steeply down the side of a hill. The men were mostly looking pretty stoic, but the women tended to wear their emotions on their faces, showing pain, determination, alarm, or even elation:

But before getting to coast around those downhill twisties, they first had to get up the hill. There were only two ways to do it--push the bike, or pick it up and carry it.

(Do not adjust your set. The sky really was that blue--no digital enhancement.) 

Well, that's not quite true. A very, very few of the strongest competitors were able to ride straight up--which, when you're standing on the side watching, looks like you're seeing something physically impossible transpire before your very eyes.

But you know who I admired most? It wasn't the elite cyclists whose incredibly muscled legs let them defy gravity. It was this woman:

She is obviously not as highly conditioned as most of the other racers. She may not love having to buy her spandex clothes in larger sizes. She was not in contention for one of the prizes. She clearly doesn't have as many hours in the saddle as others, which you can tell from the way she has already taken her feet off of the pedals in anticipation of having difficulty managing the gnarly turn she's about to hit. (We watched several people take tumbles when they misjudged it.) And I suspect she noticed that some of the bystanders snickered as she rode past. But she was out there giving it her all, while those judging her were just standing around. She could absolutely beat me around that course, and probably many of them, too. Plus, she's working on getting better at it, while I'm sitting on my butt in front of my computer. So my hat is off to her for taking on the challenge instead of just vegetating.

Speaking of the spectators, they were having a grand old time, what with ringing cowbells and cheering on friends and/or giving them a little friendly trash talking, sometimes through megaphones. Two stood out. First was this woman:

She obviously knew a lot of the riders and would taunt them by name as they sped by. Sometimes she would reach out and poke them with her stick, offering to give them a "hand." (Nobody seemed bothered by this. I gather that these are highly  informal competitions.) Her best moment came in that super-tricky turn. She yelled through her megaphone at one rider, "No front brake! NO FRONT BRAKE!" [Wipeout.] "Told ya!"

But nobody was having a better time than this kid:

He'd shout and ring his cowbell as loudly as he could at just about every rider that came his way. His enthusiasm was delightful and contagious.

I enjoyed the few minutes we had to watch the cyclists relaxing near the finish line, while waiting for the last stragglers to come in. Notice that this young woman is in bike shorts and a short-sleeved shirt, but sweating, while the more sedentary among us were freezing despite heavy coats because of a nasty cold wind.

All in all, it was a fun and beautiful afternoon at Biltmore.

Addendum: Nina's pictures are here.

Use it or lose it

I went out for my first real bike ride since moving to Asheville 15 months ago. (I say "real" because I took a quick spin around the block Wednesday just to be sure all the mechanical parts were working after reassembly.) The numbers don't lie: I've completely lost the extremely modest amount of conditioning I had managing to achieve with my riding in Vegas.

As you can see from this screen shot (from a very nice, free site called "Ride With GPS"), my last serious ride in Nevada was in late November of 2012. I wrote about that ride here. It was at the outer limit of my ability, but I could do it: 99 minutes, 18 miles, 1370 feet of climbing.

Today I rode 11 minutes, 1.7 miles, and a measly 153 feet of climbing--and it nearly killed me. The last stretch is about 200 feet of an 11% grade up to the alley behind my house, and I swear that if I had had to go another 10 feet, my heart and lungs would have jumped out of my body to go find a more worthy host. I had to spend five minutes huffing and puffing to recover enough just to pick up my bike and carry it inside, and even then I couldn't carry it up the stairs to my apartment until after I had spent 10 minutes panting on the couch. And 15 minutes after that, sitting at my computer, I was still covered in sweat from head to toe.

Pathetic. Completely, utterly pathetic.

My goodness, it is discouraging to both feel in my bones how much progress I've lost, and see it reduced to cold, hard numbers by a GPS tracker that will not fudge the data to soften the ugly truth.

On the other hand, there is this: I'm better off than the people who slacked off for the past 15 months and then DIDN'T go out for even a short ride today.

"You'll get there"

(No poker content.)

Last night I was browsing bike routes that local riders have uploaded, looking for someplace new to explore this morning. I found this one out in Henderson and thought it looked promising:

I did see that hill between the 11- and 12-mile marks, but thought that after my encounter with the monster climb Tuesday, I could handle this one. Ah, the hubris of youth. Or age. To tell you the truth, I didn't even check the slopes. I just looked at the total elevation change, and made a snap-call that it was manageable. Had I peered into the numbers a little more deeply, I might have seen that most of that uphill is 7-9%, and stretches of it are above 10%, peaking at 13.6%. Those numbers may not mean much to you if you have no experience comparing them with real-world roads, but trust me--those are gnarly slopes. The one that nearly killed me Tuesday was a pretty steady 4-5%. So if I had seriously studied the map for this one in Henderson, I might have spared myself what was to come.

The first part of the ride wasn't hard. About ten miles in, I got to the base of the hill and started up, determined that I was going to do it without stopping, even if it meant going ultra-slow. If I just looked a short distance in front of my tire, I could convince myself that I could do it--just keep turning the pedals one more time, then one more time after that.* But if I lifted my head and looked at how far I had to go, and how steep it was, it felt impossible.

I was pushing through the hurt, mostly managing not to discourage myself by looking too far ahead. But then about half way up, I had a sudden collapse. I had not planned on stopping to rest, but all at once I just couldn't push the pedals any more, and had to stop. I parked the bike and sat on a big rock panting, sensing my heart about to pound its way through my sternum, feeling pathetically sorry for myself. I also felt stupid: Twice in one week I had bitten off more than I could chew (an apt metaphor for Thanksgiving week). How could I have looked at the profile of this hill--a mere three days after having underestimated the one in Summerlin--and yet again failed to realize that it was beyond my capacity? Am I really that slow a learner?

As I was wallowing in fatigue and hypoxia and pain and self-pity, I glanced up and saw another cyclist coming up the hill. He was covering ground faster than I would have thought humanly possible, given how that same slope had defeated me. What's more was that he didn't look like it was killing him, or even bothering him. He appeared to be enjoying himself, as if he were just on an relaxing Sunday jaunt. At a glance it was obvious that he was a very, very strong rider. His bike and accessories were top-shelf, and he was clearly in that elite class of riders for whom such expensive purchases were justified, in that he could really squeeze their performance potential from them. If there is a bell curve of cycling ability, he and I are at opposite ends of it.

He never stopped, but he slowed down as he neared me. He called out, "Are you all right?" "Fine," I replied. "I just couldn't make it all the way up without stopping to rest."

He gave me a smile that struck me as warm and supportive, not in the least bit condescending (as he might have reason to be, given the disparity in our abilities), and said sympathetically, "It's a hard climb." By now he was past me, and he looked back over his shoulder to add, "But don't worry--you'll get there." And he sped off.

I'm not usually one to be easily affected by cheap sentiment, breezy cliches, or generic affirmations. But something about the specific words he chose and the warmth and compassion that I detected behind them gave me a real rush of confidence. Like few times that I can remember in my life, in a flash my mood and outlook were transformed. This random stranger managed, with those last six words, to pull me out of a pit of doubt and self-recrimination and snapped me back into focusing on actually getting done what I had set out to do. As soon as he had disappeared around a bend, I hopped back on my bike to attack the hill again.

And you know what? He was right. I did get there. Not nearly as fast as he did, but at my own slow pace I got to the top, when a few minutes before I had come very close to convincing myself that I couldn't do it and calling off the apparently futile attempt.


Not many worthwhile things in life are easy. Once in a while you are treated to an easy coast down a hill and the feeling is exhilarating. But very quickly that freeroll ends and you're back to the hard slog up the ugly side of the next challenge, step after step, day after day. Life is one hill after another after another, and we spend a lot more time trudging up them than we do sailing down the other side. Each one can feel endless, even pointless, as if you'll never beat it, as if you'll never get to the top.

It's a hard climb.

But don't worry--you'll get there.



*If you've never seen the documentary film "Touching the Void," you owe it to yourself to find it and watch it. It's an incredible, harrowing story of survival. In short, a guy with a broken leg has to climb down a mountain in the Andes all by himself, because his partner has left him behind, assuming that he had died in the fall that broke his leg. I thought the most interesting part was the psychological tricks he had to use to get himself through the ordeal. He had a master self who kept issuing commands, such as, "You have to get to that rock over there before you can rest." And the part of his mind that was actually carrying out the orders would protest that it couldn't be done. But the master self was like a slave driver who would accept no excuses for failure. So accomplishing one small goal at a time, pushing through the pain of one more short segment before resting, he made it down and survived. It took him several days of pushing himself in that way. I realize it's kind of melodramatic of me to compare a virtually risk-free suburban hill climb on a bicycle to that arduous journey, but I do flash back to it when trying to push myself to go a little bit farther, and then a little bit farther after that.

Climb every mountain

(No poker content.)

I found a web site, Strava, on which one can not only upload the GPS data from a bike ride, but compare it to other users who have covered the same track. I quickly discovered that one of the most popular local biking challenges is a route called the "Villa Ridge climb" in Summerlin:

I thought it would be fun and interesting to take it on and compare my time to the best that have been recorded--which, as you can see, is 13:37 for a man, 15:03 for a woman. I knew I would be vastly slower than that, but I didn't expect that I'd have difficulty even finishing the ride. After all,  I've done 24-mile rides with 1000 feet of climb, so how hard can 4.4 miles and 667 feet of climb be?

As it turns out, a lot harder than I thought. I had to stop--twice--for ten-minute breaks to catch my breath. Some of my longer rides to date have certainly left me tired, but I had never before been forced to stop because I had reached my cardiovascular limit. Until today.

The first time I must have looked a sight sitting on the curb panting, because a nice lady stopped her car, rolled down the window, and asked if I was OK. I put on a brave face. "Yes, fine, thanks--just taking a breather." Inside, though, I was dying.

When the fire in my legs and lungs again forced a halt, this time I dialed 911 and had the friendly paramedics come by and jump-start my heart a few times, as it had gone into ventricular fibrillation.

Why so much difficulty compared to my previous rides? The answer perhaps should have been obvious to me just looking at the graph above, but it became painfully apparent as I was riding: It's the unbroken, unrelenting nature of the climb. Once it starts going uphill, there are no flat spots, no downhill portions in which to do some recovery. It's just climb, climb, climb, and climb some more.That is a condition I haven't faced before, and it makes all the difference in the world.

But I did eventually make it up the hill, mostly fueled by sheer stubbornness. Well, that plus the fact that I had left my car at the top of the hill, so turning around and heading down was not an option. I confess that I was feeling so completely whipped that I probably would have wimped out and taken that option had it been available.

My time? 51 minutes, including the rest breaks. My legs felt like overcooked spaghetti for the rest of the day. Overcooked spaghetti that was on fire.

This is mildly discouraging because I've had my eye on riding Red Rock Canyon, and that is an even more difficult climb, with more than 50% greater elevation rise in about the same distance as Villa Ridge. I had previously been thinking that it would be at the outer edge of my ability, but that I could do it. I now know that I can't--at least not without taking several breaks along the way, and maybe being carried the last mile or two by my funeral procession.

On the other hand, being faced with this stark evidence of how out of shape I am gives me some motivation to do better. And having an objective, repeatable benchmark test gives me the means to track my progress. Maybe next time I can make do with one ten-minute rest and one five-minute rest. Then with just two five-minute rests, then just one. And maybe, just maybe, in a month or two I can increase my leg strength and cardiovascular reserve enough that I can make it to the top without stopping at all. (One of the advantages of living in Las Vegas is that even in the winter it doesn't get prohibitively cold for biking.)

I still won't show up on the Strava leaderboard, but that doesn't matter. I'm really only competing against myself. As long as I can get to where I can convincingly trounce the pathetic, out-of-shape, overweight, middle-aged, whiny slowpoke who barely managed to even finish the ride today, it will be something I'll be proud of.

Life in Summerlin

No poker content, but there is blood and gore ahead!

The target for this morning's bike ride was this chain of trails (marked in red) out in Summerlin, the rich part of town.

Have you ever wondered what the city provides when it builds bike trails where the wealthy people live that it does not provide when it builds bike trails where we working-class folk live? Well, I'm here to answer your question!

You get beautiful, manicured trailheads!

Trees!

A ginormous floodwater basin!

(I had to digitally stitch together several shots to make this panoramic composite, and it still doesn't adequately convey the size. I checked on Google Earth, and it's about 120 yards across, and just over 2/3 of a mile long. The volume of water that has to be contained when we get one of our occasional flash storms is just staggering.)

Tunnels!

Tennis courts!

Soccer fields!

More tunnels!

Bridges over the busy streets so you don't get killed crossing them!

Purple shrubbery, sufficient to placate the most demanding forest knights!

Whole parks and playgrounds!

More bridges over busy streets!

Baseball fields!

Skateboard parks!

Mormon churches!

Sign posts!

Benches!

Doggie doo bags!

(They have boxes just like this along the trails in the poor parts of town, too, but I look at them as I ride by, and have never, ever seen one that was stocked with bags. 100% empty. In Summerlin, every single one that I passed had bags in it.)

Nicely maintained trails! No broken glass! Lights for night riding!

For when the weather's not nice, an indoor sports complex!

Exercise equipment!

Basketball courts!

Picnic tables and drinking fountains!

I also saw six--six!--very cute chipmunks, but none of them stuck around long enough for me to pull out my camera and take his picture.

The difference in the quality of the amenities provided in the suburb-like Summerlin neighborhood and the central, working-class neighborhoods in which I did my first rides is nothing short of stunning. I'll bet that city politicians would try to claim that such differences have nothing whatsoever to do with the income (and consequent political influence) of the residents. I would laugh in their faces.


Oh, I almost forgot the blood and gore part of the program! That skateboard park was deserted, and it sorely tempted 14-year-old me. At first I just rode around the perimeter, marveling at how lethal everything looked. But then I saw some gentler slopes at the far end, and that mischievous 14-year-old me took over. I can do those! No problem! So I swooped down into the pit and in my lowest gear pedaled hard, and came to a triumphant stop on top of the crest. "See?" said the 14-year-old. "Easy!" He even stopped to take a picture looking down over the handlebars:

He texted that photo to his girlfriend, and coasted down. Whee! Exhilarating! The 51-year-old me thought that that little taste of long-ago recklessness was enough. But the 14-year-old me looked at the next slope over, which was just a little bit steeper, and said, "That one! We can do that one!" Against my better judgment, I gave in to him.

And we almost made it. "Almost" being the key word there.

Just about six inches from the top, Impetus, the Great God of Momentum, looked down upon our foolishness and thundered from Mt. Olympus, "No more of that for you!" Quicker than I would have thought possible, I switched from rolling forward to rolling backward, an eventuality for which I was wholly unprepared.

I wish somebody had been shooting video, because I suspect it would win a prize on "America's Funniest Home Videos." Legs flailing wildly, handlebars twisting this way and that, all while rolling backwards, in a desperate attempt to keep the wheels under me. I did manage to make it to the bottom of the slope before I toppled over, so there was only minimal sliding along the concrete.

As gravity was taking over, the only thing I could think was, "This is not going to end well."

My handlebars were knocked out of alignment. There's some scraping on one brake lever. My helmet--which I'm very glad to have been wearing--has a little scuff mark on one side. My shirt and pants got dirty but, surprisingly, not torn. I got a couple of boo-boos:

There was, fortunately, no damage to expensive things, like my teeth and glasses. Or bones.

In spite of these massive wounds, the 14-year-old in me still thinks that that place looks like it would be hella fun to play in, given a bike better suited for such shenanigans. Sadly, the 51-year-old me realizes that the 14-year-old me is no longer in charge of the reflexes and balance part of the riding process. He could have done it. I don't think that I can, or should.


Oh, and one other little thing about the biking, since if you've read this far you must find something interesting about it (though I have no idea why you would). I've rigged up this front fork mount for the back of my car to keep the bike from flopping around when I drive:

The rear wheel tucks up between the front passenger seat and the frame, like so: 

Note that the larger side of the rear seat stays usable in its normal position. Pretty nifty, eh?