Ridin' The Storm Out (May 2011)

 
Sometimes even the most mundane rides can turn into an adventure.

The Weather Channel promised us fog, temperatures in the upper 60′s, and a reprieve from thunderstorms until 11am on the Sunday of the Memorial Day weekend.  Starting at 8am, we would be back in our cars with at least thirty miles on the odometer before the first raindrop fell.

We had contemplated driving downtown for the annual Bike The Drive ride on Lake Shore Drive.  With the Drive closed to vehicle traffic, it’s the very best way to see Chicago’s iconic skyline up close and personal – if your idea of personal includes 19,999 other riders, that is.  This May’s volatile and unpredictable weather made it a safe bet to opt out.  I felt somewhat better about my decision when I awoke to fog.  It’s hard to appreciate the Second City’s storied architecture when you can’t see ten feet in front of you.

This Sunday would mark the first official ride of the season for our informal group of recreational riders.  We don’t really have a name, but I’m leaning toward the Fox River Social Club as we usually default to riding the two trails that run along the Fox River (Fox River Trail, Prairie Trail).  We seem to spend as much time eating and taking restroom breaks as we do bicycling.  Our inaugural ride of 2011 was no exception.

Our group could have affectionately been called four and a half men.  Our half man was neither pudgy nor annoying and neither of his accompanying adults had sipped tiger blood for breakfast.  Our Jake is a very affable and athletic seven year-old capable of powering his dad up rolling hills from the back of his tag-along bike – when he’s not snacking or watering the grass.

The four men consisted of me, Jake’s dad Javier, Eric, and Josh.  Javier suffered a spectacular crash navigating the twisting turns and steep hills of Veteran Acres Park the last time the four of us rode together.  The initial stretch of this ride featured an eerily similar set of curvy rollers with a thick cover of trees to keep the trail unpredictably moist.  Take the first ride of the season, add a seven year-old on a tag-along, start them off on some slippery hills and if nothing tragic happens within the first five minutes, you still have some great foreshadowing.

By the time we all got rolling at 8:30, the fog had already lifted.  That should have been our first clue that TWC had just gotten lazy with the copy and paste buttons for their hourly forecasts.

Rerouting on local roads to avoid two closed sections of the path, we still managed to make pretty good time until we approached the long, gradual hill that leads up to Tekakwitha Woods just south of the bridge in Valley View.  None of us expected Javier and Jake to pedal up it effortlessly.  We were all winded by the time we reached the top.  Waiting for the two of them to dismount and walk was no inconvenience, it was a needed break.

The number one rule of the Social Club is to leave no man behind.  Despite Javier’s insistence that the rest of us ride ahead, one of us always stayed with the two of them.  Pay attention to this foreshadowing…

We suffered a host of delays as we arrived in St. Charles.  Eric had to change a flat tire.  We were forced to dismount and walk our bikes through a tent city housing local artists.  We stopped to realign the tag-along after it developed the unibody drift synonymous with the 1970′s Chevy Nova.  Add in Jake’s ecological commitment to spur vegetation growth along the trail and we were about 45 minutes behind when we reached our turnaround destination.  We had traveled thirteen and a half miles in one and a half hours.

After the four and a half of us used the makeshift facilities in Batavia, I stated the obvious; the temperature had yet to rise to the 67 degrees forecast by TWC.  With two out of three predictions already blown, we should have anticipated the rain arriving ahead of schedule.

We made it nearly four miles before the sky suddenly darkened.  We all picked up the pace for the next half mile, negotiating the twisting turns of the trail despite limited visibility.  Just north of Geneva the trail is forced to cross Route 25 for a stretch that is barely a block long.  As soon as we crossed, Jake apparently became concerned that the rain might miss a specific section of bushes on the east side of the trail.  I took advantage of his sprinkling session to grab a jacket from my trunk bag.  Back on the trail for less than thirty seconds, the rain began.

At first it seemed like a gentle summer rain.  That feeling lasted all of another thirty seconds.  There was a loud thunderclap and the skies let loose.  As Javier and Jake sped downhill toward the crossing at Route 25, I could see that they would have trouble braking on the wet pavement.  Lightning lit up the sky and Javier’s deft maneuvering appeared in front of me like a dancer in a strobe light.  It was a series of still shots projected from a slide carousel.  Each fishtail of the tag-along was caught in a separate frame.  The whole scene played out in slow motion.

Javier managed to bring his runaway train to a stop in the grass just off the trail, well shy of the street crossing.  After a few tense moments waiting to cross Route 25, we continued north to the Prairie Street bridge.  We crossed the bridge in search of shelter.  We spied a gazebo in Mount Saint Mary Park, just south of our sidewalk.  With no direct route connecting the sidewalk to the walking path below, Javier took to the grass.  Sliding to safety on the walking path, Jake had had enough of Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.  He leaped from the tag-along and made a bee-line directly for the shelter, easily beating the four cyclists who were forced to follow the walking path.

Huddled amidst the rows of picnic tables beneath the roof of the open gazebo, we took stock of our situation.  Javier grabbed Jake’s jacket from his handlebar bag and Jake immediately pulled it over his soaked t-shirt.  Josh stood shivering in a jersey and shorts, wondering why he left the house that morning without his bike trunk and a jacket.  Eric, clad in tights and two top layers, was wet but not saturated.  My cycling jacket had zero rain repellant features.  My mountain bike shorts and jacket combined must have retained five pounds of rainwater.

The lightning that spooked Jake and forced us to take shelter subsided quickly enough.  The storm appeared to be moving off to the west of us.  Only nine miles separated the four and a half men from their two minivans.  The rain showed no sign of stopping.  The vans weren’t going to drive themselves down to pick us up.  I transferred my phone and wallet from my soaking shorts pocket to my trunk bag and slid on the reflective rain cover.  I clipped my flashing red light back on and switched on my headlight.  I knew what I had to do.

Both Eric and Josh offered to ride back with me.  There was no point in all three of us getting wet, so we left Josh to accompany Javier and Jake.  Remember, we couldn’t leave a man behind.

Eric and I had but one mutual goal as we headed north; ride safely.

It took awhile to cross Main Street in St. Charles.  As we followed the on-street route to the bike path, I remained behind with my flashing red taillight.  My sport hybrid was no match for Eric’s road bike as we sprinted toward the trail.  Once on the trail, however, my wider tires and straight handlebar offered greater maneuverability each time we encountered a washed out stretch of crushed limestone.

Our skills were complementary as we forged on through the steady rain.  Eric pulled and set the pace on the street sections.  I cleaned the lines through the washouts.  Aside from Eric dropping his chain in one sketchy section, we made seven miles without incident, weathering some pretty heavy downpours along the way.

As we prepared for our final two mile stretch, another cloudburst sent us scrambling for cover.  We took shelter beneath a canopy outside a liquor store in South Elgin.  Each lightning flash featured a simultaneous thunderclap.  The storm had moved back east as we had headed north.  It was now directly upon us.

The storm was extremely violent for about ten minutes.  Sirens from the fire department just west of us wailed on several separate occasions.  Unfazed, we waited patiently, talking about his family’s farm near the Elroy-Sparta Trail in Wisconsin.  A tornado had touched down the previous week and his folks were finding pieces of the neighbor’s barn in their fields.  We were silently grateful that all we had to deal with was a little rain and some lightning.

When my astute powers of observation deemed that the lighting storm had passed, we took to the street en route to the last section of trail.  We could make it to our vehicles in less than eight minutes.

We hit the trail fast and hard.  The trail paralleled the railroad tracks as it snaked up and down rolling hills, twisting toward the river and back to the tracks.  With a mile left to go we encountered a tree branch blocking the trail.  This branch wasn’t on the trail when we passed through a few hours earlier.  It had recently snapped from its tree, breaking in a 70/30 manner with about six inches of clearance between the two pieces.  I pointed out the hazard and weaved through the break without incident.  Eric was about twenty feet behind when he made his attempt.

Zap!  A lightning bolt shot to the ground no more than 100 feet in front of me!  There was no thunderclap, only the amplified sizzle of a fly being electrocuted by a giant bug zapper.  The ringing in my left ear momentarily deafened me.  I didn’t see my life flash before my eyes – I heard it!

Stunned, I turned back to check on Eric.  He had barely cleared the branch when the bolt had assailed his eardrums, but he was still upright.  We were sitting ducks on the bike path.  Surrounded by trees halfway between our last shelter and our vehicles, we had no choice but to keep moving forward.  Another blinding flash about one hundred yards ahead made me second guess the wisdom of that decision.

The next four minutes were extremely tense as we pedaled onward to the parking area.  There were no further lightning strikes by the time we finally reached the two minivans.  I yanked open the sliding door, rolled my bike inside, and climbed in after it.  I stripped off my soaking jacket and jersey and toweled myself off with a rag from my tool kit.  Once dry and back in the driver’s seat, I pulled on a track jacket, started the van, and led Eric to St. Charles to retrieve our remaining two and a half men.

Freeing my phone from the trunk bag, I discovered a text message from Javier.  We would find the three of them taking shelter in the men’s room.  Not only did this provide four enclosed walls for the three of them and their bikes, it gave Jake a great sense of relief.  At least twice, I’m told…

Despite having to sit in soaking wet shorts, we kept our tradition of a post ride breakfast at Ray’s Family Restaurant in Elgin.  It’s the very rare occasion when I allow myself to deviate from my nutrition regimen and indulge in a plate of gyros and eggs.  It also gave us all the chance to rehash the day’s adventure with the usual embellishments that turn an unfortunate incident into an epic adventure.

At least in our minds…

(Nearly) Every Day in May - Part 1 (May 2011)

On the first day of May I became optimistic again.

The unseasonably cold weather of April was now behind me.  It was time to stop muttering to myself “eight measly days”.  That was all either the weather or my work schedule would allow in April.  Eight days.  Ten hours in the saddle.  One hundred and forty nine miles on the odometer.  This was a very disappointing start to the season.  I turned my hope to May.  Spring would surely arrive in May.  It had to.

One thing was certain; I was not riding inside again.  So long stationary bike.  Goodbye Y.  My three to four days of cardio were going to be performed outside.  Whether it was a 30-minute sprint around the forest preserve loop or a two-hour ride over the backroads of Barrington, I would be on my bike, taking in the fresh air, and constantly moving forward.

I awoke that morning in a hotel room in Minneapolis, fumbled for my phone, and pressed the icon for the day’s weather.  Thirty five degrees?  Mornings are usually colder, but thirty five?  That’s barely above freezing.  The temperature would most surely rise as the sun came up.  This was not a good omen for the start of May.

Just as I started feeling sorry for myself I remembered all the people who had signed up to ride the Iron Man and Iron Crotch rides that day.  I had run into several of them at the bike expo the day before.  Many had traveled from out of state, excited to kick off the season with an epic ride.  This was Minnesota.  It was early spring.  A little cold and a little wind wouldn’t stop anybody.  Snow would literally be icing on the cake.

That’s when it hit me.  If you want to ride, you need to get over yourself, take what the weather gods serve up, and just get out there.  No more excuses.  So what if you need to wear tights?  Who cares if you need to pull on a long sleeve jersey and jacket?  You’ll warm up once you get moving.  Get out there and ride.

I kept checking the temperature as I ticked off a day’s worth of to-do’s at my desk in the hotel room.  Hour after hour, it didn’t budge.  Thirty five and overcast.  The wind was gusting up to thirty five miles per hour out of the northwest.  Meanwhile back home in the Chicago suburbs, the temperature was climbing through the mid sixties.  By the time I got on the road shortly after noon, Minneapolis was locked in a winter day and I wouldn’t arrive home with enough daylight to enjoy a spring day.

I had vowed to myself to ride every day in May.  No exceptions. 

May doesn’t begin on the 2^nd or on whatever day is convenient for me.  I needed to find a place to ride while driving home.  I decided to stop in Reedsburg and ride the 400 Trail.  Forty eight degrees with a strong wind gusting up to twenty five miles per hour in Wisconsin was still better than thirty five degrees with thirty five mile per hour gusts in Minnesota.  Yes, I was still wimping out  by choosing Wisconsin over Minnesota.  What can I say?  I just don’t have that Nordic blood.

For the next eight days I would squeak in a ride whenever and wherever I could.  A fast seven miles on the Paul Douglas Trail, a few thirteen mile jaunts to and around the Cuba Marsh Forest Preserve, a longer ride on the Paul Douglas with a stop for a haircut, and a nice thirty four-mile road ride.  I even carried my bike along on a trip to Macomb when I visited the Western Illinois University campus with my son.  While I didn’t have much time, I still managed to log nearly ten miles on rural roads with some pretty steep hills.

Then I got hit with a twenty four-hour bug.  My limp and achy legs weren’t going to spin a block, let alone a mile.  My head was so congested that it felt as if it were in a vice.  Not an ideal physical state for riding a bike.  The chain had been broken.  It would now have to be “nearly” every day in May.

Why should missing one day matter anyway?  If I didn’t ride another day over the next twenty three days it would still be the same as all of April.  Sure it was only one hundred and twenty one miles, but that’s still fifteen miles per day.  Why wasn’t that enough?  Why isn’t it enough if I don’t ride every day?

As with everything else, I guess there’s a long and a short answer.  The long answer likely involves my purple Spyder bike, missing out on the 90’s, and suffering a heart attack at 43.  There’s probably more than one blog post involved in finding the long answer.

As for the short answer, short is the answer.  Available daylight in spring is short.  A warm enough temperature during available daylight is short.  Time spent not working is short.  Summer’s short.

My patience is also short.  I can’t wait until the weather is warm enough for both early morning and early evening rides.  I daydream of Saturday mornings along the Fox River Trail with my long-time friends who take cycling a little less seriously than I do.  I imagine the faster pace of a Sunday morning group ride originating from one of my customers’ shops.  Then there are the all-day fundraising rides and all-week adventures like Tour de Kota and RAGBRAI.  

These days can’t arrive soon enough for me.

As I sit here, nearly half-way through May, I find myself contemplating whether or not to brave yet another sub-fifty degree day with winds gusting up to twenty five miles per hour just to keep the latest string going.  I was lucky earlier in the week with back-to-back eighty degree days followed by another back-to-back pair in the seventies.

Has an early taste of summer made it impossible to put the jacket back on and suffer through spring?  I guess we’ll find out in part two…

First Ride Of The Season (April 2011)

When the calendar reaches March 21^st, I become anxious.  I’m not talking “little kid on Christmas Eve” anxious.  It’s more the stereotypical “junkie on a crime drama” anxious.  I’m wearing a rut in the carpet pacing back and forth in front of the window, peering through the blinds for Mother Nature to deliver my fix.  “Bitch better get here soon or I’m about to go all kinds of crazy!”

If I haven’t been out on my first bike ride by the time the calendar officially announces the arrival of spring, my mood darkens and my nerves become frayed.  Irritability sets in.  I’m a powder keg in the middle of a place where there’s lots of dry stuff that burns easily.  Some brave soul needs to scoop me up and carry me outside before it’s too late.

Each and every day that passes without a ride is a day lost to eternity.  My already short season is being pilfered right under my nose and there’s not a damn thing I can do to stop it.  Sure, I can bundle up, toughen up, and take whatever the weather gods can throw at me.  Plenty of better men (and women) than I do it every day in urban centers like Minneapolis and Chicago.  Riding in suburbia, I just don’t want to create a distraction for unsuspecting motorists who are concentrating intently on applying make-up, shaving, eating breakfast, and reading texts while they happen to be behind the wheel of a two-ton assault weapon.

Twelve days had passed without a reprieve from thirty degree weather.  Each new morning brought the dreaded realization that it would be another day of working out at the gym.  At some point, you begin to feel like an understudy for a Broadway production.  You prepare.  You rehearse.  You improve.  You perfect.  And then you wait for your time in the limelight.  But that time never seems to come because Donny Osmond likes doing three shows a day, seven days a week, and he never gets sick or takes a vacation.

Don’t get me wrong, training is important.  It strengthens the heart.  It improves breathing.  It conditions the legs.  It keeps you in shape.  Properly motivated, you can progress past that insurmountable plateau.  You can simulate just about everything riding indoors with the notable exception of the wind.  Unfortunately, riding without the wind is like stepping out on a stage without an audience.  You remain completely detached and disconnected until you feel the energy in the air.

It’s the energy in the air that makes cycling sensational.  The moment you throw a leg over your bike, you feel the air on your skin.  As you roll forward you feel the breeze on your face, even if there isn’t any wind.  You create your own wind as you slice through the air with each pedal stroke.  Each of your senses comes to life as you propel yourself onward to your destination, even if you’re going nowhere in particular.

There is no sensation on a stationary bike at the gym.  Your eyes aren’t scanning the horizon, glimpsing the periphery, or surveying the path unfolding in front of your front wheel.  Your ears aren’t serenaded by the sounds of nature while simultaneously in tune with the hum of an approaching car.  You aren’t exchanging crisp, clean, outdoor air with the carbon dioxide you expel from your lungs.  You aren’t smelling the wildflowers and trees coming into bloom.  You aren’t tasting spring.

At the gym, your bike doesn’t sway back and forth beneath you as you adjust your cadence to the slightest change in the terrain.  The gym bike remains perfectly stationary.  It is stiff, still, and devoid of any feedback as you pedal endlessly without moving an inch.  Even if your stationary bike is your favorite road bike mounted on a trainer in your basement, it still remains relatively lifeless.  There is a familiarity about it, but it’s like date night at home; you’re spending time together watching a movie you’ve seen one hundred times before when you both would rather be out dancing.

By the first weekend in April, I was more than ready to take my best girl out on the town.  With a high hovering around fifty degrees and a strong wind out of the northwest, my riding buddies politely declined my invitation to double date.  I can’t say that I blame them.  It was far from the shirts-off, sunny days of summer.  The sun was hiding behind some heavy gray clouds, leaves had yet to even form buds, and no one had bothered to check the condition of the bike path, let alone prepare it.  Undaunted, I decided to venture out on my own.

The moment I rolled down the driveway I felt instantly alive.  My mind was focused.  My senses were alert.  My feet began dancing on the pedals.  I felt the crisp, cold air against my cheeks while the tailwind propelled me rapidly down my street to the menacing two-lane road that stands between me and cycling nirvana.  When the traffic in each direction cleared, I took a deep breath and pedaled furiously along the heavily traveled state highway someone conveniently forgot to add a paved shoulder to.  An easy right turn at the stoplight and I was safely on my way down a tree-lined, rolling, lightly traveled secondary road with a 2-foot shoulder.  Four miles, a stop sign, and two traffic lights later, I was at the forest preserve trail.

I love paved bike paths that loop around a forest preserve.  No matter which direction you choose to ride,  you will always encounter an equal amount of wind resistance.  Not really giving it much thought, I chose to ride counter-clockwise.  The first two miles were directly into the wind as I traveled straight west through the open prairie.  It was cold and it was certainly more strenuous than the ride down, but it was bearable.  As soon as I hit the curve that carried me south, the resistance was gone and I was ready to fly.

The wind can be your invisible friend or your elusive enemy.  When it’s got your back, you’re invincible!  Everything comes effortlessly.  You race through the flats.  You zoom down hills.  You even power up short climbs.  You forget that your invisible friend is even there and you begin to suffer delusions of grandeur.  As you pedal more furiously, dopamine surges and you literally begin to feel intoxicated.  The passing trees don’t become animated like the ones in H R Puffinstuff, but they do seem less ominous, even without any leaves.  It’s still very early spring and everything remains dull and gray.  For a moment, though, I can actually envision some color, although nothing remotely psychedelic.

The endorphin high I was experiencing quickly evaporated when I hit the next curve and headed back north.  My invisible friend was no longer pushing me along.  He suddenly became the middle school bully.  He shoved his palm into my forehead and held me at arm’s length as I attempted to evade his stronghold.  The more I pushed against him, the more he pushed back.  I flailed away spastically only to realize that I would tire out long before he would.  As I dipped my head lower I could feel his control weaken, but he was definitely still in charge.  I geared down, picked up my cadence, and moved slowly homeward.

The last half of my ride was unpleasant.  I was cold.  I was expending a great deal of energy.  I was going nowhere, very slowly.  It was ten times more difficult than any hill simulation on the stationary bike.  It wasn’t solely about pushing hard and feeling the burn.  It wasn’t about enduring pain while strengthening targeted muscles.  It was more about enduring sensory overload.

Everything I had felt while zipping down to the bike trail – the breeze on my face, the clean air in my lungs, the taste of spring – was still there.  Instead of being inviting and invigorating, it became frustrating.  I still desired it.  I still could feel it.  I just needed to work physically harder to appreciate it.  My body was being asked to multitask, to dig deep into its physical reserves while still enjoying the multisensory experience that I had been longing for all winter.  I was experiencing pleasure and pain simultaneously.

When I arrived home, nose running, ears red, and a chill setting in from the sweat trapped between my wool jersey and rapidly cooling body, I took a deep breath.  As my heart rate returned to normal, I felt a wave of calm envelop me.  I felt a surge of energy return as I adjusted to the inside temperature of my house.  I felt alive for the first time in many months.  My spring had finally arrived.

As I write this, spring has taken yet another shot at depressing me.  I have only been out eight times in twenty six days.  There have been entire week long stretches where only the most diehard among us would dare venture out.  There is but one day in the next week’s forecast that doesn’t show rain and a temperature approaching sixty degrees.  It’s aggravating.  It’s annoying.  It’s frustrating.  But I refuse to be depressed.

I can endure another week or two of indoor cycling.  My turn on stage is coming.  I will be dancing with my bike again very soon.  I just need to make sure that my imagination doesn’t get the best of me while I’m on the stationary bike.  People will think I’m strange if I take a deep breath and savor the rank air of the cardio studio.