I rode my bicycle a hundred miles yesterday, and so yes, this is mostly an extended humble-brag. But it is also a mark of how much has changed since my first, ecstatic road bike experience.
A down pedalstroke no longer seems to make the ground leap past me, and my legs no longer feel like springs ready to launch. In retrospect, I got what I wished for in that post, a melding of body and bicycle: a fall two years ago means my collarbone is now built with lightweight, precisely-machined titanium (alas, my bike frame is still mere aluminum). Having wishes granted is fraught.
But I still love being on a bike, and I understand it a bit better than I did. Certainly I understand my limitations better: I am not built to be a great cyclist. Too many college days in the gym, adding muscle to protect myself for an awkward but already-concluded adolescence. These days too much mass, period. The great cyclists are hugely tall and nearly skeletal, save for the enormous engines of muscle between their knees and hips. I’m not built like that.
More interesting than that is the revelation of a body’s limits. This is Charles’ insight, really. But a bicycle makes it easy to understand yourself as a machine, to deplete your metabolism before breaking your body in a away that’s hard to achieve when running or doing most other athletic things. The air cools you and there’s little stress on your joints. You can adjust gearing to manipulate the difficulty of the task. Really, you can just keep going until you run out of fuel. If you forget to feed yourself every 20 miles or so, you will fall to pieces, but the brief delay of digestion makes it hard to remember this. Which is why I bonked around mile 60, shortly after we had climbed Sugarloaf Mountain.
Well, no matter. Matt and Charles were patient with me as we stopped in the shade near a park, and a few miles later we sat down to lunch at a restaurant in Poolesville. I consumed a digusting amount of Coca-Cola at a pace exceeded only by my heart rate, which refused to slow down. I ate my club sandwich so fast that my throat still hurts today. Afterward I felt a lot better.
The last 40 miles were not pleasant, exactly–the human butt is not meant to sit on a saddle for that length of time, and a pinched nerve in my neck meant that the skin at the top of my back was numb until this morning. But I took better, steadier care of myself after lunch, and arrived home with an odometer showing a distressing 94.5 miles.
Steph had gotten me some century-related birthday gifts two years before, but schedules and injury had made it impossible. This was a long-deferred goal. Matt had promised an 85 mile ride, which we had (accidentally) exceeded. And Charles had headed down to Hanes point when we reached 15th Street to put in the necessary laps to hit three digits.
So I trundled up and down the Met Branch Trail a few times, watched my bike computer font get the smallest it’ll ever be, then laid down on my living room floor for an hour. Today I feel fine, though I can’t tell if it’s good or bad that the impact on my knees, butt and neck seem to be the same for a 40 mile ride and a 100 mile trip.
