Rage like a Baby

I either did not set or never heard my alarm this morning, and woke up at exactly the time I should have been 30 miles away, hopping onto my bike with the rest of the team for a 60 mile ride. When I realized what I had done, I decided to drown my frustration with myself in a deep pool of more sleep. However, I didn't plan on another FIVE HOURS of sleep, and thus found myself gearing up for a four hour ride at 12:30 today - I had an inner tube to change, and a new double-water bottle holder to mount (for a total of FOUR water bottles being carried on my bike) before I could get started.

I didn't want to drive the car to a superior path or mountain or blah blah, so I just left the house and headed for Griffith Park and the LA river. My whole goal today was to keep my average speed above 15 mph if I could, and try and bring my 60-mile time a bit below four hours. I figured since the river path was mostly flat I'd do okay. I was wrong. Not dead super gross regrettably wrong, but wrong.

The loop I'd set, from Fletcher & Riverside to Forest Lawn & Barham, is apparently not that long - 7.71 miles each way, so just about 15 in total. It looks like this:
Objectively a 15 mile loop seems like that should just about do you, but something was really demoralizing about having been in the saddle for a couple hours and knowing I needed to loop around two more times. This coming from someone who spent 3 hours a day from age 8 to 16 turning around every 25 yards in a swimming pool. I just wasn't going as fast as I wanted - I kept up 18 - 20 mph on the flats, but felt totally brutalized by the slightest hills. Probably from trying to burn on the flats. Sigh.

Eventually I decided to ride into the park and try and do the Griffith Park Dr hill, which was probably a good choice - I was going miserably slowly at the bottom, trying to just keep moving without using my two lowest gears, and about 60% of the way up I decided to just stand, which is really laborious & generally a frightening prospect to me, and to not stop standing until I reached a particular "Horse X'ing" sign. By the time I'd reached the sign, the crest of the hill had come into view, about once again the distance from when I'd stood to the horse sign, and I decided I had it in me to reach the crest. That little victory was lovely, and the 28 mph decent felt nicely earned.

Then I went back to that stupid loop again...Somewhere around 3 hours, I got angry. Really irrationally angry. I think the first time I ever got angry in this mode, where you try and resist it, knowing its stupid, but it just gets out of control, was one time Kevin & I were on a road trip, exhausted, and I had three pieces of bacon at some crappy breakfast place. He kept joking that he'd take one, and I kept laughing while fighting the creeping annoyance the whole thing gave me, and when he ended up grabbing one, I lost it so badly all I could do was swerve verbally between screaming at him and laughing, and felt like I was going actually crazy from the disparity between how retarded I knew I was being and how nuclearly upset I was. The visual of my fork going into the back of his hand made me feel both more creeped out by myself and slightly relieved. Maybe a weird aside, but I thought a lot about the bacon thing during the last hour and a half of my ride.

At one point I rode over probably not that big of a rock, and the jolt it gave me translated into a flash of red in the neanderthal part of my brain - shouting "Motherfucker!" through gritted teeth five times seemed, to whatever part of my mind wasn't being an asshole, like not the best solution, but it got me through. Immediately after I stopped shouting, the back of my bike made a weird noise that felt like the wheel was falling off, and I angrily RIPPED my feet out of their clips, pulled the biked over and shouted at the bike before even trying to see what was wrong. 20 feet back, the new water bottle cage was sitting in the road - as it was falling from the seat post, it was dragging on the back wheel, which was the noise, and really a pretty okay problem to have. I still had 20 miles to go, and really wanted to make it in 4 hours, so I didn't want to take the time to reinstall the cage. Result: it's still on the side of Forest Lawn Drive, under a shopping bag under a tumbleweed - I'm not joking, thank god for LA trash - and I'll go get it later when I'm not angry at it anymore.

So kept riding, etc etc, getting pretty angry and my legs increasingly ineffectual - these are the moments where I realize what I'm attempting, and somehow that thought actually bears some fortitude, and its the pain & annoyance, I guess, that somehow are what allow you to keep going. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Goals. Huh.

In the end, got home 3'54" after I left, and had done 56 miles. I stopped checking my distance after 42 miles, and stopped checking the time after 3'30". Just kept my ass in the saddle.