Zapped

Yesterday I did "the 20", and man was it ever brutal. I'm now sitting at 121 miles for the week after riding in this morning, and I'm feelin' it. Back up to yesterday's ride home.

The highway 2 ride isn't anything brutally bad normally. Sure, there are some hills, but so what? There's a couple that get a little tiresome as they seem to last forever, but usually I don't have any problem. Yesterday, however, there was the HEADWIND OF DQQM. I have absolutely no idea how fast it is, so I'll guess at 30-40mph. There were points, seriously, where I was fighting in a granny gear just to keep going. To illustrate how much suckage it was, on a generally pretty fast downhill - one great for attacking the uphill after it - I was doing everything I could to push the 36x11 and just barely making a decent cadence. In the drops.

Yeah, it sucked.

Here's the thing, though. I fought myself, the wind, and everything else to keep going. At 120th street I said "if I turn around now, I get 13 miles and have 20 for the day". At 134th I said, "hey, here's 15". Similar at 148th. In fact, I was darn sure I had convinced myself to turn around at 148th before the big hill to the Bennett corner. Nope, I made it all the way to Bennett, cursing the wind's final attempts to stop me (and truth be told, it nearly did). I made the 12 and a half miles from work to Bennett in about an hour, probably my most dismal average speed with that much work for the entire year.

Now, that "thing" I referred to.

See, the best part about rides like that is the way back. It's like the reward for putting up with everything that mother nature threw at you for the previous hour, you get the amazing push of the tailwind. So I popped it into about the biggest gears I could find - 48x11 or 48x13 - and hammered it back. The LOWEST I got was into the 36x13, and that was just plain wussing out. Most amusing, and funnest part of the entire ride was cresting a hill and seeing the "Speed Limit/Your Speed" radar sign ahead, and barely making out "25" on it. That ruled! So the 12.5 out was slow, but I was home - no kidding - in a hair under 30 minutes. Average speed well over 20mph, and man did the Surly ever feel good.

That brings us to today. I got on the bike this morning, and I was zapped. I just couldn't get anything going, and I KNOW it's about 75% mental. Whatever it is, I'm zapped and the ride to work was one of the longer ones I've had this year, but I still got here at the point where there was only two cars in the lot. Just, zapped.

I'm telling myself to just ride straight home after work, then save the legs for an epic ride tomorrow. My inner sadist, however, keeps muttering words about pain being weakness leaving the body, and that if I have any prayer of even keeping up with my wife this week (who, I just got off the phone with as she just got off the treadmill), I'd better man it up.

Crap. Oh well, at least I'll bring a camera for photographic evidence of my destruction of, well, me!

(side note: I just rolled over the 800 mile mark on the LHT, and I picked it up on May 15th. Either I really like it, or I'm absolutely insane - you pick!)