Speedweek, The Heartwarming Tale of How I Got My Ass Kicked. Part 1: Athen's Twighlight

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Speedweek has been like a punch in the gut. I traveled down here by myself, as you can read in my previous blog post, which in and of itself was pretty scary. I've had a couple of near disasters with my phone almost dying and that being my only means of directions back to my host housing. (Don't laugh, who carries maps nowadays?) Besides all of this the racing has been intense. I'm not going to lie and say I expected to come down here and get my ass kicked; I mean, I knew it was going to be hard, but I didn't expect it to be skull-crushingly, skin-evaporatingly difficult...

It's been a long time since I've been pulled from a criterium. I like criteriums, they suit my strengths: short, fast punchy efforts. From my own experience they tend to be periods of efforts followed by periods of recovery. However short, there have always been periods of recovery. I was not prepared for a race with none of that.

Athens Twilight Terrapin Criterium is definitely the fastest, hardest criterium I have ever done. Its layout is simple, it is a four corner crit with a small hill on the backstretch that slopes down into the last two corners.  Flatter crits are usually faster paced, as there aren't any obstacles to slow us down, but holy hell I didn't expect it to be skin blisteringly, nitrous fast.

Let me pause for a moment and tell you a little bit about what the atmosphere was like. The course is fully metal-barricaded on the inside and the outside, and for good reason, for on either sides of those barriers is a frat party. That's right, a frat party. To make Athen's Twilight you simply take a bunch of drunken college kids, a bunch of drunken normal people, and you layer them like cake frosting all around the course, but you do a really shitty job. Some places have three layers of frat parties, some places have ten! It doesn't matter, this is your drunken human barrier-cake you can frost it however the crap you want. You then coat it with broken-glass sprinkles, fumigate it with a healthy dose of cigarette smoke, and then yell really loudly at the center of the cake (the racers). I'm not sure how well that cake analogy just worked out but hopefully I painted a thrilling picture.

Mmm, glass. 

To some this may sound disgusting, (broken glass, drunken cigarette cake?) but let me assure you that it was awesome. I have never seen so many spectators lining a course in my life. There is a trend in bike races that only bike racers come to watch them. Not so with Athen's Twilight. There were people from all walks of life, all united in their cause to get outside on a nice night, get plastered and watch men and women and a car, and some motorcycles go really fast in circles and sometimes crash into each other and the pavement.

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I lined up not realizing that my destruction was imminent. Naively, I did not believe that this would be the hardest criterium I had ever done. Just getting to the start line was trial enough. Since as I mentioned before there were barricades lining the inside and out, I wandered, (wheeled?) around looking for a small break in the wall of metal so I could get myself onto the race course. I finally found a crossing only to discover that there was…a running race going on? I suppose this is what makes Athen's Twilight so popular: it has something for everyone. The only issue with this is that we were already running behind, and with a 7:45 start time we were definitely going to be racing in the dark.

Finally we were all able to stage, right at dusk. They did the call-ups, waving all the super-fast women in front of our faces, kind of like a little taunting preclude to the race. "Haha! Look who's going to kick your ass today, these women are!" The crowd was getting a little crazy by this point and I was getting worried about my ability to see the race course.

They blew the whistle and we were off, stretched out like a long, string of taffy right from the get go. Oh, and who missed her pedal? This girl. I was subsequently shuffled right to the back, right where I did not want to be, tail-gunning territory. Let me tell you a little bit about how a criterium works. The speeds and the efforts actually differ drastically depending on where you are in the field. The riders in the front and middle of the field are protected in their nice little bubble, whisked along and safe in the draft, while the riders at the back are suffering from the dreaded yo-yo effect. The way a pack of riders looks also indicates the speed. Bunched up like a horizon means slow…ish, strung out in a long skinny line like unravelling yarn is more indicative of, kill me please, in however horrible a manner, fast. So when I say stretched out like taffy, I mean the fastest fucking taffy you have ever seen.

The riders in the pack naturally go through the corners faster. The front riders are not braking, they fly through those fast corners with finesse and ease, however, the more riders you jam through that corner, the more people have to hit their brakes as the speed slows. It's the same thing on a highway when you pack in too many cars, people hit their brakes, and then everyone else behind them hits their brakes, and then before you know it you're looking at a sea of brake lights and you're late for work.

Yup, about like that.

I was looking at the sea, and it looked like I was going to have to call in sick at this rate.

Being in a flat stretch looking far ahead of you up into a corner and seeing the field already going through it, 5 seconds up the road is a terrible feeling. By the time my group in tail-gunning territory got to the corner we were going slower than we should have been, and that means you have to SPRINT LIKE YOUR LIFE DEPENDS ON IT. Because it does, at least your life in the context of being a successful bike racer for the evening.

Oh shit.

So I did this, out of every corner, and just for laughs, the field was sprinting up the hill, full gas, every time, and even though they were ringing the bell for primes nearly every lap, oh hell, let's sprint through the finish line too, every lap! By the time we got fifteen minutes in it felt like all of my organs were on the outside of my body and I would have welcomed it if a field of lava had suddenly come down and swallowed up the field, ending my suffering.

There's really nothing quite like turning yourself inside out in front of thousands of people. Nevertheless, I didn't have long, and much sooner than I'd have liked the official stepped into the course and gestured my little group, which had been having a harder and harder time sticking to the back, until we finally popped like a balloon, off of the course.

My first thought was, 'oh Jesus sweet relief!' and then immediately, 'aww crap, that's my race!'

Shut up, game!

I then quietly slunk back to my car, changed, and then proceeded to sulk next to the race course eating some Mellow Mushroom pizza, (which is delicious regardless of sulking). Watching your own race is not fun.

After some careful reflection and guidance I did however realize that being in the tail-gun, and blowing monstrous amounts of energy trying to stay on out of every corner sort of dooms you form the start. You can be super fit, but at those NCC races, being in the tail gun is going to tire you, and eventually crack you. I needed an improvement in my tactics. I had three races to go, and that was exactly what I was going to do.

Also, who charges ten dollars just to get INTO the beer serving area? I'm looking at you, Athen's Twilight.

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I Am Not An Expert Traveler

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Well, it's been a long time and I apologize for that. Stuff has been happening! I'm now on Strava, I wrestled and killed a bear, I started a business, and I'm down in Georgia for Speedweek. Contrary to popular belief Speedweek is not actually a a trip to Georgia where I do lots of drugs. I'm down here to (surprise) race my bike.

Speedweek is an annual tradition where bike racers converge on the fine, sunny states of Georgia and South Carolina to participate in nightly National Criterium Calendar 'twighlight crits.' I will be racing in the dark, in really fast circles around a small city block, with hopefully very intoxicated people cheering me on, who will also hopefully not throw full cans of beer at me. Another great hope of mine, (could one possibly call it a longing?) is to come back with all of my skin. 

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Purchasing my plane tickets this past weekend was a tad horrifying. I decided to fly down to Georgia as opposed to driving for several reasons. One, that I don't think my poor car could take it, two I don't think my legs could take that, especially after their stellar performance in the USGP cross race after 16 hours of driving to Kentucky, (way to go, legs) this past fall, and three because I simply don't think my brain could take it. I had planned to arrive in Georgia fully sane, not foaming at the mouth with a pile of roadkill that I have collected brimming out of the trunk of my car. So I flew, and I successfully employed the Jeremy Powers trademark Airport Ninja tactics.

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Airport Ninja-ing is a delicate art, one that takes guts, bravado, and cunning. It goes something like this:

Approach the ticket counter lugging a giant bag with your bicycle packed inside of it, the bag possibly says 'VELO' or 'I'M A BIG BICYCLE' on the side of it.

"Hello there, such a fine day, beautiful weather inside this terminal. I would like to check this bag."

"Is that a bike?"

"A bicycle? A Velocipede? Perish the thought! Never would I lug around such an unwieldily article, nor would I ever participate in such raucousness as bicycle racing."

"Ok, so what is it?"

"It is a large carbon display for my work, a display that displays every aspect of the work that I clearly do."

"Is that a helmet hanging off of your bag?"

"Safety first."

"Fine, that will be the normal price of if this where a piece of luggage and not the exorbitant price that I would charge you if this where a bicycle in the same size bag for the same weight."

"Excellent. This transaction went exactly as I hoped it would."

Yeah, the fees for flying with a bicycle are outrageous and I do not feel bad at all for fudging the truth just a tad. Not that I'm recommending that of course. Kids, never lie; unless it is to save yourself hundreds of dollars at an airport when you're getting blatantly ripped off because of your choice of sport.

If it were a weight thing, or a size thing, I would be a bit more understanding, but no, it's literally when they hear that word, BICYCLE. If they don't know it's a bike, it is possibly HUNDREDS of dollars less. 

While my luggage transaction did not quite go as scripted above, I did manage to airport ninja the crap out of my bike. Trade show displays for the win.

Alternatively, I could also just tell them it's filled with 50 pounds of cat vomit, and that I am a researcher, studying cat vomit.

'Must I do it again?'

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Jerks.

Anyway. So I flew to Georgia with all of my bicycle accouterment, my bicycle, and 50 pounds of cat vomit. Because I decided to purchase my ticket through CheapOAir.com I was able to get a screaming deal on a plane ticket, which was great except for the fact that half of my flight was on a train.

A train? Oops.

I was a little worried about where I would put my giant bag of bicycle on this train, but I looked it up and the internet assured me that I would be able to fit it onboard. I probably should have called and spoken to an actual human about this, but humans are terrifying, and like many of my generation I have a healthy horror instilled in me about the act of speaking on the phone to people I don't know. The internet never lies, right?

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So I get onboard this train, and oh look, THERE IS NO WHERE TO PUT A HUGE BICYCLE BAG. 

The train is moving and I am standing in the middle of the aisle, wide-eyed with horror, with the whole damn car staring at me like I'm some museum spectacle on display. I awkwardly pushed the bike bag to the end of the car in the hopes that there would be some magical compartment, smashing into peoples feet and arms along the way. At one point I tried to lift the whole thing into an overhead compartment only to realize that once I'd gotten it halfway there I couldn't lift it over my head by myself and I was about to drop the whole thing on some ladies head.

Great.

I managed to shuffle it to the front of the car again and then I stood there with this look of, OH GOD WHY ARE YOU ALL WITNESSING THIS HORROR, plastered onto my face. Then out of nowhere a nice man showed up and together we muscled and crammed my poor bike into some weird little compartment next to the bathroom. I then sat down and proceeded to act like this was all totally fine. Meanwhile I was recovering from the fact that I had just sweat through my jacket and reached my target heart rate and adrenaline levels for the day purely on public embarrassment.

Oh god don't look at me.

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I then proceeded to ride the train to New Jersey, where I ripped my bike out of it's tiny prison and ran off the train car as fast as humanely possible. And by ran I mean lugged all my shit off the car at a slow pace with people grumbling and walking slowly behind me. I then had to carry my bike bag and all my luggage up four flights of stairs because the troll-escalator was going the wrong way. Damn you, escalator.

This is all before I had to do the airport ninja of course, so I was quietly preparing myself for them to open my bag in front of everyone and call me a dirty liar and charge me one million dollars to fly my bike.

Public shame knows no bounds when you're traveling.

But that didn't happen. When it came time to check my bike and get my ticket, I very stealthily did the self check in and then handed over my large, but within acceptable parameters, bag of bicycle with only one question of, 'what is this?'

I smoothly replied that it was equipment for a trade show and my bike was ready to be loaded onto the plane. Phew.

Seriously though I think that whole debacle gave me heart palpitations.

So here I am in Georgia. Everything is a highway, there seems to be only fast food and lots of fried chicken and Waffle Houses. I did the Athens Terrapin Twilight Crit last night, but that will be a story for my next blog. Spoiler: I do still have all my skin.

The Accident

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Three years ago I was hit by a car. 

Unfortunately this is something far too many cyclists experience. We are all at risk for this accident simply by the nature of what we do. We share the road with cars who outnumber us, outweigh us, and sometimes brush by us so close it makes your adrenaline fizz and your hairs stand on end.

There are many articles written on the issue of car-cyclist interaction and the ethics of such. We are too often seen as an annoyance, a fly on the windshield, not a living, breathing human being with a family, a job, a life. How many times have we all been 'buzzed' by an irate driver who wanted to teach us a lesson for getting in their space, for being on their road? Too many times I'm sure. My favorite analogy for this I read on the internet some years ago. Threatening a cyclist with your car is the same as walking up to someone on the sidewalk and pointing a gun at their face. As we all learned in driver's ed a car is a deadly weapon. Threatening a cyclist with a car is assault with a deadly weapon. Would you threaten someone with a gun simply because they were taking up too much space on the sidewalk?

Is this what it's come too?

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I've had many interactions with cars that have left an absolute foul taste in my mouth. I abhor the interaction with a driver where they accuse me of being some car-hating, un-showering, tax-dodging idiot because I happen to be riding a bike. Oh no good sir, you've caught me! It's true that I don't drive a car just like you, I've never worked a day in my life, I pedal around weaving all along the road tossing flower petals in the potholes and I haven't showered in a year. Give me a break. You would think I'm exaggerating but unfortunately I've been accused of all of these things!

But I like trees...

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With all this malice, and this ignorance floating around for cyclists you would think that every accident was a deliberate attack. In my case however this was not so. In so many instances the driver gives the same excuse: "I didn't see them."

I was hit by a car, and it wasn't by some gun-toting, 12-cylinder driving whacko with a thirst for my blood. It was a guy with his young daughter in the back seat. He didn't see me.

I'd like to tell you this story, of how I was hit by a car, and the ramifications it has had on my life as a cyclist.

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It was November, my second year racing 'cross and I was trying to squeeze in a training ride before darkness. It was chilly, so I was dressed in my full winter ensemble, thermal jacket and booties included. I completed my loop and I was heading for home. There are several different ways to get back to my house, but that night, for efficiencies sake since it was getting dark I chose the route through the center of town.

I crested a little hill and was picking up speed into the downslope. The lane coming in the other direction was bumper to bumper with traffic, the headlights bright, lined up in a row. Most of the time I have a habit of giving drivers I see waiting to make a turn a little wave as I'm approaching. I try to make eye contact and let them know that I'm coming faster than they think I am, please don't pull out in front of me. That evening I saw a car on my right waiting to make a left turn. I remember thinking to myself as I got closer to him that there was no way he would be able to make the left turn, the traffic going the opposite way was so clogged.

I was wrong.

As I reached my maximum speed for the small descent, probably something between 20-25mph, he suddenly pulled out in front of me. I remember thinking, ohSHIT I'm not gonna make it! I swerved to the left, towards oncoming traffic in a last desperate attempt to avoid the hood.

I took the impact on my right side, in the front of my bike and on my right leg and foot. I remember vividly being popped up into the air, detached from my bike at some point, turned completely upside-down. Time seemed to slow, and I had a moment of contemplation, upside-down flying over the hood of a car like some airborne camel, limbs akimbo. Oh. Fuck. This is gonna be bad.

I hit the ground in the middle of the road, and then popped up like a daisy. It was absolutely surreal. I was standing wide-eyed in the road, traffic stopped both ways, clutching my leg. This must be what deers feel like after they get hit. I had a moment of elation. I can stand! If I can stand it means I'm alive! This seems to be some sort of reflex I have. Even when I've slid out and crashed in a race my first instinct is to stand up. I am the mole that will not go down in whack-a-mole. 

I'm in that pile somewhere.

After I realized that I was not a bloody smear on the road, and that I was whole, and relatively intact I remember being flooded with rage, turning towards the car, hobbling at the hood still clutching my leg and screaming expletives.

This must have been quite a scene.

Two very nice ladies who had been driving the other direction were suddenly escorting me to the side of the road and sitting me down on the curb. I was shaking, and I think I was mumbling , oh God, to myself. Before I knew it there was a firetruck, and a police car, and an ambulance. At some point I think I remembered my bike and panicked. Someone had grabbed it for me. It didn't look good but I didn't really have the mental wherewithal to examine it. Later I would realize that the impact had not only taco-ed the front wheel, but had crumpled the fork and snapped it. RIP pretty 'cross bike.

I was put in the ambulance and they took my shoe off. I had to help with my booties because the EMTs were a little bit confounded by them. After a quick examination they declared that I was banged up but probably nothing was broken, I didn't have to go to the hospital unless I thought I needed to. I did remember at this point that ambulance rides, while novel, are expensive so I politely declined. There was enough adrenaline coursing through me that I wasn't feeling much pain at that point.

The policeman asked if I wanted a ride home. I said yes. Duh. What am I going to do, carry my mangled bike and hobble home? I watched them try to stick my bike in the trunk of a police car, jamming the front end in and slamming the hood down on it's mangled wheel. I cringed. I was shepherded into the back for the very short ride to my house. The back? Are you kidding me? My bruises were starting to hurt and the back had no seat belts and was made entirely of plastic. I felt like a criminal. Wasn't I the one that had just gotten hit with a two ton vehicle? Every time he turned I would slide in the seat and slam my bruised body into the door, all the while looking behind me and wincing every time the swaying hood slammed into my bike, which was dangling half-way out of the trunk.

Finally we made it back to my apartment and I was dumped outside of my house. Thankfully my landlord was there and he helped me get myself and my bike inside. I changed, barely looking at my foot. I called my boyfriend and told him what had happened and to come over. I remember hanging up the phone and sitting down on my couch. All the cacophony and the terror and the adrenaline suddenly behind me. I was alone, my foot was hurting. That's when I started to cry.

The actual act of getting hit was not nearly so terrible as I had heard many accidents be involving cyclists. I did end up going to the hospital, and then later to the bar, so really that whole night, stretching into the morning I don't remember as being awful. I was filled with the adrenaline of being alive. It's the aftermath that still has it's claws in me, still, three years after the fact.

I didn't hit my head at all during the accident, and I was praised by the EMTs for wearing my helmet. (Duh, I'm not an idiot.) But in hindsight, with all the mental damage, the destruction of my riding confidence, the scrabbling fear that now lives inside me about what might have been, it sure feels like I hit my head.

My physical wounds healed quickly. I hadn't broken anything and after a few days of an air cast, and a bit longer to walk normally again I was good to go. Even so, it seemed that however much I tried I could not seem to relay that information to my brain. It felt like I had planted a seed, a seed that was growing and overtaking my mental confidence. It wasn't the accident that was terrifying, it was how the accident happened. I had no control. I thought I was going to ride by that car safely and continue to my house, to my life, but all that was interrupted, shattered, when I was hit.

Now I have to live with that knowledge, the macabre knowledge that even if you take every precaution, bad things can still happen on the bike, and boy does my brain love finding those things and dancing them in front of me.

For the first few months I was an absolute mess on a bike. I couldn't go over 15mph down a hill without having a panic attack. What if if a car turns out of that road? Hell, what if a car suddenly decides to come out of the woods? To my damaged psyche anything was suddenly possible. My brain probably could have told me that big foot was going to walk out from behind that stone wall while I was descending and trip me and I would have believed it, and been afraid of it.

It could happen!

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Being afraid of the what if is terrible.

It got so bad I even called a sports psychologist. He wasn't much good because DAMN they are expensive! Eventually however my brain started to process the trauma. Descending got easier, and squelching down the fear that something was going to pop out of the side of the road and crash me got more manageable. Things went back to normal, almost.

I still have problems descending. That seed of fear still lives inside of me, ready to grow strong if I water it. Every time I have to do a fast descent I have to battle with myself internally. I cannot let this fear win, this panic. Sometimes it does, and as my friends have seen it's not good when it does. Sometimes the panic gets the best of me and I have to pull over and turn into a hyperventilating mess on the side of the road, but this is not frequent anymore, thankfully.

But I can control it, and even though it's been three years, it still gets better if I work at it. My confidence is still coming back, in bits and pieces. That feeling of wheee going downhill is coming back, so for those that have been hit, it does get better, the fear does go away. 

The driver who hit me never apologized, never said he was sorry, all I ever heard him say was, "I didn't see her."

So be careful out there, and seriously don't drive a car in front of me when I'm going downhill.

How Sugar Shacks Keep Me Alive

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I don't think my legs are ever going to stop being sore. They seem to be in this permanent loop of muscle destruction and repair. At this point I don't think I remember what it feels like to have legs that have snap. That just doesn't exist. Just like warm weather apparently doesn't exist.

I'm not sure about the rest of you but here in New England spring is really taking its sweet time to get it's butt out of bed. Not only this, but it tantalizes me every time I'm at work. Oh, it's 41 degrees and sunny you say? Excellent. Maybe my training ride will be pleasant today. Of course, the weather hears this contemplation and so when I get home it promptly switches to 32 degrees and snowing. I've said it before and I'll say it again: March is an asshole. Regardless it's still base time and that means I still need to train, even if the weather has been excreted from the butthole of a troll.

Let's back pedal for a moment. I'd like to tell you about what I do for work. Yes, I have a job besides riding my bike. Surprisingly enough cycling does not shower me in money. I manage a little coffee shop in Northampton Massachusetts. I do all the behind the scenes stuff, I get to hire and fire people, but most of the time I'm behind the counter slinging coffee, or making pretty pictures in lattes, a-like so:

Look, I made it all by myself!

Coffee and bicycles seem to go hand-in-hand in most circles so this would seem like a natural path for me to have taken given my penchant for the two-wheeled part of this equation. Really though, my good friend Mukunda Feldman (the M in JAM) let me help him do the build out for Greenfield Coffee when I first moved out to the Pioneer Valley and needed a job. From there I migrated behind the counter and since then I've worked at nearly all of the little coffee shops that he has opened, landing at Northampton Coffee for the moment, where I run the show. So, I suppose you could say, since I've been doing this for a few years now that I am an expert in coffee--a BLACK BELT in coffee. I can take you down with an espresso so fast you won't know what hit you.

Anyway, working at a coffee shop and being a bike racer you would think these things would intertwine quite organically. Most of the time they don't, or rather, I'd prefer that they didn't. I enjoy my job, I really do, but like most people I like to keep my work life and my other life, where I have this semi-abusive affair going on with a bicycle, separate. 

I split my day up into two parts in my mind. The part where I wake up ridiculously early, I'm talking well before sun rise early, to make and serve coffee to the fine people of Northampton, and the part where I change clothes, into my lycra outfit like some kind of Superhero that doesn't know how to dress herself, and do my training. If I could I would probably make this switch in some sort of public receptacle. Superman kind of has the pay-phone booth taken, and given that those don't really exist anymore anyway I think I'll have to pick something different, like a porto-john for instance. It really does feel like I live two separate days in one because the two things that I do, work at a coffee shop and ride bikes, feel so different. Regardless, even if my mind feels like I'm living two separate days, my body knows that they are still just one long day with lots of stuff smashed into it.

Lots of bike racers trying to go big time experience this I'm sure. I have to train, sometimes for long hours in order to make the jump to pro, but I also have to feed myself and keep a roof over my head, and thus I must go to work in the mornings and earn my keep. But this has a cost, a physical and a mental cost that only my fellow working athletes understand (and probably people with kids); everyday during the week it becomes harder to recover, sleep does less, you wake up feeling more tired. In my current training block by Friday I feel like a true zombie. I would very much like to take a bath in the coffee that I serve. But then, before the lights go completely out in my head, the weekend comes, I can sleep more, and maybe let my finger hover tantalizingly over the reset button.

On the weekend, I can be a bike rider full-time. When I make coffee it is for myself, and when I ride, I don't have to worry about beating the sun home. I can ride with friends, the ones that work during the week like me, but aren't trying to punch themselves in the face by trying to become a pro cyclist.

It may seem like I hate doing this by my previous descriptions of what training feels like, but that is a falsehood; I love doing this, and I couldn't imagine my life without it, and sometimes on these weekend rides, rides where I get to just follow the route, I remember why.

Let me tell you about a ride I did this past weekend.

It looked like this.

My friends and I are trying to make March riding better by biking to sugar shacks. For those of you who don't know a sugar shack is essentially a home run business where families tap their Sugar Maple trees, harvest the sap, boil it down to make syrup, and then have a little restaurant where they serve pancakes and the like; anything that can be doused in wonderful, real maple syrup. I didn't even know these existed until I moved to the Pioneer Valley, and boy was I missing out. We ride to these sugar shacks and then eat our weight in pancakes. There are so many in western Mass that you can literally do a Tour de Sugar Shack.

Ride to eat.

We make these rides long, because damnit we are going to earn those pancakes and earn them hard. The day's ride had a sugar shack scheduled in for the two hour turn around point. I knew the sugar shack was far up into the Hilltowns (which I will explain in a moment), I knew it was two hours away, I just didn't know how intense those two hours would be, or how much elevation we would gain. 

Most of the time the best sugar shacks are the ones that are up in what we call the Hilltowns. The area of upper western Massachusetts where there are more fields and cattle than people, and where life is probably simpler. I envision the people who live here as either really nice grandmas on porches, or grandmas with shotguns on porches. It could go either way really. Also, as I know my friend Evan (who is from the Hilltowns) is going to protest this description, I will admit that there are exceptions to my vision.

As the name depicts, there are a lot of HILLS in the Hilltowns, so this past weekend, our sojourn into them totaled a cool 5700 feet of climbing. Some of it on stuff like this. It gets mushy.

The point of no return.

Even so, spirits were pretty high when we rolled into South Facing Farm in Ashfield, Massachusetts, hungry, but still pretty fresh. South Facing Farm like all sugar shacks in western Mass produces, by hand, glorious real maple syrup. As you all know the real stuff is usually pretty expensive, so this is really the only time at a restaurant where you can FLOOD your food with it, which we all do, liberally.

I think I made some lewd remark while this was happening.

These sugar shacks are not shacks at all, but usually homey, family run places, with videos that look like they were shot in the 90s about how to tap trees. Surprsingly, these folks are usually pretty unruffled when they see twelve spandex-clad, tired, cold lunatics walking through their door.

Happy, full and warm!

 They feed us, and then roll us out the door, but starting up again after being in the warmth of the sugar shack is awful. It's cold outside, and windy, and despite the fact that the calendar says it is spring the ground is covered in snow. The worst of this is that you're a little sweat soaked and you know with every fiber of your shivering being that it's two hours home, two hours down. Brr.

This was too much for Colin.

We had climbed pretty far up, and unfortunately for our cold little bodies and all the blood digesting piles of pancakes in our stomachs we all realized just how high up when we hit THIS.

I don't even...

THIS is the craziest, most wind-blown road I have ever seen on a road ride. It looked like we had climbed into another dimension. The wind had kicked up so much snow that the road, previously plowed, was coated in what looked like fresh powder, so thick it clogged our forward progress like cylocross mud. We all ended up walking. Not so good for road cleats.

So many clogged cleats.

From here we spent the next two hours in a dizzying roller coaster of steep ups and downs, slowly winding our way back into the Pioneer Valley. While this seems idyllic, let me remind you that it was still pretty damn cold, and the wind was gusting so strongly that if you hit an open field on a descent, you got shoved. The wind is a jerk. There were many points on this ride that I lamented that I was a follower. I had no idea where I was, how to get home, or when I would get home. I didn't choose the route and therefore I was subject to the whims of the group. This can be really cool sometimes, and others, terrifying.

 This ride, since it was chosen by a friend who loves going downhill also had a lot of, shall we say epic descents in it. I am terrified of descending. I was hit by a car on a descent three years ago and my psyche has never been the same since. Some days are better than others. Some days I hit a downhill and the response is wheee! Other days the response is shitshitshitGOINGTODIE.  Lucky for me, that day was a day where my brain was singing the song of fear, and getting shoved by a huge gust of wind when you're going 40mph does little to assuage such fears. I will admit I had a couple of moments where my brain went, you are going to crash into the road and BECOME the pancake that you just ate you stupid meat-carcass. My poor brain, stuck along for the ride inside my thick skull.

Eventually however, tired, and amazingly hungry, even after all those millions of pancakes we all did make it back to the rendezvous point amazingly unflattened, an un-hypothermic. I'm looking back at the pictures now, and while I can say in a lot of those pictures that I was cold, cold, hungry, terrified, tired, cold, I was still happy, happy to be with my friends, and doing what I love, and overall, very glad that I had followed.

Now it's time to go back to work and wait for spring, but at least I can dream of riding to sugar shacks until the weekend comes.

YUM. BACON.

The Weakest Link

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My heart is pounding so hard that it feels as though it is hitting the inside of my ribs with each beat. Breath coming in desperate gasps; I can't push enough air from my body to take anymore in. The burning sensation is flowing up my legs, my vision is turning to pinpoints. The world is shifting and breaking away, and all I can think is that I do not know when this will end.

Often I feel that I am the weakest link. As an athlete I am naturally competitive. Training to make myself stronger, faster and fitter has been of exceptional interest to me ever since I understood the concept as a girl, watching the Summer Olympics for the first time. After that first Olympics I was hooked. I wanted to be an Olympian. Other kids wanted to be a Firefighter, or a Veterinarian (I did go through a phase where I wanted to be a Vet), but no, I wanted to go to the Olympics. I would design elaborate courses in my backyard and make all my neighborhood friends compete. In retrospect I think they thought it was stupid; I thought it was awesome.

When the Olympics came around every four years I spent the entire two weeks in this state of awestruck inspiration. I watched everything. I made my parents buy stacks of blank VHS tapes so that I could record everything. I even watched the closing ceremony (which I've now learned that nobody does), my face glued to the TV as I watched my obsession being packed away; vowing as the host of the next Olympics called to the youth of the world that I would be there someday.

It is my nature to reach far beyond my own capacity, often without a shred of an idea of how I'm going to accomplish the feats that I dream up. I really believed that I would go to the Olympics one day. 

I'm all grown up now and with a healthy dose of reality and cynicism I understand perfectly clearly that I don't have an ice cube's chance in hell of making it to the Olympics for cycling. I am strong, I am fit, I have years of training layered onto my body like some kind of absurd cake where the frosting is tan lines on your thighs that never go away--BUT it is not enough. There are so many women who are stronger, fitter, faster, have more ridiculous tan lines. This is simply a reality that I have had to accept, a reality that forces the question of why? Why do this? Why train so hard when I am so sure that I will never be the best? This is a question that my Mother puts to me when I am in particularly hard training blocks and she asks me how I'm doing.

Exhausted.

Sore.

'Why don't you take a break?' she always asks me.

I can't. I can't take a break, and it's not because I have someone with a whip behind me forcing me onward. Well, I do have someone with a whip behind me, but it is myself. 

Training doesn't necessarily make me feel strong, however. Most of the time it makes me feel very weak.

Most of the time I train alone. There is something very zen about embarking on a training ride alone, like some sort of stoic warrior with only my wits and my iPod for survival. However, the rest of the time I'm training with men. Since I am a woman, this gives me an absolutely warped perception of my own fitness and ability simply because when I train with men I am constantly getting my butt decisively handed to me. Oftentimes I am dangling off the back, struggling to stay with the group, watching my friends, my male friends, chatting and pedaling with ease. This makes me feel very weak.

This is a phenomena that all female athletes in endurance sports have experienced at one point, and something that I just don't think men understand. Suiting up for a ride with my male friends, a few of which are real-live pros (as opposed to dead pros) for me feels like preparing to go into battle. It is distinct from a race because in a race with your peers you know that there is a possibility that you will come out on top, whereas in riding with the boys I know that at some point a grenade will be thrown into my foxhole and I will not escape from it.

'This is good for you,' they say, 'it will make you stronger,' they chirp as they pedal in front of me with lightness and ease, as my vision starts to swim and my lungs simply cannot fill themselves with enough air.

There is a certain stoicism associated with training rides, one in which you must endure, even if it is killing you, and you must do it silently. I don't know when this unwritten rule was created or conveyed to me but I know deep inside my soul that the only way I will escape the shit talking when I'm on a ride and I'm so deep in the pain cave there will never be any light for me again, is to literally die on the side of the road. I picture this as tantamount to the story of the Spartan soldier who brought a fox back to training camp without killing it, and instead of face the shame of being caught with his meal, he let the fox eviscerate him in silence while he listened to a training lecture.

In most of the training rides I do with men, the fox is eating me alive. The worst part of this pain is not the searing in my legs, the feeling of near-drowning in my lungs, but the idea that this ride is four hours long, and I do not know when the pain will stop. They have the controls, and they can twist them as they please to ramp up the amount of agony I experience, and the only way I can stop it is if I rip out the plug, and I hate ripping out the plug.

It's a test, it's always a test. How much can you endure?

Unfortunately my ability take these doses of exercise-induced torture have become on par with my own self image. Cycling and training are so intrinsically entwined with my own being that it is very hard for me to separate out my performance on the bike and my self worth. Logically, I know this is a dangerous path to follow, but sometimes I feel that I can't help it. What makes it all the harder is that I am putting myself into situations, by my own choosing, in which I am the weakest link. This makes it very hard to see myself as a strong, capable athlete.

However, if this is what I want, what I want to be, a half-way decent cyclist, a professional cyclist then I will give the controls to my training away again and again. 

As I go deeper down this rabbit-hole it gets harder and harder to separate myself from my training, gets harder and harder to see myself as having value without the bicycle. It is a bit surreal however that I derive self worth from my cardiovascular and muscular systems.

Unfortunately I am guilty of this perpetuation as well. I have been so trained to expect this kind of behavior from people that sometimes when I take a friend on a group ride and they go from quietly riding in the group to ten miles off the back it's not cause for alarm.

Oops, so and so has cracked, guess we were going too hard.

There is no canary in this coal mine, just the sudden explosion.

 It seems like it would be nicer and more efficient for us to simply let each other know when we're hitting the breaking point, so we can all help them along, instead of watching them detonate and crawl into the woods in despair. Ah, but this would of course go against the whole 'hard man' (hard woman!) aspect of the sport, and far be it from me to change tradition!

Really though, people in the cycling world are always wondering why there are so few women who race, in comparison to the number of men. Maybe this gives a little insight, at least into my brain, and why I chose to do this. But it is a hard thing to do, for the most basic reason that you are giving someone a bat and saying, 'Here you go, beat the shit out of me! It will make me stronger!'

Epic Rides

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It is 30 degrees outside and I am going to go ride my bike. It is 30 degrees and snowing, and sometimes raining, and I am going to ride my bike.

 It's days like this that I really reflect on my life choices. It is base time, and unfortunately because I live in New England that means that the weather in March is confused at best, raging poopwhistle at worst. You know what they say, March comes in like a lion, out like a lamb…Or in like a freight train carrying all the worst raw sewage from the bowels of what is left of winter and out like, I don't know, a puppy that looks friendly but has rabies and just bit you. I don't like March. Let's take it off the Calendar.

Anyway, March is when you see your Twitter and Facebook feeds blowup with people detailing their 'epic rides' or 'epic trainer ride.' It's March, and we're all a little portly and out of shape from ending our seasons and immediately throwing ourselves head first into the nearest bar. It's kind of like the kids getting out of school for the summer, but with alcohol and all the fries you can eat! So when we have to get back on the bike for base miles and the weather is less than ideal we're either forced onto the trainer, or outside in some sort of bicycle hazmat suit, everything gets a little epic. Then comes the inevitable wiener measuring contest to see who has ridden in the most epic fashion. For those who don't know trainer rides can be epic, even if you're weather-free indoors, simply because of the damage done to the party in your basement. Bikes oscillate, so they are happy when outdoors, when clamped to a trainer YOU do the oscillating, turning your crotch into a belt sander of despair.

So to throw my lot in with everyone else, this week I went on an epic ride.

It started with the usual internal battle. Weather is shit. It is snowing, it is raining, it is freezing cold, DO NOT WANT. Then comes the compromising. Ok fine, so the weather is shit, no problem, I'll just ride the trainer. Next, the realization. Wait, I need to ride for 2 hours. On the trainer, BUTT TORTURE. Bargaining. Ok, ok, I'm going to put all my clothes on and just get on the bike and start pedaling. I'll go as far as I can, and if I get too cold I'll just finish on the trainer. Deal struck.

So I get home from work; time to put my kit on. Unfortunately dressing for winter riding is the equivalent of dressing a 2 year old to go out and play in the snow, and probably takes as long. It comes with the same problems too. For my winter or summer garb choices I prefer to wear bib shorts, rather than anything with a waist band. It's way more comfortable because it doesn't feel like you're getting gut-strangled by a python, and it has the added bonus that if you crash your pants don't get ripped off. This is a win-win. The problem with bib shorts is that you have to take off any added layers to get down to the bib straps, which you then have to manually take off so you can sit down and pee. I REALLY wish I could just pee out of the side of my shorts like the rest of you man-jerks but I can't, so this means that sometimes I get to the door all bundled up and my idiot bladder goes, 'I have to pee! GOT YOU.' Commence disrobing.

So on this epic day, it was quite cold and miserable, and while I do have a very large collection of cycling clothes I sort of ended up putting on everything in my closet, and the kitchen sink, and some other stuff...

Winter has no idea what is about to hit it.

...As I said before, ninjas and cycling are two things close to my heart, and sometimes I really cannot help but combine them. Regardless, the way that I am psyching myself up for this ride is to FIGHT WINTER, Mortal Kombat style (With some help from Photoshop).

Did you think I was kidding?

I think the only thing that I succeeded in doing with this outfit besides keeping my body temperature at acceptable levels was to frighten my housemates, and anyone that I came across outside. 

So outside I went and I have to tell you that I was pretty pleased with my ability to dress myself (a skill I've only recently acquired). Ski goggles it turns out work just as well for winter bike rides as they do when you're doing that sweet backside 360 on the mountain. What I mean by this of course is that it increases your style points, and possibly keeps snow out of your eyes. However, my smugness over my choice of garb quickly dissolved into annoyance when I realized that keeping my nose warm meant fogging said ski goggles. Commence the stage of pulling the fabric on and off my nose and grumbling to myself. I'm sure for those lone stragglers on the bike path this also made for an increasingly weird picture as I rode by them swearing under my breath.

Either way, I was outside, and I was conquering the weather, still leaving me mostly self-satisfied. HA! I am outside getting in hours, everyone else is inside crying into their DVD player. I am WINNING.

 Oh shit.

What I apparently forgot is that you cannot K.O. the weather. As my epic ride progressed and the temperature dropped I finally started to get cold. How could this be possible? My disguise was perfect! How could the winter have found me? Oh right, it's WINTER, and it is patient and calculating. Nose is cold, toes are cold. Crap. In my overzealousness I figured I would stay as warm and upbeat as I had been when the ride began.

Let's go on an eventually relevant tangent for a moment. This year I got a brand new CycleOps Joule to measure the thousands and thousands of watts that I put out every ride. This particular brand of power-measuring device is excellent because it is able to measure watts into the tens of thousands, which are numbers that I frequently produce. I broke my last power meter because it simply could not handle the watts. This brand new Joule also gives me other awesome measurements, like how many cookies I am allowed to consume after riding, and temperature. Oh temperature. I don't like this feature. I don't want to know how cold I am, but you, Troll-Joule, you insist on telling me.

It's 30 degrees!

Damnit.

Ok I'm cold, and possibly a little miserable. I need cookies and a hot shower, but I must pedal to these things. Did I mention that now I'm soaked, and my VAM is at 170! 170, my God! (I don't know what VAM means, so I will make an educated guess. Voraciousness About M&Ms. I think 170 means that my need to consume M&Ms is hitting dangerous levels.)

Now comes the part of the ride that I hate, especially when I've already hit my VAM maximal level. Pedaling home. I want to step inside a magical transporter that takes me directly into my house. These are expensive though, and given that I am an aspiring professional athlete I don't have the funds for one. Every pedal stroke is making me more soaked, and colder and colder. Somehow, however I keep doing this novel pedaling motion and it does, eventually, take me to my place of residence. The feeling of walking back into a well-lit, moderately well-heated, enclosed building is tantamount to drinking the elixir of life, or maybe drinking a beer in the shower. However, all this constant psyching myself up has left me pretty tired. Winter will finally have it's moment.

 I'm ready for it, Sub Zero, crush me.

Winter, 1. Frances, 0.

At the end of the day, while I did make it home in one piece, (with a bunch of staged, poorly photoshopped pictures to boot!) I think that I will give this round to winter. I'm sure that I will venture out again for many more rounds, and probably lose them all, but getting beat down makes you stronger in the long run. Or makes you sick. I really hope I don't get sick, again.

Mortal Kombat elements thanks to http://www.mortalkombatwarehouse.com Photoshopping and Photographs by Frances Morrison

I Wish To Be A Ninja (Among Other Things)

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Welcome to my blog! It is a blog among many thousands and thousands of blogs that exist on the internet, and yet in all its grace, the internet has allowed me a small cavern in which to expound on the various facets of my life. Ok, but seriously though I've wanted to make a blog for a long time. Blogs are great for posting stories of your cats, your collection of pictures of yourself making the duck face in various iconic spots around the world, or even a written collection of that one time you were really constipated. I don't know if I will be able to be as interesting or as relevant as the things that I listed above, but I will strive to be.

Anyway, now that the introduction is out of the way let's talk about ninjas. Why ninjas, you ask, what could they possibly have to do with cycling, or anything? Isn't the only time you should hear the word ninja from a little kid in Karate class, or that one time really late at night where you left the TV on and just happened to accidentally end up watching some anime? Questions aside, would you mess with this?

Adorable black belts today, the silent killers of tomorrow.

Do not underestimate ninjas-in-training. I have great respect for ninjas, and ninja-ing, which is indeed a verb. I have a Bachelor of Arts, and if I can't use it to turn words that I enjoy into verbs then what can I use it for? Ninjas are masters of their craft, yet they have to hone their skills for years. I feel that many aspects of ninja life are applicable to the life of a bike racer. We are both fully immersed in our training, to the extent that it takes up the majority of our waking thoughts. It takes years to hone and shape our bodies into what is needed for maximum performance, and in order to win, you've got to have that killer instinct.

So, cycling and ninja-ing: two things close to my heart, and in the most absolutely convoluted, three-paragraph way of getting to a proper introduction of myself here we are. My name is Frances, I am an elite bike racer. This year, after many years of training (ninja-ing) I am attempting to be noticed by and signed to a professional team. I am a road, mountain, and cyclocross racer, although my heart will always be with 'cross. I want to chronicle this attempt, for while there may be many women out there who are trying to do this, too many are remarkably silent about what it feels like.

Sometimes it feels like this!

Besides yelling about women's cycling (which I will do a lot) I may also write about other things that I like such as coffee, dogs, or swords. I also like to be silly, though you probably couldn't tell. Here is a picture of me, so that if spotted in public you can more easily be sure that your target is correct when you go to throw fruit at me.

I am ALWAYS watching for stray oranges.