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.