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.
Awesome recap, this ride was insane. Glad we both got through it together.
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