Sporty vs. Mental (part 2)

mental (adj)

1. of or pertaining to the mind: mental powers; mental suffering.
2. of, pertaining to, or affected by a disorder of the mind: a mental patient; mental illness.
3. (Informal.) slightly daft; out of one's mind; crazy: He's mental.

You know that it's going to be a mental day when you're biking to the train station and one of the first things you encounter is a bunch of cops putting a cow into a police van.

"Bunch of kids," muttered one, "decided to be funny and ran into the cow with a scooter." The poor Cow Parade Cow wasn't even a "real cow", in the sense that it didn't even look like one of the horned, hoofed pseudoruminants that dot Madrid these days: it was shaped like something like a four-year-old would draw, with bubble-round head, a body like a bag of flour and soup-can legs. None of which made it easier to put in the paddy wagon. It may have been an omen. I'm still too tired to work it out for myself.

It was a mental day all around. I wanted to convince myself that it was sporty, and in some ways, it was - there wasn't anything with road conditions or weather that I didn't have to deal with while I was on the Trans-Iberian. But on the Trans-Iberian, I was only doing about sixty kilometres each day (and most days, not even that). I wasn't training for anything specific. But it reminded me that there were a number of things that I did recall today: If you have to stop to pee, do it on an incline, on grass, with the wind in your face. (And don't tell the guys. They get REALLY weird about girls needing to pee.) Don't fight the wind - you're gonna lose every time. Stay small. Keep pedalling. Remind yourself that, whatever happens, you're going to be in bed by a certain time and that nothing lasts forever - not wind, not good days, not bad days.

Sporty, indeed, with some fun climbs and some re-surfaced roads which made the going a lot easier. And being able to drop Pilar on every single climb was certainly good for my ego (and my pedalling.) At the beginning, coming out of the Henares Valley and going towards Tórtola de Henares, the secondary highways were still pretty crumbly, but the CM1103, which we'd had so much trouble with over the October long weekend in the fall of '07 was delightful and smooth - both for us and the tumbleweeds. It's not that I haven't seen tumbleweeds blow among Spanish highways; I've just never seen them become AIRBORNE over Spanish highways.

Our weekly Spanish tortilla stop took us to the town of Caspuñas, in the deepest Alcarría region - honestly, why there aren't more cyclists who take advantage of this gorgeous area's proximity to Madrid blows me away. The landscape was gorgeous, the hairpin turns were challenging (OK, Chris Carmichael, now I see what you mean about cantered turns) and while we were in the valleys, it wasn't such a big deal because we were basically protected from the wind while we were down. But when we were above the valleys, on the plains that hadn't been excavated by earthquakes or rivers, we got blasted. And I mean blasted. No matter what we did, we couldn't get the wind to work with us: it came from the sides, it got into the front wheels, it sent drops of snot flying horizontally from our noses and set distance records for loogies horked. (Disculpa, Yago. I will explain "horking loogies" the next time we go for coffee.) But it tested us. It tested our patience with weather and ourselves and each other, frankly, because in a situation like this, I would normally have expected being able to count on teamwork to save us the need to fight individually against the wind. But not this time.

For some reason we don't know (and have been too ashamed to ask), Pilar doesn't see stuff. Oncoming cars, overlapped wheels, things falling off her bike: I don't know if it's just a lack of observation skills or if she suffers from some kind of vision impairment, but it's the bane of any outing she's on. Admittedly, I'm no master at group riding, but I hope that I know better not to overlap wheels or close a gap in a pace line that's going along with the wind. I know Juan tries hard to show her how things work. But at one point, as we were riding down the Valle de Ungría towards Caspueñas, she got her rear wheel to within four inches of my front wheel and I had to jam on the brakes to give myself enough space. I tried hard not to snap too loudly - "Pilar, be CAREful!!!!!" and Juan looked back with one of those "what's-goin'-on-back-there" looks, but he didn't yell at me for yelling at her, which surprised me. It soon became pretty obvious why: she stays parallel with him because that way, she gets constant input on what to do and what not to do - which has its logic, to a point, but which makes me nervous as hell.

And the ride down to Iriépal. Iriépal is one of those hills that I have a seething resentment against, because, trying to ride it up it in 2005 (probably the first serious climb I ever had to do in a group ride), I came as close as I've ever come to dying of an athsma attack (not VERY close, admittedly.) It's four kilometres long and four hundred metres up, a broccoli-shaped regional road that hugs a Wild West-style valley. Normally, you can do the entire descent in less than five minutes. I don't think that we did it in less than fifteen.

So now: dinner, toothbrush, stretching, bed. EVERYTHING hurts tonight. Absolutely everything. The weather websites are calling for 95% chance of rain with snow in the sierra tomorrow, and I'm sincerely praying that it comes through, because I want a legitimate reason not to go riding tomorrow. Somehow aching and hurting and being stiff doesn't seem like reason enough. Who knows. Maybe the winds will get so bad that all of the cows in the city will start flying, the cops will freak out and the city will get shut down. Maybe that'd do it.