How bumblebees fly

I was going to write that there are days when I really don't know why I do this, but that'd be kind of lying. Most days, I feel pretty confident about why I'm doing this: I want to get better and faster. This morning, though, I had one of those mornings where I began to wonder if I was just plain out of my mind.

For the past five days, I've been fighting chest and nasal congestion. I refuse to call it a cold or the flu: it's a seasonally-induced physical low point, albeit one that is going through most of the offices where I work. The Saturday morning gang were going on a big, long, 145 km ride, and I knew that I was not going to be in any shape to handle that kind of riding. Besides, I had a bigger challenge to complete. I needed to knock five minutes off a Cat 3 climb.

I'm not a climber. I come from one of the flattest regions in North America, and if I'd actually gone through with my dream to be a cyclist at the age of 14, the only place that I would have had to practice would have been the bridge crossing the CPR freight train line, just south of town. So one of the biggest problems has been learning how to climb, how to have the patience and measure energy and output and not flat-out panic every time there's another hairpin turn on the horizon.

The good news is that Madrid is an excellent place to learn how to climb well. There are climbs of all categories, from dips and swings right up to Cat 1 hammerfests, and you basically can't ride a bike here unless you know how to go uphill without killing yourself.

So: me and the chest cold set out from the train station at the Autonomous University, and we took it slow. There was no sense in hammering away; there was no sense in killing myself on the ride up, because I was going to need the energy for later. And why blow a beautiful Saturday morning - the first warm, pleasant, totally sunny Saturday that we'd literally had in months - trying to prove what a toughie I am?

I took the bike path all the way up to Soto, had tortilla and coffee and set off on a leisurely spin through Guadalix. The roads were full of cyclists - mountain bikes, road bikes, and everything in between - and I was ready.

I visualized this. I don't know if I visualized the warm weather, the pleasant guy cyclist wearing a blue jacket and riding a white Canyon who smiled at me as I hit the town limits of Guadalix, the fresh sent of the soil and earth coming from the sides of the creeks. But I visualized doing it in less than 27 minutes. I visualized the smooth flow of the chain and the cadence, hitting high speeds before the real climbing began five kilometres in. I didn't visualize the heavy traffic, the motorcycle fanatics dressed in Valentino Rossi green-and blue outfits dodging and weaving on out of the lines of high-end cars coming down the M625. I did visualize the work, what a 7% grade was going to feel like in my hamstrings. I didn't visualize the kids hiking up the vía pecuaria. I visualized what it was going to look like, riding up to the caseta and pulling out the phone and telling Yago that I'd done it, that I'd got my time under 29 minutes.

I did NOT visualize knocking damn near eleven minutes off the time.

It has been said (I don't know by whom) that aerodynamically, bumblebees are not supposed to be able to fly, that their heavy, ball-shaped bodies cannot be lifted by wings so small. No one has ever told bumblebees that. So it just goes to show that there's no sense in trying to limit yourself, because if you don't think about what you CAN'T do, it's amazing what you can do.