Saturday, February 28, 2009

Wheat from the Chaff

Normally, any train ride that we have to take to get anywhere for a ride ends up being a humph-fest that can only be stopped with massive infusions of caffeine. Not today. Within ten minutes of getting on the train to Aranjuez, SuperLópez is on a rant about the Saturday morning gang. This surprises me. He's usually more discreet, but today, he lays into everyone and anyone - probably would lay into me, too, if I weren't the person he was talking to. I don't know if this is because of the early hour or the crap weather, with the sky threatening to open up and dump on us at any moment. It's like the dropping barometer has set everything loose at once.

Loose, indeed. Wind, grit, trucks (but no tumbleweeds, oddly enough.) We get out of Aranjuez (easier than I thought) and head over the Madrid-Castilla La Mancha border to a small town called Ciruelas. I try to keep to his back wheel; it's hard, considering how much taller and lighter he is - he doesn't have to fight against weight and wind as much as I do. It gets slightly better as we head over the plains by Yepes, but deep down into the bottoms of the gulleys, the wind gets channeled against us - not with enough force to push us backwards, simply blowing hard enough to fool us into thinking that we're going faster than we are. Which is disheartening after an hour.
My mind is suprisingly quiet today - a bit of Amy Winehouse, a bit of positive thinking - but it's easy to let your brain drain of thoughts when the wind keeps scraping against the Buff covering your ears.

Rain comes. Okay.

Rain starts to freeze. Okay.

Two big trucks blow past us, throwing our balance off just enough to push up the adrenaline. Okay.

It is what it is.

La Guardia. Three Guardia Civil trucks sit outside the Bar el Cono, where the bartender takes pity on us and slaps down half a tortilla each and only charges us €4 for a serving and a Coke each. We decide to cut it short and take the train back from El Romeral. Problem - train doesn't come for another three hours.

Screw it. Lunch in Tembleque.

Luckily, neither López nor I have anyone waiting for us at home, which makes it easier to grab lunch and mess about town, taking in all of the sights which I'd already seen on the Trans-Iberian. It is what it is.

Easy ride back to El Romeral, at about 3:15 (train comes at 4:20) and my brain starts going. Right, then: If these things are sent to try us, but we're in a position to get rid of some of them, then why do we tolerate them? Why maintain a friendship that is no longer friendly? Why belong to organizations which don't work to defend our interests? I went to Ikea on Friday to get stuff to reorganize my apartment; what's stopping me from doing the same thing from the shoulders up?

Every so often, we pass tractors disc-ing the fields, pulling up all kinds of gems from the earth. Small flocks of birds trail the tractors, seeing what food and treats the tractors have pulled up. Spring cleaning, spring changing, even with rain looming close by.

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Differing ways of being

Once upon a time, when we still cooked our meat over open fires and probably only bathed twice in our lifetimes, English had three verbs that meant "to be". There was "to be", which described permanent situations; "art", which was for emotions and more temporary situations; and one very old, very temporary verb called (and I don't have the proper characters here:) "phtet", which was for passing phases, like being hungry or tired. Spanish gets around this by having three different ways of expressing this: ser, for more or less permanent situations; estar, for situations that can change; and tener, to have, for things that don't last.

Tener is for situations like the trainer. Tener sueño, to be sleepy, when you've spent the entire morning running around like an idiot, and have to get on the trainer an hour after lunch because it's the only space in the day that you can find. Estar cansada, to be temporarily tired, because you're not used to training at such high levels and with such intensity, and you think that you're going to blow out. But never ser cansada, to have had it up to here, to be so fed up that you're at the point of no return.

How's the training going? Des McC. asked this morning. And I said it was going all right, because I am generally enjoying it, though I think I'd enjoy it more if I could focus on it more and not feel like it's something that has to get squeezed between everything else. I am happy, but I am not too tired, yet.

Sunday, February 22, 2009

Attack of the Killer B's

So to get the ride going, Ángel yells out for the guys (and it's almost all guys) in Group A to join him. Nobody moves. This is a bad sign. It means that the riders who are capable of holding higher velocities (but who are too lazy, hungover, whatever, to do so) are going to slip down into Group B, which means that the rest of us who are barely holding onto our positions in Group B are gonna get creamed. Group B ends up with about 20 riders, which means that Group C, the technically slowest group, is gonna be full of people just messing about. So. Group B or Group C? I take my chances with the hammerheads. At least it'll get my heart rate up and I have a chance of looking like I gave it a shot.

I hang on until Tres Cantos. No, to be fair, I hang on until the Autónoma, and by the time we pass the Army base at El Goloso, my tongue is hanging out and I feel like barfing. I pushed too hard yesterday. There's no way I should have raced Buje and Antonio G. to the top of Marañosa (though I was very proud of my winning sprint at the top) and I really should take it a lot easier on Pilar, try riding with her even though she can't open her mouth any more without any of us wanting to scream. But yesterday, I needed to show my stuff. I wanted to show them that I'm not the dumb, fat guiri that they can all laugh at, that they'd better take me seriously or I will kick their asses from here to Finisterre.

And until I bonked on the fourth climb, I think they did.

By the time I reach the Foxá hotel in Tres Cantos, there's no seeing Group B for love or money. They are GONE. God only knows how far behind Group C have gotten; they're far more conservative when it comes to things like jumping red lights or letting the group get too far spread out. Whatever. I have intervals to do today anyway. Once past the main area of Tres Cantos, I push the gears up to a 54X14 and push, hard. I try invoking Amy Winehouse songs, the chattering monkeys, thoughts of Tom Boonen wearing nothing but leather trousers and a smart-ass smirk, anything to keep my mind off the fact that I feel like I'm blowing up. No pain, no gain, says Yago, but I'm not sure I'm gaining anything. All I can feel is the seething anger at being left so far behind.

Which makes it doubly irritating because I'm having trouble keeping my heart rate up. The whole point of doing intervals is to try to keep my heart rate at about 80% maximum for twenty minutes, but I can't; every time the terrain levels out or goes downhill, it plummets from about 154 to 128. I'm five minutes away from two climbs that would make it soar through the roof, but I can't hold on.

And then the snot comes. Oh my God, does it come. Someone turns on the faucet at the back of my sinuses and before I know it, I'm choking on it. I can't hork it out. I can't blow it out. But it's there, washing around but not loose enough to get out in one big loogie. I check behind me. I look in front of me. And, being left-handed, I blast it out onto my left arm warmer and feel relieved that I can breathe. Until four really good-looking guys pass me, muttering "Ánimoooo...." in the same tone of voice that one uses to berate the dog for peeing on the carpet.

But I accidentally hit one of the buttons on the new cycle computer, and bring up the altitude function. I'm riding up a 12% grade. I'm not sure if that makes me feel better or not.

I never get to the point of wondering why the hell I'm doing this. Not on the bike. Those thoughts tend to come when I'm exhausted and there's been no time to shop for food and the house is a disaster. But I do wonder how well I am doing it. I know that I'm climbing stronger, that (when I don't blow out) I can climb faster and go faster on flats. What I do wonder, though, is if this ever gets to the point where it gets effortless. Or just feels like it is. I want to be one of those guys who flies up hills and still has enough breath to talk about Real Madrid's season. I don't know how long that'll take. All I can think of when I get to the top of the 12% bit is that it doesn't feel like it's coming fast enough.

We take over one of the cafés in the plaza across from the church in Manzanares el Real; the B's have headed up to the to the Canto Cochino parking lot of the La Pedriza Park, which is packed with cyclists and cars. The C's roll in ten minutes later -- "Where the HELL did they shoot off to?" Pepe grumbles, shooting the hammerheads a poisonous look. The sun is shining, the protein and carbs are starting to settle down.

On the way out, I try joining the B's again, but their numbers have swelled, and instead of having a three-tier system, we've basically broken down into Those Who Go Like Hell and Those Who Take It Easy. I start in the second, chatting with Pepe, but those who can, do, and we get caught in a sub-group which should be Group B, but technically isn't.

And then another problem comes up, sort of. While I value the experience of riders like Pepe and Miguel, who have been riding for over forty years, I'm not sure how to gently extricate myself from being with them so that I can do my second interval. I'm supposed to do a second set of 20 minutes going like hell; but, blocked in with six older guys who are determined to show me the ropes, I end up in a paceline, straight behind Pepe and beside José Antonio. Knowing that these guys are all retired, I take extra care to do this well; me breaking a bone is nothing, but them breaking a bone would mean being laid up for months. But I can't break free, I can't do the Z4, and I don't know which is the bigger sin - not doing the exercise I was prescribed (which is, after all, meant to make me faster and stronger) or passing up on damn near 200 years of collected experience riding around me. I opt for the latter. I'm not in a position where I can turn down more help.

We head back into town going at a pretty good pace, about 28 kilometres an hour, and Pepe gives me some pointers about descending. Let's face it, I'm a lot more corpulent than a LOT of the guys I ride with, and since most of my weight sits from the waist down, it tends to drag me a lot faster and further than any guy who tips the scales like I do. Unless you can get around him safely, don't race him, says Pepe. If he comes down or slides out when he hits the curve, he's gonna take you with him.

And the gang collects again just inside the old town limits of Fuencarral town, where Miguel and a couple of the other guys are hanging out by the club car.

"How she'd do?" says Miguel.

"She's doin' all right," says Pepe, with a big smile on his face. "She's doing quite all right."

Well, they haven't chucked me out yet or demoted me. That's something in itself.

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Bad Cyclist

"No pain, no gain," says Yago, and by the time I'm finished screwing around with trying to get the Polar on the bike, it's damn near nine and I DO intend on trying to get the training in. But I don't. The trainer is misbehaving and keeps snapping out. The phone rings. I can't focus. I'm days away from the ever-feared arrival of Aunt Flo, and I am in SUCH a mood that, after a while, I give up.

I hate this. I hate not being able to focus and shut my brain off but it's still so damn loaded with irrelevant, non-cycling stuff that I don't half wonder if I'm going to do more harm than good. Which I don't. My f***-it gene is too strong to go so hard I actually hurt myself.

It's ten p.m. I'm sick of messing around with stuff. I still haven't eaten dinner. I'm going to bed, a bad cyclist who can't focus.

But at least I'm honest about it!!!!! :O)

Logjams

Something evil happens when you start losing weight and start burning more energy than you ingest: practically everybody you have contact with turns into an idiot.

The biking buddies who don't clarify where you're supposed to meet for coffee, so that you end up parking your arse in front of their office building for half an hour while they're waiting 500 metres away because they thought you meant another building....morons. The bank? Unmentionables. Tax office? Don't get me started. The student who refuses to use the English she learns in class and, instead, insists on translating every single blessed word from Spanish to English? It's a miracle I'm still employed.

I used to think that I could like being hungry. I know what it's going for, I know why I'm doing this, but God, this is hard. I would rather bike an extra fifty kilometres a day (and I would, if I had the time) rather than have to cut back on carb consumption, like I'm doing now. I feel continuously like I'm three minutes away from either a meltdown or a migrane, and I really, seriously have to restrain myself from talking. ("Are you sure that you're not going through early menopause?" my mom said last night. "When I went through The Change I was never ever really sure what the hell was going to come out of my mouth.")

I look at my Facebook "friends" and think, Why are you here? You're not my friend, and blow them away. I look at the bathroom and before you know it, every surface has been blasted with window cleaner. I look at the pile of photocopies of ESL handouts sitting on the sofa and think, Screw it - it's saved on the hard drive, and chuck them into the recycling bin. And all the time, I'm thinking of bread, of pasta, of all sorts of things I probably should not have, and am thankful that I don't live really, really super close to a grocery store, because I'd be the size of a Volkswagen Beetle right now.

And all the while, I keep trying to calm myself down by thinking, you asked for it...you knew what this would entail when you started...you know what you're like when you're on a diet...you know you love it when you walk into a room of your friends and one by one, you're becoming skinnier than most of them...you know how good it feels to blow by the guys on the rides, especially coming home when you can hold a higher cadence than most of them...you know that it'll be worth it when you win an important competition...ride with Group A without thinking twice...zoom up Canencia or Navacerrada or the Marie-Blanque....

And then I have a piece of bread and some butter, with some spices spread on top.

And then I stop to breathe.

And then I start thinking that it's probably a very good thing that I'm still single and live alone.

Monday, February 16, 2009

Why Lance Armstrong Never Ceases To Bug the Bejeezus out of Me, Part I

So: Lance had his time trial bike stolen yesterday. Apparently it's worth more money than I make in a year. About twenty grand, they say.

So Armstrong gets on Twitter and tells his 118,400 followers that he's offering a reward for its safe return.

And all I can think of is...

a) Did you pay for that marvel of engineering out of your own pocket? Or was it given to you by Trek, who know they're going to make the investment back off of weekend warriors who walk into bike shops and babble, "I want a bike just like the bike Lance rides!!!!!"
b) How much money do you make in a typical year?
c) Then SHUT UP.

Sunday, February 15, 2009

Home is where the head tube is

Nothing earth-shatteringly important or meant to move mountains...just a lovely little blog post from Bill Strickland at BICYCLING magazine that I wanted to share:

http://sittingin.bicycling.com/2008/10/bicycle-gothic.html

And what are you still doing inside, Mr. or Mrs. Madrid? It's going up to 15ºc today. There's not a cloud in the sky. It's the first decent weather we've had since December. Get outside already and stop reading dumb blogs like mine.

Saturday, February 14, 2009

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.

A solution with lots of bottle

Back last August, when César and I were riding through Burgos and Soria, we were surprised at the amount of garbage you could still see on the road after the Vuelta a Burgos. Signs, flyers and even bottles littered the ditches, and while I'm not ashamed to admit that I scored a couple of very cool cycling bottles (thank you, Andalucía-Cajasur), what we saw probably didn't go a long way towards helping cycling's image as an environmentally-friendly sport.

So kudos to CamelBak, who have teamed up with the Coolest Damn Team in Cycling (i.e. Garmin-Slipstream, the Argyle Armada) to turn trash into treasures. Spectators who pick up Garmin bottles from the sides of the roads during the Amgen Tour of California can use the bottle as a kind of raffle ticket. Each bottle will have a code on it, and when you find a bottle, you simply enter the CamelBak website to see what you've won. And these are REALLY cool prizes we're talking about - a team-issue Felt bicycle, a set of Zipp wheels - I mean, really COOL swag.

Which makes me think I should write CamelBak and ask them why they don't extend the promotion to Spain, where Garmin will be racing in the Vuelta a Murcia in a couple of weeks' time. I mean, hell....I KNOW I am not the only one who recycles bike bottles recovered from the ditches.

For more information: http://thisjustin.bicycling.com/2009/02/the-roundup-t-1.html

Monday, February 9, 2009

Attack of the Mental Chattering Monkeys

I don't know why I'm having such a rough time sleeping in lately. On Tuesdays and Fridays I don't have to be at work until the early afternoon but, without fail, by 6:30 in the morning I'm bolt awake, my brain blasting with thoughts about everything and anything. I don't know if that means that I'm sleeping more efficiently, but it sure doesn't help to find your eyes open, staring at the ceiling, knowing that you're about five minutes away from suffering an Attack of the Mental Chattering Monkeys: Pilates or pool today? When do I get down to the health centre to get the blood test sorted out? What fresh hell am I going to encounter at the perfume pump company? Do I go to get weighed in this morning or do I leave it 'til Friday? Is it worth trying to get to know Jesús better or should I just leave it and let him make a move if he's truly interested? Do we have parking at the youth hostel if we take the cars to Bilbao? If Igo to the pool in the Casa del Campo is it going to be full of pensioners who swim too slow? Has the chain stretched? Why doesn't the toilet drip water in the morning, just at night? Why doesn't Paloma the lawyer pick up the phone when I call?

I know why this is: I don't really have anyone I talk to about normal stuff (well, I do, but I'm also aware that I can't push the limits too far.) And the thoughts end up stuck in my head, and to tamp them down, I end up doing stuff like swimming and cycling and Pilates and teaching and messing about on the Internet. Because it's therapy. Because it makes me feel better. Because it's a good way of ignoring the little stuff that ends up getting blown out of proportion by stress and worry because I didn't take care of it in the first place. I don't want to bother Kinga or Tora or my parents or Yago with shit that really isn't that important. But I'm also fully aware that canning feelings and worries and stress inside is not a way of dealing with it, either.

I don't want this stuff to affect my progress, especially since some of the Chattering Monkeys do actually talk about cycling-related issues from time to time. Maybe I should think about joining a Zen dojo to try to learn to clear my brain so that the Mental Chattering Monkeys just stay that way - they stay inside my brain, where they can be silenced and prevented from causing trouble.

Friday, February 6, 2009

YOU'RE leaving at 8AM.

I like it when Jesús organizes outings, because it's clear and precise: We're leaving at this time and we're gonna do this and them's the breaks. AO, on the other hand -- there is just no nice way to say this -- is an unmitigated disaster.

We're meeting at 8AM, he says, even though the sun didn't come up until 8:25 and leaving at 8:00 means having to ride though several questionable areas (both in terms of road quality and safety) in the dark. AO, we say, do you really think that that's such a hot idea? We're meeting at 8AM, he says, because that way those who want to do 100 kilometres and those who want to do 120 kilometres can be home before lunchtime. So does that mean that you haven't specifically picked a route, then? We're leaving at 8AM, he says.

I don't really mind AO all that much, but he strikes me as a very...well, Canadian...Spaniard, in a way. He's so busy trying to find a middle ground to make everybody happy that he doesn't realize that his vacillating pisses everyone off to no end. He'll yammer on about the importance of taking yourself seriously as a cyclist, yet show up looking like a Hobbit or an art student, in baggy pants gathered round the ankle with a big elastic band or metal clip, a windbreaker that's big enough to hold his wife and both daughters. When the wind picks up, you don't have to look at where he is in the pace line: you can hear him twenty metres away, flap flap flap.... A couple of months ago, he was doing the climb up the Cerro de San Pedro and got smoked by a bunch of guys from SanSe, who made fun of the clothes he was wearing. He was indignant as hell. None of us were surprised: Well, what does he expect, if he goes out riding looking like a Bosnian refugee?

It may be a uniquely Anglo-Saxon hangup (or maybe I'm just really, really being a girl, here) but appearances count. If you don't have enough self-esteem or pride to kit yourself out well (and don't talk to me about money, the guy's a federal civil servant and makes good coin), you're gonna have to expect that people are going to think that you're not taking this seriously.

And I know why he was so uptight about leaving at 8AM. Gloria, his co-habitant (as he romantically calls her) is continually referred to in his e-mails as the person with whom he must negotiate time. You coming to Bilbao with us or not? I haven't consulted with Gloria. You going out on Saturday? I haven't asked Gloria.

I haven't met Gloria, but frankly, if she's like a lot of Spanish housewives I know, she would probably be thankful to have him out from under her feet and doing something regularly that doesn't involve a Lazy Boy, a six-pack of Estrella Galicia and the remote control. Gloria, I suspect, is being used as a convenient excuse to get some cycling in because AO hasn't really sat down with her and said, look, this is important to me and I know it's hard with two kids, but I'm willing to negotiate and make this work. I don't think Gloria has him on a short leash at home by any means. Dollars to doughnuts, AO just kind of sneaks out whenever he thinks he can get a couple of hours in, just enough that he's not missed, but not enough that she starts thinking he's having an affair or something.

So if he wants to leave at 8AM and drag the rest of them with him, good luck to him. It's freezing out there and the road to San Martín is not the best - it's busy, full of broken glass and garbage and God knows what else. I may be crazy enough to ride in snow, but I'm not so desperate for a ride that I'll go out somewhere that's hazardous if you can't see where you're going.

10:23 AM

Random thoughts while cleaning up and putting the bike on the trainer.

- It's only rain. It's really not that big a deal. Some poor 22-year-old Belgian cyclist died in his sleep yesterday in the early morning. He'd been riding the Tour de Qatar, went to bed and never got up again. Things must be kept in perspective.

- A year ago, Kirsty and I almost got attacked by a turkey and got nailed by sunstroke on the Ruta del Quijote near Alcázar de San Juan. How can it be that last winter was so amazing, and this winter sucks?

- It's rain. At least it makes it easier to wipe the bike clean of crap and dust and stuff.
Crap and dust and stuff. Amazing how such general, vague language can generate such strong mental images.

Right: 90 minutes of riding with 15-second sprints.

9:43 AM

John, the guy who taught countless adults and kids from Kemptville to drive, once stopped a driving practice session I had with him because I was so pissed off and wound up from work that I wasn't able to concentrate properly on driving. He literally stopped the car in the middle of Asa Street, ordered me into the passengers' side seat of his adapted K-Car and drove me home. I felt ashamed. Controlling my temper is never something I've been particularly good at, especially when it's something that I can't change anyway. I turn into Dawna Duck: quacking (qwacking?), yelling, not able to disconnect enough to talk myself out of the red fog.

It's 9:41. In 2.09 km I have been cut off twice, had three different people with umbrellas walk out in front of me to cross the street without looking. (Want to know what Hell is going to look like when you die? I'll tell you. It's raining and full of very short Madrileños with golf umbrellas.) I am now standing under the eaves of the Teatro Real and the sleet is coming down so hard I can't see the Palacio Real, 250 metres away. Enough of this shit. I call Yago.

¿Hola?
Hi, it's me. I'm sorry to bother you, but I have a question.
Shoot.
I'm standing beside the Teatro Real and it's been sleeting and raining for the last ten minutes. I know that we said that I had to do the five rides up La Marañosa today, but can I please do it tomorrow with the group ride? This is nuts.
Yeah, the weather is pretty bad. Go ahead and do it tomorrow.
So, trainer today?
Yeah, do a bit on the trainer and then tomorrow when you go out riding, do the rides up during or after the group ride.
OK. Thanks.
Hey, by the way, thanks for the funny e-mails with the English cycling slang. I've really enjoyed them.
No problem. And if I get more, I'll send them your way.
Right.

I hate bailing like this, but hell, it's Friday and there'll be no one out on those roads. The one person who you might even run into down around that way, training on a Friday, is in California, the lucky bastard. I don't mind riding in inclement weather if I'm with other people but there ain't no way, no how I'm going down those hills with no one to look out after me.

Thursday, February 5, 2009

7:46 AM

It's 7:46 AM. I've been up for an hour; the sound of the rain woke me up at 6:30 and every ten minutes or so, I poke my head out the curtains to see if the rain has let up, which is kind of stupid because it's still raining hard enough that I can hear it in the kitchen. Maybe it'll go away before 9 or 10. Maybe it'll blow through once the sun comes up; the radar images on the national weather website shows that the band of precipitation going through central Spain is not solid, that there are breaks. Accu-Weather says that the weather is going to get better this afternoon, but that doesn't help me at all because I have to work at 3PM. So: suck it up, head out in the rain and just hope that it doesn't get worse than this.

If the status on my Facebook page doesn't change by 6PM, call the Civil Guard. I'm doing climbs on the bike lane beside the M301, between Perales de Tajuña and the turnoff to the Warner Brothers theme park by Góquez de Abajo, near San Martín de la Vega.

Qwacking up

Four and a half more hours to go and the weekend begins. Before Christmas, I was pretty sure that I could strike a balance between cycling and working, and I'm still feeling pretty confident about it, but I am not going to lie: this may be the first time in my life when I actually wish I were married, because it would be SO much easier to have someone to help out with...stuff.

Four and a half more hours. Two with the perfume pump people - one fun hour, one grind hour. Mabel, who uses most of her class to talk about the problems of her life. (How much do shrinks make an hour?) And then the kids, who are 12 and 13 and going through puberty and are VERY sulky and who turn me off the idea of teaching kids forever. Alfonso's not bad (how can you not like a thirteen-year-old who likes Henry James?) but I could slug Guillermo for being such a sulky little sod. So it inevitably happens that my mind starts wandering: Can I still make my reservations for the Clásica de Bilbao? Is SugarLopez gonna show up this week, and why hasn't he been out since early December - did he really gain that much weight? And is The Oik not coming out because of me or because he's so out of shape?

I teach and my mind starts wandering towards cycling. I cycle, and my mind doesn't always veer off towards teaching, but it does sometimes. Am I qwacking up? That's the last thing I need - to qwack myself.

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Viva el Meatball!!

Over the last couple of weeks, I've been explaining a couple of the, ahem, finer points of English cycling slang. So far, he's learned (and I hope he's been able to use) snot rocket, hork loogies, and do a Fred Flinstone. I know a fair amount of slang, but I bow down to the comic madness of Mike "Meatball" Friedman, who rides for Slipstream-Chipotle. Dave Zabriskie used to be the quip of the pelotón, but he's had to cede that title to Meatball, who has rightfully earned his nickname. This guy is nuts. And not only is he nuts, he's pretty damn funny, too. The word of the day today was to "quack" someone, which, to quote Meatball, is when:

Quack or qwacking is the term Tommy D (Tom Danielson)likes to use when his 130-pound dainty little arse makes an abrupt move on a guy next to him in a treacherous situation. It’s you or him out there and nobody is nice. Well, unless it’s your teammate. So I quack in Tom’s honor!

Lord knows my hinie is not dainty, but I love the expression. And it's a good thing, too, because I know that, for the next twelve months, every time I make a move on someone, I will not be able to silence my inner duck. Smoke Pilar and/or The Oik on a climb...quack quack, quack. Attack a group of guys from SanSe....quack, quack, quack....

It's not enough to love Slipstream because they're the cleanest team in cycling. They are the only group of cyclists who you could even remotely dream of playing beer pong with. They're the only ones who have cyclists who have anything resembling sense of humour. They are the only professional cycling team who aren't afraid to let it all hang out, which is brilliant for some of us who are trying hard to get a handle on this cycling lark.

¡Viva el Argyle! ¡Viva el Meatball!

http://www.slipstreamsports.com/

PS: Mike, if you ever read this....and you decide that you're not particularly fond of the moniker "Meatball".... sorry, dude. I think you've earned it so well that you're stuck with it whether you like it or not. ;)

Sunday, February 1, 2009

Everything is relative

We get back to the Chamartín's clubhouse (which isn't a clubhouse, exactly, just a converted office that lacks heat) and Paco looks at Luis, Rob and I like he can't make up his mind if he should high-five us or smack us upside the head. Nobody, I mean nobody, knew that the morning was going to end up like that - huge, gobby snowflakes that came down horizontally more than once, visibility down to 200 metres, speeds slowed to damn near 10 km/h because you just had no idea what lay under the snow.

Canadian weather, vamos. Stuff that would not have flipped out any urban cyclist living in Toronto, Ottawa or Montreal - if you were a bike courier in any city along the eastern seaboard of North America, it would have been nothing at all. You would have dressed appropriately, dug into your mental maps of any potential problems like grates or crap pavement, and just kept going. But looking at the faces that greet us as we come in, get dried off and warmed up (just enough), you'd think that we'd just run an Alley Cat through Madrid traffic on a Saturday night. It's equal parts respect, confusion, and a burning desire to chew us out.

Me, I don't care. I'm Canadian; I've ridden in far, far worse conditions than what we encountered today. I am kind of pissed at myself for not having the foresight to bring a change of clothes -- but, then again, we didn't think that it was going to be quite as wild as it got. Had I known, I probably still would have gone out, but I would have brought home two of those plastic gloves that they make you wear in the supermarkets when you serve yourself in the produce section. I would have brought a change of clothes. And I would have made sure to have brought warm socks. But otherwise? I probably would have gone out anyway, even if it meant that I would have gotten soaked in the process.

None of the Spaniards went out. None of the Spaniards even went so far as to budge their arms up when the vote went down at 9.41 AM to find out if we were gonna go out or not. This mentality may be the reason why there are so few Madrileños in the pelotón and most of the ones who do compete get their asses kicked by the Basques during the Spring Classics, who grow up riding in this stuff and have to do it straight through from October to May every year.

I mean, it's just snow, right?? To me, riding in 40º weather, in the middle of the day, with the sun beating down, when there hasn't been rain or clouds for the previous six months...that strikes me as being a wee bit sick. If I can learn to ride in the oven, riding in the freezer shouldn't be such a big deal.