In the world of club cycling, I’m normally what you would consider a C+ rider. This means, for any given ride I can expect to average 12.5 to 14 mph over moderately hilly terrain between 15 and 30 miles in length. I say normally as I just road today and barely made it through 7 miles of mostly flat terrain at 11 mph. It appears my summer of sloth has not been beneficial to my riding. It’s been about a month since I did any athletic activity other then Wii sports. And that was only twice.
I would never have thought it, but the stationary bike riding I did two to three days a week all winter seems to have paid off. At the start of the season, Yani and Chad and I joined my cycle clubs kick-off ride. We chose the D level ride since we all thought we were out of shape. Well, we and about three fourths of that group were very much underestimating our abilities and rode well ahead of the official ride. We were all clearly at least C riders and just didn’t realize it.
That was in April. Then, for the next month I did at least one ride a week. Including a beautifully scenic ride through Port Chester, Rye Brook, Purchase, and Rye. It was about twenty-two miles in length and relatively hilly. I averaged about 13 to 14 mph on the two rides I did on that route.
I called the route the RCH-Rye route after my grandmother. She lived in Rye and was very proud of it. She even got a personalized license plate for her car based on her name, Ruth Copper Helm. Thus the plate read RCH-RYE. When put on her second hand Cadillac which she bought from a friend (a very good deal), she must have appeared the biggest snob on earth. Rye, you see, is a very wealthy town. Anyone observing the car would of course assume she was bragging about her wealth. She was in fact middle class.
The ride however travelled through some of the wealthy neighborhoods of Rye and Purchase. Purchase recently rank fairly high on the Forbes wealthiest neighborhoods list and is home of the Westchester Country Club where the Buick Classic golf tournament is held every year. The name was give the ride based on the family joke about the license plate.
I should have know todays ride would hurt. For one thing, I am very aware that I have not done any exercising for the last month. First there was a heat wave which lasted about a week. It was too hot to sleep let alone ride.
Then I took my bike in for a tuneup. Since it was near my brother’s house, I left it for the week since I visit his neck of the woods on weekends. When I went to pick it up, they rolled out a bike, leaned it against the counter, and started for he cash register. “That’s not my bike,” I said since it wasn’t. The gentlemen helping me got a very strange look on his face and told me to please wait. He went back in to the shop and disappeared for about five minutes. When he came out a manager had entered the store and they talked in hushed tones. What I picked up from their conversation was someone else had brought in the same model and color bike as mine and apparently picked up my bike without noticing. He must not have been very observant as he had a different saddle and trip computer as well as two additional accessories on his bike i didn’t have.
They called him and he said he would not be able to bring my bike back until Monday evening and no one was home for them to go pick it up. He apparently noticed it had a different computer on it when he got home and was planning on returning it at his leisure. I said that was fine and my brother would pick the bike up. I would get it from him the following weekend.
When my brother did pick the bike up, he walked in the store and the manager looked up at him and merely said, “Oh no.” My brother, you see, had some problems with his bike tune up a couple of weeks earlier and they gave him a big discount for the error. Long story short, I got the deluxe tune up for free. But, that was another week I didn’t ride.
Finally, after I got the bike back, we had another heat wave followed by rain for a couple days. So that was a fourth week down the drain.
Recently I have noticed that my once muscular legs were looking stingy and undefined. And today I proved that in fact they were stringy, undefined and indeed weak. I was winded and they cramped quickly and had no power. If you want to know what it’s like to race in the Tour de France, don’t train a lot and climb Alp D’Huez. Do no training for a long time and then try to ride up a small hill. You will save time and money that way and still have the same feeling of exhaustion.
Anyhow, I hear by declare my summer of sloth at an end. With todays first ride under my belt, I plan to resume my regular cycling schedule.
