The Velophoric Year

I love this cartoon. The first time I saw it, I was standing in the service area of my former LBS (much lamented), where it was posted on the wall. (Click on the graphic to enlarge it.)

The beauty behind the humor, of course, it's that there's so much truth to it. Cycling can be much, much more unpleasant than work. And I'm not talking about the long hill-climb or final interval unpleasant; we all not-so-secretly love that pain, or we wouldn't train in this crazy sport. I'm talking about frustration... dark nights of soul... cursing the day you first rode a bike... That kind of thing.

Now, Velophoriacs don't come to this blog for sarcasm or hopelessness. I fall into the "What you put your attention on, grows" school of thought, and, being a therapist myself, I try really hard to walk the talk of staying positive. But it's also important to be real, and part of reality is that even the best parts of life have some extremely crappy moments. Sometimes, especially the best parts of life. So, given that New Year's is right around the corner, and in the spirit of making light of the darkness, I'll do a classic "Year in Review" type piece by re-capping some of my low points for the last year.

In the 15 months since I started training again (after decades away), most of my frustration has come from injury, as is well documented here on Velophoria. Maybe four or five of those months, at most, have been free of worries about or pain from recurrent knee problems. And there were far too many rides cut short, the second half of which I usually spent cursing and grinding away in pain, trying to spin and get home with as little further injury as possible. Also, lots and lots of riding hours spent soft-pedaling, wondering when I'd be able to discover my limits again. Better than not riding at all, but pretty gray winter days, nonetheless.

There were sources of frustration beyond injury, too. I haven't had the money to get the equipment that reflects the type and level of riding I do. I also don't have the money to get a proper, full-scale bike fit, which would probably alleviate the recurring injury. There have been repairs during which I have crouched sweating and cursing next to my bike, running through the directions for the fourth time and still not getting the right results. There were the six or eight weeks of barely riding while recovering from classic overtraining (written up here). I was caught in numerous thunderstorms of biblical proportions 20 miles from home (like this one, for example). The one in Acadia National Park was just miserable, though the first half of the ride was blissful.

I was pretty frustrated when I first moved out here to beautiful Western Massachusetts, because the terrain is way more hilly than eastern Mass; my average speed went way down and I felt like a much weaker rider all of a sudden. That's changed a bit since then, and I've become a stronger rider for it, but I'm still adjusting to the hills to some degree.

Finally, there's the frustration that comes from being a fan of the sport and having to constantly adjust one's head to the "new normal," all the doping, the scandals, the politics and idiotic moves from governing bodies. I took that one head-on in June, in one of my favorite posts ever.

Now, I could sit here and spin all these frustrations into positives, and it's no surprise to loyal readers that each of these challenges has produced its own excellent crop of rewards and lessons for me. I won't bore you with that here. I was just looking through old graphics files and came upon an excellent Calvin and Hobbes, and decided we could all use a laugh, before we turn the calendar over and bump up into Base 2. Happy Season!

Velophoria Incident Report

Apologies to all for my prolonged absence from these pages. First it was job searching, then it was long-distance apartment searching (my wife and I are moving to another part of the state), and finally, we took a week-long camping trip to Acadia National Park, in Maine. Hence the inexcusably long two-and-a-half week lag between posts.

For reasons too hard to explain (and I still don't completely understand them myself), I couldn't take my bike to Acadia. I missed it terribly. For the first few days, every single time I saw any kind of bike whatsoever, I had the worst pangs you could imagine. Bear in mind, one sees a lot of bikes in Acadia during July. On day four or so, my wife got weary of my pining and kindly bundled me off to the highest-end bike rental place we could find, shelled out an obscene amount of money (for a decent entry-level mountain bike), and I rode off, map in hand, to find the most challenging trail on the island. (It was weird spending money to ride someone else’s bike. I’ll try to never do that again.)

There is no off-road riding allowed in the Park, for obvious reasons, but they do have excellent carriage roads designed by none other than John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who had a pied-a-terre in the area, and was a horse-and-carriage fanatic. He loved landscape architecture, as well – learned it from his daddy – and by all accounts, lavished quite a lot of his time and energies supervising the construction of these paths. They're laid with large gravel, and offer a relatively even surface -- which presents a small, pleasing technical challenge on extra-fast descents.

Now, don’t kid yourself thinking that rich-boy carriage trails are all a walk in the park. Most of them are flat-to-rolling, but the Around the Mountain trail does gain quite a bit of altitude on a very long, constant grade with little let-up. It loops around six mountains, passes three gorgeous waterfalls, and has inspiring views of mountains, lakes, harbors and ocean. You really can’t ask for more. I looped that in with a bunch of other trails and some road riding back to my campground, and ended up with roughly 23 miles of riding (I didn’t have an odometer on my rented bike to get a specific distance).

I got caught in a thunderstorm of biblical proportions during the last third of this ride, which devolved into nearly an hour of pedaling in torrential rain and blinding wind. I’ve never seen more fickle weather than on Mount Desert Island, the home of Acadia. The weather was sparkling for most of the ride, and the clouds moved in so quickly I didn’t even notice them until the heavens opened up. This was common during our stay, though we were lucky, with mostly pleasant days. The hiking was just as good as the biking, and there were plentiful other pleasures to enjoy.

So rest assured: Though I may be absent from the pages of Velophoria, I am nevertheless always in search of velophoria. And if you seek such yourself, you could do no better than to hie thee to glorious Acadia National Park.