500 [miles] of Summer

edit: after posting, I changed the title from the snoozy-lame "My Tour" to the almost impossibly witty current title. word play! just goes to show how rusty I am. let that be a lesson to you, kids: that's what happens when you're out the blog game for two years!

As cycling-nerds (cyrds) like myself are well aware, July is the month of Le Tour de France. There are a lot of nuances and peculiarities within the Tour that will not endeavor to explain or defend here. Only this: I like it.  And each year of the recent past, I’ve participated in some version of my own little tribute.

This year, my goal was to complete a fourth of the mileage, while mimicking the day’s experience as closely as possible (e.g. mountain stages, time trials, etc)

I missed the first couple days because I was out of town for a wedding, and then I was sick… but all things considered, a pretty solid three-week effort. I didn’t hit my mileage goal, but considering the late start and the sickness… 500 is a lot of miles in 21 days (19 if you take out the sick days). Here it is in chart form:

For those of you who are curious, “mountain” stages were just me trying to find “big” (for the area) hills, and ride them more times than seemed reasonable. For instance, on the final mountain day in the Pyrenees, I climbed the Park Blvd hill (coming up out of the arboretum) 10 times to get my mileage that day. Nothing else, just climb the hill, turn around, bomb down the hill, turn around, climb the hill… on and on. Mundane perhaps, but a decent workout… and the closest I’ll get to anything “mountain”y around here.

There was a landscaping crew working the yard of a house along the route… and every time I passed I tried to imagine what they thought of the spandex-bedecked fat guy who is going up and down the same hill over and over. 

But this post isn’t about me acting irrationally foolish on some pathetic misinterpretation of a mountain stage…

It’s about me acting irrationally foolish on some pathetic misinterpretation of a TIME TRIAL stage.

First, a quick background: I bike in the Morton Arboretum a lot. It’s a 7.4 mile loop and it’s the best place to bike in the western suburbs for the following reasons:

1. Considerate (and limited) traffic
2. Smooth roads
3. Good hills
4. It’s pretty

Also, since 2012, I’ve used a website/app called “strava” that allows you to virtually race other people over different segments of road (or trail). It crowns riders “King of the Mountain” and alerts you of your PRs and all sorts of neat nerdy things. It’s pretty brilliant, actually. I won’t explain more here, but google is your friend.

So one of my days in the arboretum (a good place to simulate “mountain” stages), I accidentally went pretty fast because, in a moment of misplaced competitiveness, I passed some guy and I didn’t want him to come back and pass me.  After finishing, being successful in not being passed after passing (a faux pas, to be sure), I was alerted of my PR.  Huh. I had beaten my previous PR around the arboretum by almost two minutes... and that got me thinking… how fast could I go? Ya know, if I really TRIED to go fast*?

* two notes on speed:

• “fast” is a relative term
• I LIKE going fast. It’s fun. It’s one of the many reasons cycling is much better than running. But I don’t often think “oh I need to go fast or TRY to go fast”… I just go… and since fast is fun, I keep trying to go faster. This is perhaps difficult to explain with any degree of lucidity. Suffice it to say that my “pursuit of speed” (if you can call it that) is more like a little kid flying downhill than someone who takes cycling seriously (or for that matter, does it well). This explains how “what if I TRIED to go fast?” can be somewhat of a novel concept.

So I decided to try. After looking at the strava leaderboard, I made a goal of finishing the 7.4 mile loop in 22:12 – exactly 20mph. That would also put me in the top 10. Not bad.

On July 19^th, I made my attempt. I was in an absolute sprint for 22 minutes… gasping up hills, talking to myself (sometimes in whisper-screams: “come on!”), passing cars, and blowing through stop signs. Looking ridiculous. All in the name of this goal I had made in this silly online community that pretty much everyone who saw me had no idea existed. I just imagine the old couple on a stroll through the trees of the arboretum seeing me pass, pedaling as hard as physically possible, panting, grunting, maybe drooling a bit… and thinking “what the crap is that guy doing?” It’s not like there are other cyclists racing me (that they can see, anyway).

Finally I finish. The “unofficial” time looks good. I won’t know for sure until I get home and load it intro strava. 

aaaaaaaaaaand... 22:26.

DANG IT! 14 seconds! Fourteen stupid seconds!!!

Ranking is #11… all that ridiculous effort… for nothin’.

But of course, this means I’d have to come back and try another day…