Confession:  some days I run just so I can get the post-run high.  When it happens (it doesn’t always), it’s fantastic.  Endorphinized happiness.

Some days, though, the run is just an attempt to avoid complete stabbiness.

Today was (is!) one of those days.

Actually, today started last night, when a writer-friend ripped my novel a new one (notice I didn’t say ripped me a new one, because I’m working very hard on taking my own advice, and NOT taking criticism personally).  What she really did was ask the question that I’ve been trying to answer for six months, without really understanding what the question was, so I’m actually deeply grateful, but it took me a few hours of processing (er . . . all night?) to embrace the constructive part of “constructive criticism.”

Then our local Vespa moron went on a neighborhood tour at 5 am (better than the 3 am tour a couple of weeks ago, but still).  So I might’ve woken up slightly less cheery than usual.

Then we had a more-spectacularly-dramatic-than-usual teen-age meltdown.  You know they say sh** rolls downhill?  At our house it rolls every which way:  up, down, and sideways.  All of which resulted in my having to drive Delaney and the carpool kid to school.  Which is fine–I really like this particular carpool kid (hi Shay!)–but it was unexpected.  I might be just the teensiest bit inflexible sometimes.  Lee, bless his heart, talked me off the ledge afterward, and convinced me not to change the locks before school gets out this afternoon.  But don’t think I wasn’t tempted.

When I got home from the unexpected carpool, the refrigerator was dead.  Dead.  As in, not cooling.  As in, all that tomato sauce and freezer jam and all those bell peppers that I painstakingly peeled . . . all thawing.

So I did what any sensible person would do–I went for a run.  Right. That. Minute.

Because I needed to destress.  I needed those endorphins, and  I needed to get them in before the rain started.  Because me + running + rain usually results in an emergency room visit, and frankly, we’ve had more than enough of that sort of thing lately.*

For the record, that rain that I was trying to avoid?  It held off, if by held off you mean rain wasn’t actually falling from the sky in discrete drops.  Instead it just saturated the atmosphere–warm, swampy humidity.  The kind that makes your shins sweat.

Guess who else was out for a run, along the very same route?  The garbage truck.  Full of garbage.  In that warm, swampy humidity.  Leaving a wide, wet trail of decomposed garbage juice.  Right along my path.  I was fine–albeit wrinkle-nosed–until I had to actually leap over the trail of garbage juice.

That, my friends, was the closest I’ve ever come to actually vomiting in the middle of a run.  I have, on other days, run hard enough to make myself queasy, and I’ve run far enough to be turned off by my warm bottle of sports drink.  But I’ve never actually had to swallow down the heave.

So yeah.  I wasn’t really feeling the runner’s high this morning.  Some days that’s just how it goes.

ps–That rain that I was trying to avoid?  It’s coming–tomorrow.  Right smack in the middle of the high school field trip I’m chaperoning.  The one in which we’ll be tromping in the woods and collecting specimens from the lake.  The forecasters are calling for 80 degrees and flooding.  Anyone have some waders I can borrow?

*I haven’t written about all the gory details , simply because it’s hard to drive up traffic by blogging about one’s husband’s colonoscopy and the ensuing complications.  He’s fine now, but I’d just as soon we were all healthy for a little while.

This is awesome.  I saw this story on last night’s news; it’s an interview with a doctor–a centenerian.  He’s going strong, seeing patients.  He sounds sharp and active.

His advice for living a long, healthy life?  Don’t bother with exercise and vitamins.  Instead, get married and have lots of sex.

Sounds like an excellent plan.

If you’ve read this blog for any amount of time, you know how much I hate running in the heat.  I have to keep doing it, because I live in the South, and it’s hot here, and if I don’t run, I get stabby, but still.  I hate running in hot, humid weather.*

It’s record-breaking here this week, even in the mountains, and so muggy it’s hard to breathe.  So I thought I’d share with all of you my list of heat-defeating thought topics.

This is what I thought about during my most recent steamy-hot run:

1:  A tall glass of cold, cold water.

2:  That breath of cold air that hits you when you stick your face in the freezer.

3:  Ice cream-induced head freeze.

4:  Wading in a river so cold it makes my feet go numb.

5:  The bone-deep chill at the end of a long scuba dive.

6:  Riding my bike in the dead of winter, when the wind is so cold it makes my eyes water.

7:  Digging in the freezer, looking for that last container of pasta sauce, and having to stop because I can’t feel my fingers.

8:  Jumping into a pool so chilly it takes your breath away.

9:  Movie-theater air-conditioning.

10:  Making snow angels.

11:  Iced tea with crushed ice (because crushed ice just seems colder than cubes, for some reason).

12:  Those huge freezers in gas station parking lots, where you reach in to get big bags of ice.

13:  The deep, unshakeable chill that comes from sitting in an ice rink at 6 am, waiting for a kid to finish hockey practice.

14:  A long, cool shower.

Feel free to use this list on your next run.  Then, when you’re done, go stick your head in the freezer.

*Let me be clear:  I vastly prefer summer to winter.  I LOVE hot weather–I just don’t like running in it.

I’ve explained this before, so forgive me if I sound repetitive.  We’re up in the mountains for a few weeks.  Running is a logistical challenge up here.  My mother-in-law’s house is on a dirt road on top of a mountain, way out in the country.  The people who live nearby are . . . country folks.

They have dogs.  Their dogs run free.  Any time I step onto that dirt road, I’m likely to be chased by a loud, barky, big dog.

I have a dog phobia.  I also have a constitutional need for large amounts of exercise. We have a house full of people (nine this past weekend), which stresses my introverted self in every possible way.  This is a challenging scenario.

Here’s the solution I’ve worked out this summer:  We drive into town (25 minutes), I drop Lee off at a coffee shop, and I park the car at the public pool.  There’s a 2-mile trail, so I run out and back, getting in a perfect 4 miles.  Then I shower at the pool (for $2, it’s the best deal in town), and go back to the coffee shop to pick Lee up.  Then we go on with our day.

Yesterday we had 2 teenaged girls in tow (Delaney and a friend).  We roused them early, so that I could get my run in before it got too hot.  We dragged them into town, making sure they stuff to do while they waited, plus all their gear for a day of adventuring.

I got everyone situated (the friend was swimming laps at the pool).  We had all the timing and transportation and communications worked out.

I got ready to run.

I had forgotten my sneakers.

In the trunk of the car, I found 4 bags of garbage (don’t ask), and my Tevas.  River sandals.  I debated for about 30 seconds, then I put on those sandals, cinched the straps down, and went for my run.  All 4 miles.*

I’m flexible, spontaneous, and creative.  Also:  determined, desperate, and slightly addicted.

*It went fine actually, making me wonder if I should reconsider that whole barefoot running trend.  On second thought, maybe not.  I missed my sneakers.

This little video is awesome.  It’s making the general rounds on these here Interwebz because it’s funny.  But it’s making the rounds in the cycling community because it’s a situation that’s all too familiar to most of us.

I can’t speak for all cyclists, of course, but speaking for myself, I love bike lanes–in theory.

Unfortunately, they’re often temporarily impassable, or worse, poorly planned and unusable.  They’re almost always full of gravel and sand and general road debris, and my skinny tires don’t like that kind of messiness.

We were at the beach once–a beach that we went to every summer, for many years.  I always took my bike; I’ve ridden a lot of miles in the South Carolina lowcountry.  There was one particular stretch, not far from the place we like to stay, that has a nice long, straight quiet road that is brilliant for doing intervals–get down in the drops and hammer.  There’s a bike/pedestrian path, off to one side (not a lane on the edge of the road, but a trail, several feet off to the side of the road).  This path twists and turns through trees and around the edge of a golf course; I’m sure it’s perfectly lovely for poking along on a rented beach-cruiser kind of bike.  But for someone on a lightweight racing bike, with narrow tires, going 20+ miles per hour, it’s a guaranteed crash.

Once, when I was doing intervals on this stretch of road, a little old lady pulled up next to me in an SUV and rolled down the window.  She yelled at me that I need to get on the bike path, and stay off the road.  Then she rolled up the window and drove on.

I followed her.  She pulled into the grocery store lot and parked.  When she got out of the car, I was waiting.  I told her (very politely, but very clearly) that a bicycle is legally a vehicle and that I have just as much right to be on the road as she does.  She said the bike path was there for my safety.  I disagreed; the bike path is there for her convenience, and for me, on my bicycle, it’s a huge hazard.  I also pointed out that I am NOT legally obliged to ride on the bike path, but she IS legally obliged to not harass or endanger cyclists just because she finds them inconvenient.

Then I got back on my back, and went back to riding my intervals, mainly to blow off some steam.

I realize that it was foolhardy of me to confront a motorist, and I probably wouldn’t do it again.  But it really, really makes me angry when motorists think cyclists are some kind of second-class citizens who don’t deserve access to a safe, unimpeded portion of the road.

You wouldn’t choose to drive on an obstacle course; why should I have to?

Years ago, I did my first half-Ironman on a day of record-breaking early-summer heat.  When I got off my bike after riding 56 miles in the glaring sun,  it was 98 degrees.  I still had 13.1 miles to run, and I was feeling a little woozy.  I saw Lee as I ran through the transition area, and told him I was worried I might be having a heat stroke, but I couldn’t remember the symptoms.  In typical Lee fashion, he responded instantly: “The first symptom of heat stroke is not being able to remember the symptoms of heat stroke.”

He could tell, from looking at me, that I was fine, and I just needed to keep moving and not dwell on the misery of the heat.  Other people were not so lucky–a lot of folks had to drop out of that race, unable to cope with the temperature.  He knew, though, from hanging out in the transition area and seeing people being treated for heat-related problems, that I was going to be in pretty rough shape when I finished (and I was).  He got me right into our air-conditioned room, poured cold drinks into me, and wiped me down with cold towels.

I was fine.  But every year, when our southern summer starts heating up, I have to adapt my running habits to accomodate the rising temperatures and humidity.

Here are some of my strategies*:

–Wear short, light-colored shorts or skirts.  Dark colors are miserable in the heat.  White is best; the fact that it’s pretty much see-through when sopping wet is irrelevant.  Wear it anyway.

–Wear as little clothing as possible.  If the neighbors don’t like the squishy white jiggle of your belly, they can just look the other way.

–Run through every sprinkler you see.

–Related–run in the rain.  You’ll come home looking like a drowned rat, but that’s okay.

–Run in the shade as much as possible.  For me, this means that I’m often darting in and out of people’s yards.  This is a good thing, because it means I can get closer to those wonderful sprinklers.

–Lube up.  I have a lot more trouble with chafing in the summer, when soaking wet clothes are rubbing up against wet skin.  Body glide is your friend.

–I would suggest running early in the morning, but that doesn’t really work for me.  For starters, I’m not much of a morning person.  Besides, when it’s really hot here, it never totally cools down, even in the middle of the night (because it’s so humid).

–Slow down.  Then slow down some more.  It’s only demoralizing if you time yourself, so don’t.  Speedwork is for cooler weather.

–Mentally break the run into tiny chunks.  In the winter, I’m fine thinking about halves:  I’m just going to run to the turn-around.  Then I’ll worry about coming back.  But in the summer, the chunks I can mentally handle get smaller and smaller.  This morning I was reduced to cracks in the sidewalk (I’m gonna make it to the next crack.  Now I’m gonna make it one more crack.  Now to the fire hydrant.  Now the light pole. And so on).

–If that doesn’t work, you can fantasize about cold things:  ice, snow, frappucinos, cleaning out the ice bin in the freezer, the air-conditioning at the grocery store.  Whatever you do, don’t think about knitting.  Ask me how I know.

–Don’t skimp on the salt.  We’re getting dangerously close to science here, with words like osmolality and electrolyte, but the take-home is this:  sweat contains salt, and you’ll feel better if you replace some of it.  I find pizza very effective.

*(note– these are just things that work for me.  If you are easily affected by running in hot weather, you should come up with your own list of strategies, and always be mindful that heat-related illnesses are real, and can be very serious.)

Yesterday, while Toby was out for his bike ride (55 miles, I think), I had a little brainstorming session, thinking up blog post ideas.  Then this morning I went out on my bike, for a little spin of my own, and spent the time planning which of my brilliant ideas I was going to turn into today’s post.

I got home, showered, and sat down at my computer.  I took a quick peek at the news from today’s stage in the Giro d’Italia, and was stunned to see that one of the racers had died in a crash.

He was 26.  His wife is pregnant.  He was riding fast down a mountain, and something went terribly, tragically wrong.

We follow professional cycling pretty closely at our house, as you can imagine, and while we’re aware that crashes–sometimes life-threatening, career-ending crashes–happen all the time, it’s really rare for a cyclist to die during a race.

And now it hits closer to home than ever before.  It was one thing when I was the one out on the bike all the time, riding crazy distances in questionable conditions.  That didn’t bother me.

But knowing my son is racing, right there in the bunch, taking risks on the downhills and mixing it up in the sprints?  I know I’ve said this before, but today is a devastating reminder:  it’s scary as hell.

My thoughts go out to Wouter Weylandt’s family.  I can’t imagine what they must be going through.

If you’ve been reading along this week, you know that with that final 600k ride, I qualified for the 2003 running of Paris-Brest-Paris.

So I bought my plane ticket, booked a hotel room, convinced my mother-in-law to come along for moral support, and headed to France in early August of that year.

Here are the relevant facts:

–It was the year of the massive heat wave in northern Europe.  Something like 15,000 people died in France.  It was hot.  The worst of the heat broke the day before we got there (I left home on the day of that huge power outage on the east coast–remember that?  Luckily I was flying through Miami, so it didn’t affect me), but it was still hot.  And our hotel, a beautiful old farmhouse that had been converted to an inn, had thick stone walls that had been absorbing heat for three weeks.  It was so hot we slept with our door open.  In a hotel.  Think about that–would you ever even consider leaving your hotel room door propped open all night long?  It was that hot.

–Jet lag.  Self-explanatory.

–I spent the weekend running around gathering supplies, adjusting the bike and lights, organizing and packing up my gear, and trying to get my bearings in French traffic.  I was a nervous wreck.

–My mother-in-law, who was otherwise the best support crew a cyclist could ask for, snores.  I tried to sleep with my big Bose noise-canceling headphones on, but that didn’t go very well.

–The ride was scheduled to start at 10 pm on Monday.  Yes, that’s 10 at night.

–Since there would be no rest stops for the first 90 miles, and no stores open along the route at that time of night, I packed enough snacks and drinks to fuel me for about six hours of riding.  I had a bottle of water, a bottle of sports drink, a bag of gels and bars and extra drink powder, a banana, and a big bottle of Evian, which I bungeed on top of the bag that was strapped on behind my saddle.

–The logistics of getting dinner, getting to the start, and signing in were more than I could handle.  I had this brilliant idea that I’d sign in and park my bike in the staging area, then walk over to the cafeteria and meet Virginia (my mother-in-law) for dinner.  That didn’t work–once I got into the bike corral (with 5000 other cyclists and their gear), I couldn’t get out.  So I missed dinner.  No worries, though–I’d just eat the banana and a bar from my bag.

–I couldn’t find the snack bag.  I unpacked everything, panic rising, and realized that in all my brilliant organizing that afternoon, I had left the gels and bars in my pile of stuff that Virginia was planning to bring me out on the route–250 miles down the road.  No worries, though.  I definitely had the banana (so I went ahead and ate it, in lieu of dinner) and the bag of drink powder.  I’d just do the first 90 miles on liquid calories, and stock up on solids at the first rest stop.

–We finally got going, just after sundown (days are long in northern Europe in the summer).  As far as I could see ahead of me and behind, the road was a mass of bicycle lights.  It was a giant rolling party.  Once we got out of the suburbs, a van outfitted with speakers made its way up and down the side of the road, blaring music, making the whole thing seem sort of surreal.  We passed through tiny medieval villages in the dark, the narrow cobbled lanes packed with giddy cyclists.  Families lined the roads well into the wee hours, ringing cowbells, cheering us on.  I knew I must be missing beautiful scenery, but there’s only so much sightseeing you can do from a bike seat at 4 in the morning.

–A couple of hours down the road, on a bumpy stretch of cobbles, my Evian bottle bounced out of its bungee restraint and hit the ground, cracking open.  Now I had nothing else to drink, as well as nothing to eat.  Luckily I soon rolled through a village where the bar had stayed open all night, just for us.  I refilled my drink bottles, had a hot chocolate, and bummed a granola bar from a total stranger.  It was just enough calories to keep me going.

–When the sun came up, it all started to seem a bit more real–and a bit less fun.  As the light grew, I realized that the roadside was littered with the bodies of napping cyclists.  Every few feet, someone had gotten off a bike and curled up on the ground for a rest.  I actually recognized some of them–friends from home, sound asleep in a ditch in the French countryside.

–I got to the first rest stop and had mashed potatoes for breakfast, then I forged onward.

–At some point I ate some lunch, but I don’t remember what it was.  It got hot after lunch.  I tried to find ice to put in my drink bottles, but that wasn’t an option.  I tried to chat with people on the road; I could just manage a conversation in French, but it was mentally exhausting.  The British cyclists I managed to find all seemed as morose as I was feeling.  The Americans were few and far between, and I got the distinct feeling the Australians were all way ahead of me.  By late afternoon I was falling behind on my pre-calculated schedule, and I starting to freak out a little bit.

–Around dinnertime I pulled into a control and burst into tears.  I had been awake for 36 hours, I was exhausted and nauseated and intensely lonely.  I was also way behind schedule, and I knew I was going to slow down even more after the sun went down.  I sniffled through a bowl of some kind of unidentified soup, and got back on the bike.

–Finally, around 11 pm, more than 24 hours after the start, my anxiety and dread won out.  I started fantasizing about going back to Paris and going shopping.  I stopped in a bar, begged use of the phone from the proprietor, figured out how to call the hotel where I knew Virginia was, and managed to ask her, through my tears, to come get me.  Then I wrapped up in my little tin-foil emergency blanket and curled up on a bench to wait for her.

–We did actually go back to Paris, where I licked my wounds and went shopping.  I bought the cutest little pair of sandals, which went a long way toward making me feel better.  A little sadness lingered, but another round of brevets (a handful of two- and three-hundred kilometer rides), in 2007 cured me completely.  I can now say, without hesitation, that I have purged the long-distance cycling bug from my system.

So to all those intrepid randonneurs out there training for this year’s P-B-P, I say bon courage, and I’m glad it’s not me.

So in that way-beyond-my-comfort-zone spring of 2003, this was the grueling final qualifier for PBP–the one that got me that coveted slot on the start line in Paris.

Final Qualifier–This is not a funny story.  If you’ve been reading these updates for the chuckle-factor, feel free to stop now. It’s a long story, a wet story, and an exhausting story, but it’s really not very funny at all.  The weekend of June 7th and 8th I rode the final PBP qualifier-600k.  I finished (barely), and I qualified, but I really can’t remember a single amusing moment.

The basic facts:  we started at 6 am on Saturday-a day of record-setting rain all across the state.  We rode in said rain.  All day. By 6:05 am I could feel water squelching in my shoes.  When I arrived at the turn-around in Wilmington at 11:30 pm, they were still squelching-four pairs of dry socks later.  Mercifully, we saw no lightning.

The route was lovely leaving Morrisville-a few gentle rolling hills, pleasant roads, minimal early-morning traffic.  But the rain really slowed me down-I had to pay intense attention to the road in that kind of weather.  I felt like I was just crawling.  Then the route wound down into the flood plain, in the flat part of the state.  I’m sure Bladen County is a lovely place, what with that huge state forest and all those lakes and all.  But it surely does feel remote-devoid of inhabitants.  Lonely.  Isolated.

And then there are the roads.  I don’t know much about the science of road surfaces, but I know that the stuff they use in that part of the state is brutal for cyclists.  Rough, bumpy-bone-jarring.  You can actually identify the individual pieces of rock that have been pressed together to create the material.  And eventually, those roads begin to develop cracks.  Apparently the most sophisticated repair technique available is a large quantity of some sort of black caulk, poured into each crack to an excess that allows it to mound up over the road surface, creating a distinct bump in the road.  Put one of these 2-inch wide black bumps every 18-24 inches over 70 or 80 miles of road, and you have devised this cyclist’s worst nightmare.

At the checkpoint in White Lake, after about 110 miles, I changed into dry clothes-don’t ask why.  It was totally mental.  I was soaked again as soon as I got back on the road.  Onward to Wilmington.

At the turn-around, I realized that I was much more exhausted than I had expected to be.  I guess I wasn’t fully recovered from the 400k, two weeks earlier.  Lack of recovery combined with the intense focus required to stay safe in the rain had completely wiped me out.  The turn-around was at a motel, and I had reserved a room so that I’d be able to shower and re-organize all my stuff.  I really had no choice but to nap for a couple of hours.  It wasn’t in the plan, but that’s one of the important lessons I’ve learned doing this brevet series-things don’t always go according to plan.  The key is to be flexible and stay calm even as you’re implementing plan b, or plan c, or even plan d.

I’ve also learned that while I enjoy the stopping, I really must figure out how to spend less time organizing and more time pedaling.  Wilmington turned into a 4 hour stop-way too long.  I had a drop bag there, which I had to retrieve, as well as getting the brevet card signed, finding food (at the Hardee’s across the street-we checked into the room, parked our bikes, and walked to Hardee’s-in retrospect, that was somehow a mistake.  It took too long), showering, eating the food, refilling the drink bottles, cleaning out the handle-bar bag, etc.  I also lubed my chain-I was worried about it in all that rain, called my husband, and tried desperately-but-unsuccessfully to find a weather report on television.

Anyway, the upshot of it was that my friend James and I left Wilmington at 3:30 am, in off-and-on drizzle and humidity that was thick enough to clog up lungs.  From Wilmington to White Lake-75 miles or so-we had no access to any kind of support or resources.  No stores, gas stations, etc.  We stopped a few times in parking lots, but mostly we just pushed on toward White Lake, where we knew we could get breakfast and, once again, change clothes.

It finally stopped raining sometime around late morning.  Then around 1:30, the sun came out.  That was when things got really ugly.  It was suddenly 87 degrees and so humid it was hard to breathe.  I could feel my arms crisping.  I started feeling even sicker than I had been, and began to really come unglued.  This is a fun sport, but it’s not worth brain damage.  I was very concerned about heat stroke; my husband had teased me once that the first symptom of heatstroke was an inability to remember the symptoms of heatstroke.  This is worrisome, particularly when you’re so tired that it’s hard to rationally analyze the situation and figure out what to do.  I was so hot and dehydrated I couldn’t take in calories, and started feeling really weak and dizzy.  We found a gas station, and worked hard at getting our core temperatures down.  After sitting in a-c for a while, sipping cold Gatorade, and pouring cold water on my head, I sort of got myself back together again, and was able to pro-actively fight the heat when we got rolling again.  Basically, the entire afternoon we pedaled for ice.  We’d stop at a gas station, buy a bag of ice, and stuff our clothes with it.  I had a bandana around my neck filled with ice, and put more down my bra and my shorts.  I was just nursing a bottle of Gatorade and a camelback of water at this point, so I kept adding more ice to those, as well.  Then we’d ride until the ice melted, and do the whole routine over again.  It was unrelentingly horrible.

The sun finally went down-we had hoped to finish by sunset, thereby avoiding another evening of slow, careful riding in the dark-but that was a lost cause.  I was just relieved that the temperature dropped a tiny bit.  I did see a few flashes of lightning off in the distance as we came into Wake County, but honestly, at that point I was too exhausted to care.

At some point-I can’t remember when-we started to have some uncomfortable anxiety about actually making it back to the finish by the cut-off.  Remember, these are timed rides.  The 600k limit is 40 hours; I had finished all the others several hours before the cut-off, but by late Sunday afternoon, things were beginning to look questionable.  We got to a store that we knew was 21 miles out at a few minutes past 8; we had until 10.  Sounds possible, right?  But the miles just crept by.  And my memory of those 21 miles and the mileage totals I was seeing on the cue sheet just didn’t seem to match up in my sleep-deprived brain, so I became increasingly agitated.  Finally, with 6 or so miles to go, at about 9:30, we saw a car coming with a bicycle on top.  One of the guys who had already finished leaned out of his window and shouted, “I think you’ve got it!  You’re almost there; I think you’re going to make it!”  Thank you for the encouragement Mike; you got me to the end.  I realized that if he had said he thought we were going to make it, then perhaps we weren’t.  I panicked.  It wasn’t rational, I didn’t process or think or calculate.  I just got this incredible surge of adrenalin–lift-the-car-off-the-baby kind of adrenalin.  I rode the last 6 miles at speeds well over 20 mph.  Even as worn-out tired as I was, I knew enough to appreciate an amazing moment-it felt truly powerful.

I finished with 13 minutes to spare, I think.  Those minutes at the finish are kind of a blur in my brain.  I was just so glad it was over.  I went home and cried.  I cried off and on all day Monday, too.  It was a traumatic experience.  All of the other rides have had obstacles and adversities, but I’ve looked back on them and remembered a generally positive experience.  Not this one.  I truly don’t remember a single fun moment.  After 5 days of thinking about it and coming to terms with it in my head I’ve decided that the best I can do is to go with all the platitudes people have offered me.  It was a means to an end, a learning experience, and since it apparently didn’t kill me, perhaps it will make me stronger. I leave for Paris two months from tomorrow.  Now I just have to keep up my endurance and refine my logistical strategies.  I’ll keep you posted.

The next installment:

June 2003-What’s amazing to me is that each ride, in its own way, is a completely fresh and new experience. This is true of training rides as well as events; I’ve learned that I’m much happier if I try to leave my expectations and preconceived notions at home, and just let each mile flow beneath my wheels in whatever way it will. The 400k, on May 24th, did just that-it flowed. It felt as if I just rolled through the whole day (and I do mean WHOLE day-all 23 hours of it!) and kept pedaling and got into my zone and pedaled some more. It was a much less eventful ride than the prior two brevets, and that was a fantastic feeling.

We followed the same basic route, extending it out into the Uwharrie Mountains–don’t ever let anyone tell you they aren’t real mountains! I saw a nice sustained 40 mph on the cyclometer on one descent-the first time I’ve ever gone quite that fast-and got a huge kick out of it.  The pure joy of having gone that fast got me up over the next ascent; granted, they’re small mountains, but mountains they are.  Thank goodness for my granny gear…

The only other little bump in my day was a minor bout with hives-on my lips.  Apparently, something was blooming that really didn’t like me-my friend James looked at me once when I took off my glasses and laughed.  He said we could tell people I’d been in a prize fight.  Apparently I was a bit swollen and bloodshot.  Frankly, I couldn’t have cared less.  Just keep pedaling . . .

Night finally fell, and I worked really hard at screwing up my courage and convincing myself to be brave.  Surprisingly, it worked pretty well. I didn’t quite enjoy the darkness, but it was much less intimidating than it had been before. First off, there was no lightning-that helped a lot. I had spent a huge part of the three weeks between the two rides psyching myself up for the darkness.  I had also fine-tuned the positioning of headlights, and had added a little light on my helmet. The helmet light was life-changing!  Now, when I hear a rustling in the bushes on my right, I turn my head very quickly and I can often actually see the little eyes staring back at me. I know that sounds creepy, but I’d rather be able to see them and know I’m flying on past, rather than just hear noises in the impenetrable dark.

So the night just rolled on by. James and I find that we need to stop a bit more frequently at night, for just a few minutes each time. We stop at pretty much every little closed-for-the-night country store or gas station that we come across-most places leave outside lights on at night. The light is comforting, somehow. Five minutes of light, a quick bite to eat, a little chit-chat- it makes us feel more normal, less disconnected from reality.

We think we may have scared the daylights out of one poor soul-about 1 AM or so, I was just spinning along, when all of a sudden there was a man standing right on the edge of the road smoking a cigarette.  I suppose we snuck up on him, silently pedaling, with our strange lights glowing like something from outer space.  I could’ve reached out and touched him. I’m not sure who was more startled-our profanity was about equally matched. It rattled me for a minute, but you start getting punch-drunk at that time of night, and eventually it struck us as hysterically funny-I nearly fell off the bike laughing at the thought of the story he must have told over breakfast Sunday morning.

There was one very distressing moment an hour or two later when we were fairly certain we had been shot at-gunshots over your head in the middle of the night in rural Chatham County really get your attention.  We were riding alone, having lost track of 4 or 5 other riders when we left the last control ahead of them.  We started hearing what sounded like sitar music playing very loudly in the woods, and loud voices.  Bear in mind, this was the middle of NOWHERE, at about 3 in the morning. We were perplexed.  We rounded a curve, and could see lots of bright colored lights strung up in a clearing, and sensed, rather than saw clearly, people moving about.  We passed a great big pick-up truck parked on the side of the road, and within seconds two shots rang out. James pulled up next to me wondering what the @#$%!! that was, but I wasn’t interested in hanging around to find out.  We just pedaled hard until we got to a well-lit parking lot on a different road, then stopped to regroup. We decided to believe that it was just a coincidence-someone was having a party and shot off a few rounds in the back yard.  Sometimes you just have to turn the brain off and keep pedaling . . .

It misted for a couple of hours (remember that rain we weren’t supposed to have Memorial Day weekend?), then the bottom just fell out about an hour before we finished. I’m not sure that I’ve ever been quite so wet, but amazingly, it didn’t bother me all that much. I read somewhere that once you hit two hundred miles, it’s just a numbers game. The misery doesn’t necessarily keep increasing at the same rate after that point-you just keep going. That’s kind of what happened-I felt like I really held steady in the last few hours, and just kept pedaling. I didn’t much want food at the stops, but I was able to keep my sports drink going down while we were moving, so I felt okay.

We finished at 5 AM.  It was a bit disorienting, and driving was a challenge after that long on the bike, but I was surprised at how elated I felt. I told James, as I got into my car to leave, that what we had just done was inconceivable to me. I’ve never been in the habit of staying up all night, even in my long-lost youth, so to do so on a bicycle–I’m pretty proud of this one!