New Route

I've changed the western third of my route pretty significantly. My sister and Jacob are getting married at the end of May. Then, at the end of June, they're having a big party about getting married. I didn't know you could do that. Well, they are doing it, and I'm happy enough about these events that I've decided to attend both. So a few weeks ago, I began looking at my maps


(they were pinned around the walls in my room, so looking at my maps meant standing in the middle of my room and spinning my head), and wondering if there were any places along my route that I could leave my bike and fly out and back. I started to think about riding further South, toward Utah, where Dusty and Lisa live. Seeing Dusty and Lisa, and Southern Idaho, and Utah, and Northwestern Colorado sounded like so much fun, that I began seriously rearranging my schedule and route to make it work. Making it work includes cutting about 450mi of Eastern Colorado and Western Kansas entirely out of my bike ride. I agonized over that for about five minutes.

This would be my third major reworking of route and schedule. So I tentatively publish to you the scaffolding of my final route, in six distinct acts:

I) Astoria, Oregon - Logan, Utah (May 13 - 25, 995mi, ~85mi/day)
If my ride has an impossible section, this is it. I seriously don't know about riding that much every day for 12 days in a row. But on top of it, I'll be riding through spring rain (snow?), pretty significant mountain passes, and long sections of Southern Idaho with no human beings. Also, I have a minimal buffer for failure: two days. I'll be arriving in Portland, and taking a bus to Astoria, late on the 11th. With grocery shopping, rebuilding my shipped bike, and all the little things that I haven't thought up yet, my earliest start date will be May 13. I've already purchased my flight out of Salt Lake City to VA for the 27th. That means I've got two days of insurance to cry about sore legs or sit out a late spring storm before my daily quota of miles begins shooting through the roof. I've received a lot of advice about bike touring, and this leg of my tour breaks a good portion of that. This is also going to be one of the more spectacular sections. My first 15omi will be South along the Oregon coast. That gets me really excited.

II) Logan, Utah - Colorado Springs, CO (June 6 - 15, 675mi, ~70mi/day)
My mom and dad are joining me for this section. We're going to drive out to Logan from Virginia after Jacob and Kim get married. Then we'll ride through some pretty awesome sections of Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado. My mom's been training to be able to ride some with me.

III) Medora, Kansas - Carbondale, Illinois (June 17 - 24, 645mi, ~80mi/day)
My parents will shuttle me across Eastern Colorado and Western Kansas and drop me off in Medora, a little town that seems like a nice place to start riding again. They'll drive on to a family reunion, and I'll begin pedaling hard to get to my Aunt and Uncle's in Carbondale. At the end of this section, I'll fly out from St. Louis to Jacob and Kim's wedding reception.

IV) Carbondale, Illinois - Waynesboro, Virginia (July 1 - 21, 960mi, ~55mi/day)
After I fly back to St. Louis, I'll begin the relaxed leg. I'm planning to ride slower through the East, and take off at least a day a week to explore little towns and interesting parks. This section is especially exciting to me. I hope I can take a side trip down to Mammoth Cave. My only schedule constraint is to meet my CO friends in Waynesboro by July 24.

V) Waynesboro, Virginia - Front Royal, Virginia (July 24 - 26, 120mi, ~40mi/day)
Dan, Melanie, and Jessica are meeting me for this section. We'll pedal up the Skyline Drive. We'll pass a lot of territory that's familiar to me, including the house I lived in from kindergarten through 2nd grade, and a mock frontier home in which my sister and I volunteered to dress up in period costume and call our parents "Ma" and "Pa".

VI) Front Royal, Virginia - Kilmarnock, Virginia (July 28 - Aug 1, 250mi, ~50mi/day)
I'm hoping Dan will join me for the rest, from the North end of the Skyline Drive to the coast. Depending on a few factors, we may wander our way to the Atlantic. We both know a few families along the way. I don't really have any constraints on my finish date. I just have to get out to Grad School by sometime mid-August.

Some of this feels a little too rigorously scheduled to me. Surely it's unwise to try to meet so many checkpoints at such specific dates. Que sera, sera.

New Home

In the next two days I've got to be completely moved out of my current apartment. Our lease is up. I'll be staying in Dan's living room until the beginning of May, then I'll drive everything I own to my parents' house in VA and immediately fly out to Portland to begin my ride around May 13. So the things I'm packing into boxes will remain in boxes until I begin graduate school in August. This is pretty difficult for me. I had an airy cabinet full of spices and pots and pans; now I've sealed all my cooking things into three boxes. I'm used to a wall full of books; now I've reduced my summer reading to 15 or so. My desk had been pleasantly organized, with office things where they belonged; now I've packed six pens, 10 rubber bands, a tiny stapler, and a handful of envelopes & stamps into a plastic bag. A week ago, I owned four bicycles (a mountain bike, a road bike, a cheap commuter, and my touring rig); now I've sold my mountain bike. And perhaps most difficult of all, I'm trying to sell my kayak. This isn't difficult in the way giving up coffee is difficult (since high school, I haven't paddled more than once per summer.) It's difficult in the way selling your grandmother on Craigslist would be difficult. I've had so many rich experiences with that boat, mostly paddling with my Dad and two good family friends from VA, Ron and Cy. The Lochsa , the Ottawa, the New, the Gauley, the Arkansas, the Youghiegheny...

A Portrait of an Amateur: Part IV

In the parking lot of Starky's General Store, you slowly get back on your bike and begin pedaling. But it's a slow, miserable pedal stroke, even in your lowest gear. You climb like this, in a daze, for perhaps 20min before you pass a gas station. It's open. You stop, lean your bike against the side of the building, push on the door with all your strength, and take two steps inside. An AM radio station is scratching in the background. An old timer is at the counter checking out a case of beer for a man in suspenders. The old timer takes a long look at your shorts, and then at your face, and goes back to pushing buttons on the cash register. The two of them are talking in cryptic mountain mumbles. You pick up that it's about the forest fire. Standing there still, by the door, you ask something about the fire, and the man in suspenders says it's moving fast. High winds. A woman in the back keeps asking about a phone number. She's trying to call someone who's house is near the fire. You ask if the old timer will take a credit card for a candy bar. He mumbles something of which you only catch, "...$10." You consider buying $10 worth of Snickers Bars and cramming them into your already full backpack. You look at him for a long time, and then say, "Well, thanks anyway," and start turning back toward the door. The he tells you there's an ATM in the corner, and he points in that direction. You withdraw $20 and buy a Snickers, which right now seems to be a stomach-turning edible. In fact the thought of anything edible increasingly turns your stomach. You ask to fill up your water bottle, and the woman, having given up on the telephone, walks you into the back and shows you a sink full of dishes. You fill up your bottle, thank them, and then step slowly out towards your bike.

There is no doubt now; You have felt this before: eight hours into your adventure race last spring, nine hours into your ring-the-peak ride last fall, and now five hours into your Tuesday ride (this must be old age), you are crashing. This is not a sugar crash, which a candy bar would fix. It's not a mental low-spot. It's a whole body shut-down, which you've experienced before, and which you know won't go away until you're done riding. You think about calling a friend, or hitching a ride with a passing motorist. You even darkly fantasize about pulling off the road and lying down in the woods. But you know this body shut-down isn't the end. It's not going to incapacitate you. Like all the times before, you'll be able to ride home, however slowly. It's just that ride (40mi? 50mi?) is going to be exceedingly unpleasant. Even though you don't want to, you get to work on your body maintenance. You start breathing audibly, just to let yourself know you're breathing. You open the Snickers, but you can only swallow one bite before you feel ill. You put chapstick on your lips just for the hell of it. And you pedal.

The wind is now at your tail, gently tugging you back up the Western slope of the pass. But you don't notice this. You are miserable, and the things that would normally delight you are now invisible or worse. You pass a stream you hadn't noticed on your way out, dammed by beavers. You see their huts and long low dams, and they seem muddy and shoddy to you. You are now passing through the smoke of the forest fire, and it maddens your eyes and is sour in your throat. Again, thankfully, your enraged and despairing mind begins to go blank as you push up toward the summit of the pass.

After a little more than an hour of riding upward, and a little dulling out of your extreme mental state, you raise your head and see in the distance a pleasing sight. The road climbs to a familiar high point and then disappears: the summit of the pass. Some thankfulness returns to you and you increase your pedaling strength by small increments. The low sun is exactly at your back and your shadow is lengthened in front of you. The silhouette of your legs is 20ft long, stroking up and down, up and down like a Masai warrior running. You pedal after the Masai, chasing him up towards the summit, and roll over the top like it was the easiest of things. You have before you, you realize, at least 25 more miles before you are home. But it is almost entirely descent.

The aches of your body are now gone, even the illness of your stomach. They have been eclipsed by a heavy tiredness. You eat your apple, but you just want to get home. You pedal in the manner of a man who wants to get home: grim-faced, steadily, in your largest chainring. After some time, you whiz through the narrow concrete-walled section of the highway and enter the large town at the top of the steep section of the pass. You pass the bank again and read the temperature (50DegF) and the time (5:36pm). You do a double take. It's only 5:30pm! You don't even bother to take out your phone to verify this. You know that an hour and a half back, either your phone malfunctioned, or you did, but you had actually turned around at your scheduled time, 4pm. This is a small discovery, unimportant now that you are on your way home, but it somehow changes everything. You stop and put on your lights (it is almost dusk.) You also put on your mittens and windbreaker. You continue to descend.

When you get to the duck pond off the main highway you decide to stop again and eat the rest of your food and see the funny white goose. You lean your bike against the same fence and sit this time at a picnic table. There are no ducks or geese on your side of the pond now. They are all on the far side, swimming sluggishly in a large, melted section. And the white goose is now walking along the shore, now wading into the water, making a steady, almost panicked honk. You look for the other two geese and cannot find them. There is something very sad in all of this. The white goose walks and wades and honks ceaselessly, while you finish your cream cheese, tuna fish, and tortillas. You say goodbye to the goose, and almost form an apology of sorts, but you're soon on your bike and on your way. As dessert, you decide to try the rest of your stomach-turning Snickers Bar. This time it is life-giving. You finish it and, though you are tired, you are increasingly happy about being on your bicycle.

You begin to warm as you descend, and your lights flash forward and backward in a bright pattern. The wind at times is descending at exactly the same speed as yourself, giving you the strange experience of moving fast in the startling quiet. You descend the pass faster than you have ever dared, in perfect control of your bicycle and your body. Cars pass you, but slowly, you are moving so fast. You watch the faces of their passengers as they move by. Descending the last bit into the village at the foot of the mountains, you are greeted by a town fully alive. A few cars are moving slowly along the main street. Families are walking along the sidewalks. You see a bearded man in a flannel shirt walking beside a girl in a simple dress.

It is dark now as you enter the side streets. Warm lights shine from windows, and the clinking of dishes and the smells of cooking float through the alleyway. You smell olive oil and yeast. The smell of marijuana briefly mingles with the rest and then fades. Now in the residential area, you pass an open garage door, and you can see two massive American flags hanging behind the garage detritus. You pass very near a parked, brightly-lit family van inside of which a little girl is dancing and singing shrilly. You come into the downtown of the bigger city, your own town, and the streetlights look like Christmas. People wave at you and smile. You watch a man walking five dogs on five leashes. And finally, at long last, you pull up to the front lawn of your apartment. You have just enough energy to carry your bike up the stairs to the landing, far more energy than you had thought you'd have. You check the time; it's 7pm exactly.

Inside you put away a few of your things and hang up your bicycle. You recall some advice that you read somewhere that for optimal recovery after an endurance workout you should consume 20-30g of protein. You stand in front of your open refrigerator. You look inside your pantry. Then you wave your hand in a dismissive gesture and lie down on your bedroom floor and fall to sleep.

A Portrait of an Amateur: Part III

You've now climbed 2000ft and the windless day has turned into quite a kicker. As you leave town, the highway narrows briefly into an interstate-like chute with high concrete walls to channel traffic. The wind funnels through these ferociously and throws bits of dust and gravel into your face, some whipping past your sunglasses and into your eyes. You squint for a few minutes until the concrete walls have fallen away to be replaced by wide, alpine plains. The single dominating mountain is now to your South, and you have a whole new view of it than you normally get from your apartment at its base. It always startles you how quickly you move around the monolithic peak while riding your bike. The familiar ridge line is now dramatically foreign. The peak looks long and sloping, with many summits. From this angle, you can't even make out the true summit.

As you continue to climb along the highway, the narrow part of the pass now behind you, you look out into the high, mountain fields and feel your remoteness. You pass an unrecognizable carcass along the fence line. Houses come less frequently now with many acres of ranch land between them. The highway crosses streams with their banks of mud and snow trampled by a million cow hoofs. To your right you notice an ancient sod house built into the side of a hill. You are pedaling hard again, even though your climb has decreased significantly in grade. The wind is fighting you like an elastic band anchored somewhere behind you. You've grown less frustrated with headwinds in the last year of riding, but this is an intense headwind. You try to crouch. You put your hands into an aerodynamic position. You pedal with your knees slightly turned in. Loose weeds are tumbling past you and grasses are bent low. Flags flap in your direction, shivering rectangles. The trees hum. The whole mountain seems to hum. In your imagination, you see Aiolos unfastening his bloated animal skins on the Western slope of the mountain range. He is laughing. "At least," you say to him, "when I turn around, these winds of yours will press me from behind." This thought circles through your brain as it sinks again into the dull repetitions of physical exertion.

Soon enough you arrive at the summit of Ute Pass. 'Summit' is a strange word for this; there is higher ground to the left and right. You come up with a satisfactory definition to clarify the situation: "the summit of a pass is the highest point along the lowest path over a mountain range." You begin your gradual descent with at least 20 more miles to go before you reach Wilkerson Pass, the point at which someone continuing Westward would descend onto the Western Slopes. You will not reach Wilkerson Pass today.

As you descend, still pedaling steadily because of the high winds, your various discomforts begin alerting you of their presence. Your hands have hurt for some time now, but you hadn't noticed; you begin adjusting their positions more frequently on your handlebars. The muscle that connects your shoulder to your neck is cramped and you concentrate on relaxing your arms and shoulders and carrying the weight of your forward-leaning torso with your core muscles. Your legs are sore too, but eating another energy bar seems gradually to give them back their strength. After a while, the ache in your lower back becomes distracting enough that you stop at a pull-out along the highway and try some stretches. You twist around and flop your legs across eachother, trying positions that feel right and hopefully look professional to passing motorists. Slowly you begin to feel your back and even your shoulder relaxing, and you mentally slap yourself for not having thought of this before. With the wind still whipping, and having been off your bike for a few minutes, you suddenly realize you are chilled. You begin to make a causal connection between this new unpleasantness and the cotton t-shirt you are wearing, but stop the logical progression before it makes wisdom out of your friends' advice. You throw on your long-sleeve shirt, check the time on your phone (3:20pm), and begin pedaling again.

You are really beginning to feel your miles now. You don't know exactly how far you've come, but you guess 35mi. Still descending, you pass fantastical piles of rocks, like those you've seen in Joshua Tree and Hueco Tanks. You pass a few more mountain towns, with names like Wagon Tongue and Saddle Creek. You eat your last energy bar, but notice very little increase in your energy. You pass a herd of cattle and moo at them. You cannot tell if you have gone 15 more miles or 5, but you estimate that it is about 4pm, and you turn around on the highway to begin the long process of retracing your path. Facing eastward now, back towards the dominating peak, you notice a long trail of smoke that obscures most of its ridgeline. The particular hue of the smoke makes you think that sappy conifers are burning. A forest fire. And you hadn't even noticed it on the way out. Perhaps it has just begun.

You decide to check the time, to mentally catalog your turn-around. You sit upright in your saddle and pedal without using your hands while you pull off your backpack and sift through its contents for your phone. You look at its display: 5:05pm. "Good," you think. "Only five minutes overdue." Then your brain registers what you just saw. 5:05pm! Five o-clock! You're an hour and five minutes overdue! The sun will set in another hour, and you've been riding for 5hrs already, not four, like you had planned. How could you have made this mistake? You wonder if you misread your phone when you stopped to stretch. Or maybe you blanked out and rode for an hour and forty minutes rather than just forty since your last stop. You look at your phone again to verify that it's really as late as that. It is. You have no idea how it happened, but you know how your sense of time gets warped when you are fatigued. "Really," you tell yourself, "it isn't that big of a deal:" you have your riding lights, and you have extra layers to put on. But somehow the ride before you begins to look utterly impossible.

In the first three minutes after you have turned around, you have plummeted from moderately tired to completely defeated. In near despair you remember again how very remote you are. The food you have left is obviously inadequate. The water you have left is only a few sips. "How could I be so stupid?" you ask yourself. You stop at the general store you passed in the town just 10min before, Starky's General Store. But the lights are out and a 'Closed' sign hangs askew on the inside of the door. It presses on you like a clamp, you've crossed into Hell.

A Portrait of an Amateur: Part II

Winding through the last streets of the town at the foot of the mountains, before you pull out onto the busy highway that winds up the pass, you stop at one of the countless mineral springs that speckle the mountain village. A hundred years ago wealthy health-seekers would come to the sanatorium here to take the waters, and they swore by their restorative powers. Today there is an earthy new-age community that still thrives in the town. This particular spring is gurgling under a rusted metal sculpture of a kneeling Indian with a jar in his hands. Out of the jar spills a trickle of the ancient waters. You fill your spare bottle with the spring water and take a swig. It tastes heavily of metal. But you put the full bottle into your bottle cage and carry on, leaving behind the expressionless Indian forever kneeling, forever pouring.

It is now 45min into your ride, and you decide to eat one of your energy bars. The sugar is stimulating. You pedal up the ramp and enter the highway, moving precisely up the shoulder. It's not long now before you enter the familiar rhythmic trance of exertion. You used to imagine yourself having lots of time to think during these rides, but this is rarely the case. When your body starts working hard, your mind slows down to a dull churn. The thousands of circles your feet describe are echoed in your mind with thousands of circles of simple thoughts. Your brain begins to loop over one line from the country song you listened to this morning. Cycle. Cycle. Cycle. Then you watch your shadow. You watch your shadow pedaling, pedaling, pedaling beside you for ten minutes, but you don't even realize it, and you certainly don't get bored. In fact, you've wondered whether within this monotonous brain-hum during the hardest parts of your rides your subconscious is actually getting work done. Maybe it sorts and analyzes and imagines, without you being aware of it. Sometimes when you arrive back home, with very little conscious memory of your ride, you have a wholly new idea waiting for you. You continue pedaling up the pass. Miles roll under your wheels. It is not unpleasant for you. It is not pleasant. It isn't anything.

Your reverie is broken at some point by a roaring tractor trailer. You are in the narrowest section of this highway, with about three feet of shoulder. You sense his dangerous closeness as you hear him approach from behind and gently move further away from the white line. Then he roars past you at 50mph, wheels rolling on your side of the white line, only a couple of feet between you. You've learned not to startle and swerve, but your heart rate still jumps towards three beats per second. You catch yourself yelling at his receding trailer, explaining in simple terms his exact standing before God.

You recover and realize that you've almost come to the section where you often exit from the highway and ride a handful of miles along a parallel back road, which climbs through three small towns. You make your exit and breathe in the quiet of this road. People still pass you in their cars, but they all slow down or shift to the opposite side of the road and smile and wave. You pass narrow horse pastures pressed between the steep walls of the pass and a creek that rolls down along the road. The horses stand there, eyes closed in the warm sun, or else necks dropped, lips moving along the surface of the ground. "A horse is the most beautiful animal," you think to yourself. "Or a deer." Snow begins to appear along the edges of the road, which makes for a pleasant sight. You are hot, climbing up the pass, and the sun glinting off the long mounds of gravel-speckled snow makes you feel cooler.

You've been riding now for an hour and a half, and you decide to stop for lunch at the modest pond in the park at the heart of the last town along this road. You lean your bike against a fence and stretch and sit down along the bank of the half-frozen duck pond. The only other person here is an older, stooped fellow walking in slow steps along the edge. It looks to you like he's exercising, making laps around it. Your presence alarms a brotherhood of ducks and three geese who are walking over the surface of the ice, dipping their beaks into little indentations filled with water. As you get out your tuna fish, tub of cream cheese, tortillas, and plastic knife, you watch them. They recover from your arrival and resume their strange exercise. The ducks move about with ease, carelessly padding across the slippery wet ice. When they come to larger indentations, they hinge their legs under their breasts and swim a few feet to the opposite ice bank and climb out. The geese move with much more caution. They sway slowly and stop at intervals to look around and to dip their beaks into the little pools. The biggest goose, a white one, and surely the male, moves with the greatest caution of all. His feet are wide, like those of a novice ice skater. He keeps slipping and catching himself just before his legs fold under him. Usually a goose's neck is curved elegantly, but his is arched into an awkward upside-down 'U', bringing his face down close to his breast. Presumably, he is trying to watch his feet. He is jerkily walking in a random path along the surface, unengaged in the community's work of beak-dipping, merely trying to get his feet steady under him. And he's making the most varied collection of goose noises you have ever heard: honking high and low, squeaking, and even hissing. It reminds you of how a human baby will make noises, oblivious to everyone else in the room, just for the pleasure of hearing its voice.

Finishing half of your lunch food and packing it away for later, you throw a piece of mulch out at the white goose. He slips and recovers and then rocks his head back and forth with crazy intensity, trying to get a look at it. You throw another piece, but then you realize that the old man is now passing behind you. You turn and smile at him. He gives you the same long, scolding stare that you give to teenagers texting in the library.

You get back on your bicycle and make your way back out onto the highway towards the largest town along the pass. In 30min you are pedaling along its main street, and you pass a bank which advertises the time (2:21pm) and the temperature (60DegF). In your head, you calculate your turn-around time, using the rough estimate that you will descend twice as fast as you climb. You figure 4pm is a safe bet, realizing also that this is not going to be enough time to get to your destination. Without much disappointment, you change your route and continue on the main highway out of town towards Wilkerson Pass, instead of North towards Deckers. You'll try again another time.

A Portrait of an Amateur: Part I

I find that even though I've been riding my road bike regularly for at least three years now, I'm still decisively an amateur. It's not like cycling takes a great amount of technical mastery or professionalism, but I seem to have the gift of perpetual and obvious amateurism. I mean, I still get nervous when I walk into a bike shop: I say the wrong words, calling a wheel a tire, and mixing up the order of the Shimano groups. And I'm a bicycle mechanic, for pete's sake.

Nevertheless, amateurism in cycling has one great benefit: epic rides. Professionals get epic rides too. But they plan ahead for them, and thereby dull their knife-sharp, life-altering effects. A pro plans for days ahead, gets on her bike, cranks out a hundred miles, eats all the right food in just the right quantities, brings just enough gear, and is home within 30min of her target time. She goes to bed pleased with a good ride. I watch her with awe. Because I, on the other hand, frequently almost die. I decide the day-of to ride far more miles than I am capable of riding, and I hobble home way past dark, either freezing or carrying 5 pounds of gear I never needed. I go to bed saying words I've promised to stop saying. But I wake up in the morning and life has a brighter hue. An epic ride. Any novice knows what this feels like.

Tuesday's ride was the most recent in a long history of such rides. For your benefit, friend, and to see one such ride through the eyes of an amateur, I place you grammatically in my shoes. It is long, so here is Part I.

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Coming home from work on Monday, an idea strikes you: tomorrow you are entirely free, why not ride to Deckers and back? There's nothing special about Deckers, besides its location 50 miles up into the mountains. And also the last time you were riding in that direction, you got passed by three kids in jeans riding single speed bicycles. They had said, "Hi." You had asked them where they were coming from, where they were going. They had said, "Deckers." And the rest of your ride had felt shamefully 'intermediate'. "So why not ride to Deckers?" you think, driving home from work on Monday. The thought, "to prove yourself to yourself," begins to form in your head, but you don't allow this thought to fully surface. "For the adventure," you say to yourself.

You know you'll have to get a reasonably early start, probably 10 or 11am, so you can make it back before dark, a little after 6pm. But instead of going to bed on time, you get distracted with one of the movies stacked below your room mate's television. You finally get to bed at 1am.

At 8am you wake up without the alarm. You look at the clock and make an agonized noise and close your eyes, thinking to get at least another half hour of sleep. You awake again, suddenly, and sit up in your bed. By the silence of the street out your window, you know it's late in the morning. Your clock says 10:43am. Not to worry, you think to yourself: it won't take long to get ready. You heat some water for instant oatmeal, but discover you only have one packet left. Hardly enough to start the day. So you make a quart of your mother's left-over Christmas tea. You make it far too sweet, like syrup, but you drink the whole quart anyway. The cabinet, you find, is distressingly empty, and realizing you need to take more food on your ride than you currently own, you jump into your car and make your way over to the grocery store. There, a fit looking gentleman with a bike helmet keeps appearing in the same aisle as you do. You smile at him and he smiles warmly back. You grab whatever looks energetic and packable; a stack of tortillas, an apple, a packet of tuna fish, a tub of cream cheese. You add up the Calories mentally, a new pre-ride ritual that makes you feel precise, scientific, like Lance Armstrong. A thousand Calories, give or take; not enough. You go to the aisle of sweet things and bump into the gentleman with the helmet agian. He smiles at you. You browse the Clif Bars and Powerbars and think about your Lenten commitment to abstain from sweets. You deliberate. This is the first time you have honored Lent, and you want to be rigorous. But it's going to be impossible to do long rides without simple sugars. Finally you grab three bars and walk to the checkout line, picturing Jesus entering Jerusalem on a rickety Schwinn, munching on a brown energy bar.

Back in your car, you put in a CD for the five-minute drive home. You choose carefully, knowing that the song you listen to will probably be stuck in your head for the next six hours on your bicycle. It's a sad country song about Richard Manuel and Rick Danko.

At your apartment, you pack the food into your backpack which also carries your water. Your backpack is an abomination, you know; road cyclists don't carry things in backpacks; they put bottles onto their frames and stuff tools and spare clothes and snacks into their back jersey pockets. But you don't want to wear a lumpy jersey for 6hrs today, so you put everything you need into this small backpack. You also put in your phone, your wallet, mittens, a beanie, a long-sleeve shirt, and a windbreaker. You pull your bike down from the wall and get it ready by pumping up the tires, lubing and rubbing down your chain, tightening odd screws. Finally you look everything over. This is the most important step, you have learned, looking everything over. You're always forgetting something essential. You consider the synthetic jersey you picked out. It smells a little sour from too few washings. You pull it off and instead throw on a cotton t-shirt, something your friends have warned against. "But cotton just feels so nice," you think to yourself. "And I'm not going to get any weather today." Besides, when you wipe your nose, a synthetic jersey feels like plastic wrap. Another warning your friends give you is to wear sunglasses, to protect your eyes from wind, flying things, and UV radiation. Despite your aversion to this techno piece of equipment, you know your friends are right. In fact, you have finally ordered a pair. But these haven't arrived yet, so you steal your room mate's shades. "For the last time," you tell yourself.

At last, feeling prepared, you walk out the door with your bike over your shoulder. It's noon. On the landing you realize you forgot your pump. You jump back inside and put your tiny bike pump into your backpack. Back outside you realize, as late as it is, that you ought to bring your bike lights, just in case you need them. You grab these, put them in your backpack, and return to your bicycle. Walking your bike down the sidewalk to the street, you begin to feel that familiar shakiness you always get before long rides. Is it fear? Is it pleasure? You hop onto your bike in one smooth motion, like the pros, but end up swerving ridiculously, trying to get your cleats into your pedals. Then you sprint out into the traffic. The whir of the chain as it snakes through the derailleur has always been a pleasing noise to you, and you feel the ruffling of the air moving through your helmet as you pace up to speed with the cars. A good day. The sun is bright; the air is freakishly warm and windless for winter, and the mountains you will climb loom to the west like a row of clouds.

It doesn't take long to get out of traffic. You move onto the back roads that cyclists always take to get to the West Side. You pass other cyclists, coming home and wave your whole arm at them. They lift their fingers from their handlebars in a subdued gesture. The back streets of the West Side are beautiful, especially as you approach the town at the foot of the mountains. They get progressively more steep and narrow, like those of some villa along the coast of the Mediterranean. You wind through them with the energy and happiness that always accompany the beginnings of your rides. Your mind wanders over many things: the chores you need to catch up on, a friend's predicament, your new feeling of income security. Involuntarily your mind begins to focus on the beginning of an uncomfortableness above your saddle. Then with clarity, you realize that you forgot to lotion up that part of you that contacts your saddle. This is another one of those warnings that you have long received from your experienced cycling friends: always use chamois cream on your ass before long rides. This had seemed utterly useless, even comical to you, like the practice of male road bikers shaving their legs. Until recently. Recently, in the dry Colorado winter, you had been experiencing seriously distracting saddle chafing. So reluctantly you'd taken to applying ample quantities of lotion before long rides, which had eliminated the diaper rash. But this morning you forgot. And now you are beginning to feel an irritation developing in the most uncomfortable of places. Quickly, you think of a solution that will save you the now-impossible 45min round-trip home. Passing a construction site, you pedal up to a Port-A-Jon, lean your bike against it, and step inside, making sure to lock the door. You pull the little cylinder of chapstick out of your backpack and roll up a quarter-inch of the stuff, slicing it off with your finger and smearing it on your palms. Feeling brilliant, then ridiculous, you pull down your cycling shorts and hesitantly apply the lip balm to your ass. You finish the business, pull up your shorts, step back outside, and smile at the man in a construction helmet who is watching you. Back on your bike, you begin to feel a blooming menthol coolness where you applied your chapstick. "This is not an altogether unpleasant solution," you say to yourself, and file the idea into the back of your head.