JQR’s secret city

To follow up on this morning's apex of achievement, I
eked out a new course record on my favorite seven-mile loop this
afternoon. With the wind coming out of the south, and quite mildly
too, I zipped around the loop in 21:12, which is 12 seconds short of
20 mph, or 19.8 mph. That was the second time around; the first time
was a respectable 22:14, or 18.9 mph.

 I'm so pleased with myself every time I put in a good ride like today;
I apologize for the surfeit of functionally identical posts saying the
same thing.

 Especially riding a single-speed, going faster means pedaling faster
and moving the wheel around more frequently in the same time period.
Or rather, accomplishing the same number of revolutions in a little
less time. It seems a little more elemental than it would on a bike
with a derailleur.

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Ha! Dragged myself out of bed this morning and onto the piste. Slept
poorly and dreamt about fishing, I the confirmed nonangler. But all is
well; I got to that magic 100-mile mark I'd set for myself three or
four weeks ago. It wasn't a bad run, either; the dawn on my left was
spectacular (if behind me) and it generated a counterdawn: a fluffy
pile of pinkish clouds in the west, about ten degrees of arc over the
horizon.
 
Still need two more bike rides to get to 500 miles, however. I'll have
to wait for the afternoon for that.

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Lucky me, I was passing by the distribution yard and saw yesterday's assist vehicle driving by. I was a bit slow taking out the camera and
getting the snapshot, which is why the version you're seeing is blown
up and cropped like the climactic scene in "High Anxiety."
 
Just a tiny bit of drafting today, behind a contractor's giant-bed
pickup truck as I passed the end of the straightaway near the fire
station. As soon as we got out of the built-up area, he sped up and
disappeared, leaving me to develop an unintermediated personal
relationship with my friend the North Wind.
 
What I have been meaning to mention for a couple days now, as I get
closer to my 500-mile goal for January is what you could think of as the
"ninety-nine-and-a-half just won't do" problem. If you fail at a goal,
it's most likely not because you got to 45%, but because you couldn't
get past 90%. So in my situation at 89% (two rides left, basically)
for the month, I need to focus and keep up the solid cycling, day
after day, because otherwise I'll get distracted and won't make the
goal. I can always laze away once I've made the goal, right?
 
But just simple goal-reaching doesn't help me explain to a reader like
you how seriously I take this getting the speed up and riding fast. I
could just slack off a little bit and who would notice, and there are
days like Wednesday where I just can't get fast, but mostly I take this real
seriously, trying to push myself harder on each lap. It helps to have
an implacable antagonist like the North Wind, but pretty much it's all
my doing. There's no coach screaming at me or team to keep up with. So
when I finish a ride like today's, with a steady wind from the north,
with two laps at faster than 18 mph, I feel pretty good about myself,
having recovered nearly completely from the slow-slash-rest day on
Wednesday. And I suspect that every time I put myself in that frame of
mind, where dogged persistence and determination are needed to push to
the finish line, I'll find that it pays off for the next time.

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On the bike today, out for my afternoon ride, I hopped off the curb
into the road and all of a sudden, everything was calm, like a smooth
and tranquil lake of asphalt. It was like that moment diving into
Craig Pond first thing in the morning, when the lake is so still and
the water is chilly but it just swallows you up into it, so softly.
 
(No pictures of Craig Pond handy, unfortunately, so here's one from
Oregon instead.)
 
The ride went OK. I attempted to psyche myself up beforehand by
listening to Tune-Yards' "Sunlight,", but it was another song, Stereolab's "Metronomic
Underground" that proved to be the key to victory.
 

 
As you can tell, it's pretty hypnotic, and just humming to myself,
"Crazy, sturdy, a torpedo" helped me keep up that steady energy needed
for the long back stretch with the wind, past the dump. Of course,
first I had to figure out what song it actually was, which is kind of
difficult, since my Stereolab sampler is on a single CD that I used to
play whenever I would drive around the secret city in the truck.
 
But it worked! I finished lap no. 2 in 22:48, or 18.4 mph. I was
pretty much toast afterward, however, and rode home kind of slowly,
still in a daze from hearing the song in my head over and over again.

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(I wrote this and am posting it not necessarily to motivate anyone
else, but more so that the next time I am in the same situation, I
have something to reference it to.)
 
Cycling this afternoon, I came around my first loop with the
straightforward intention of getting in a good ride. The wind had lightened up
since the day before and it was actually almost warm, in the low 60s
probably. Riding into the wind, I hit the straightaway from the
flagpole past the fire station, old chapel and refectory, checked my
heart-rate monitor, and set myself the task of raising my heart rate
to 80% of max from 64%. I got distracted somewhere along the half-mile
stretch and reached the turn with the monitor still stuck at 64%. I
passed the Funny Hat People running and singing their goofy songs, as
is their custom in the afternoons, then came around for a second loop.
 
Learning from the first lap, on the second I focused intently on the
pedal stroke to get my HR up and when I made the turn I was at 81%. I
didn't get down to below 70% until I got to the Leticia straightaway
(There's a clamshell structure there permanently under construction,
with the word "LETICIA" in wrought-iron letters mounted on the crane
above the clamshell; it always looks striking because when I ride in
the afternoon, I see it with the setting sun as a backdrop.) and felt
like I was falling a little short of vim.
 
Feelings notwithstanding, as I came around the tight turn, onto the
back stretch, I checked the stopwatch: it read 1:09:58, and I had
started the loop at the other end at 56:50. So I had only taken 13'
and change to complete the out stretch, fighting the wind the whole
way. That was a pretty good sign, so I sipped some water, grabbed the
drops, tucked in and pedaled hard, with the wind at my back, all the
way past the dump around to the loop starting-point by the barrels.
The entire seven-mile lap took 22:32, a pace of 18.6 mph (my target is
23:22, which is an 18 mph pace; if I've looped around faster than
that, it's a red-letter day).
 
I kept up a crisp pace on the way home from the barrels, and even sped
up a little bit at the end, trying to get in under 1:40, my full-ride
reference time (I always assume it takes 100 minutes to get in an
afternoon ride), and missed it only by a couple seconds. Not bad for a
ride where the first fifty-six minutes were pretty poky.
 
I guess the conclusion to draw from today's experiment, which I've
apprehended before but have been absorbing only slowly, is that the
first good push is critical to getting my heart starting to beat fast
enough to maintain a swift, satisfying pace. The only times I've kept
that 18 mph pace, I've had an average HR for the loop of over 70%,
which means that I need to do some serious hammering over the 23
minutes it takes to loop around. On days when I'm feeling slow, it's
hard to push past 65% at all, so averaging more than 70% is more of an
achievement than it might seem. On the other hand, as I go over my
records, I see that I only rode an 18-mph loop five times in the
entire month of December (twice on the 30th). I've already matched that sum for January, although I
haven't felt as strong this month.
 
Attached picture is my ride, in today's late-afternoon light.

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I hit this exact same feeling every morning I go running, about five
minutes along, as I pass the laundry on the right on my way west. I
feel achy and tired and slow, and I feel overdressed in jacket and two
shirts, plus sweatpants. I don't feel cold, but instead I feel bulky.
I consider seriously just turning around when I get to 12th Street,
instead of turning left and climbing the hill on the road toward the
dump, a mile out and a mile back to the same junction spot.
 
Turning around at 12th Street would result in a 3.6 mile run, which
isn't bad at all, except that I would have to do the same run just
about every remaining day of the month to get to my goal of 100 miles.
It would mean 13 events in 15 days, which is tough. At a rate of 5.6
miles per event, I only need nine more events to get to 100, which is
a little more reasonable. Back in July and August and September, I
used to do the shorter route regularly, but I had lower expectations
then and wasn't trying to get to 100 miles a month.
 
And the difference between turning left and going up the hill to the
second revetment and turning right past the car wash and going back to
the lodging isn't really that much. I'm already out there pounding the
pavement, all dressed up and moving forward.
 
So I kind of put the thought to the side and think about a movie I've
seen or something, then by the time I'm at 12th Street I just turn
left as if I hadn't really considered not turning left. When I finish
up I've taken a little more than an hour, which is hardly a
record-breaking time. What's funny is that the steady accumulation of
training time does have an effect: yesterday I ran in the afternoon,
leaving the bike parked (I think the chain may actually be too tight and serious riding might damage the
freewheel bearings). On that run, in daylight and after having been
awake for more than 10 minutes, I did the same 5.6-mile route. It took
me less than 51 minutes, or my fastest time ever on that route. So all
my frustrations--at bulking up like the Michelin man, at having the
alarm send me out to the piste 90 minutes before the sun thinks of
rising, at carrying around the dinky flashlight I use to illuminate my
path--are somehow shifted beside the point, as if I had been fully and
completely supportive of my own efforts instead of partially engaged
in pondering how I could shortchange myself.
 
No matter what it takes to get to a goal or achievement, once you're
there, the doubts and fears and inhibitions you felt become
unimportant, like the howling wind of a storm that has since passed
through your area.

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I just don't know. If I were about to give up, would I reach for a cookie in the forlorn
hope that it might spur me to renewed effort?
 
If I were a girl scout, would I unhesitatingly associate the do-si-do
with belief and support? What if it wasn't cookie season, and my support
was needed?

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Yesterday it started to rain around dawn and continued on and off
throughout the day. A good day to watch François Truffaut's Day for
Night (1973), a sweet movie about making movies. Whenever I watch
a film like this one about working in groups, I'm always keeping an
eye open for useful organizational lessons, as if I was some kind of
Organizational Change Consultant who likes to show little clips from
movies in the midst of his view-graph presentations in order to keep
the audience on its toes.
 
I guess in this one the great OC moment is when the director (played
by Truffaut) and his assistant (Nathalie Baye, kudos to the costume
designer who kitted her out with this pair of amazing round glasses),
discover that Alexandra Stewart's secretary is three months pregnant
and that this is the reason why she had made a fuss about dressing in
a bathing suit for a poolside scene. The two of them go over the
schedule quickly and see that there won't be another scene with
Stewart for six weeks, at which time she will surely be showing. They
look into getting someone else to play the role, but the insurance
won't cover it. Could her character be pregnant in the film? Baye
considers it, then demurs. It would confuse the audience because they
would think that she had slept with the main character's father.
 
Finally, the decision is made. Truffaut brings Stewart in to watch the
rough edit, which masterfully omits any view of her belly. The film
cuts as soon as she sits down to type, and we watch the rest of the
reel spool for the last time off the spindle into a cardboard box.
Despite the trouble and difficulty that Stewart's pregnancy has
caused, he still treats her respectfully by showing her the rough cut
and how it conceals that she's pregnant. At the end of the film,
Stewart returns, pregnancy quite evident, and poses in the group photo
with the rest of the cast and crew.
 
Quick lesson: Truffaut disassociates the actor and her condition. If
he'd chosen to hire someone else and reshoot the scene, it would have
been "nothing personal," but instead he uses the problem and his
successful resolution of it as a way to deepen his relationship with
the actor.

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Eyes bleary from lack of sleep and mouth acrid from stale coffee, I
check in with my faithful readership. I don't know how I got myself
roped into working the graveyard shift here at the Emotional Trauma
Center and Whine Ward. It's been refreshingly quiet and the phone has
not rung since I got here at 10:30 p.m. Jason, tonight's able
assistant, and the pet mouse sit in the front room, buying motorcycle
helmets online.
 
It seems like a long time since I went biking this afternoon in the
warmer weather. I actually stripped down to short-sleeves for the
first time in about three weeks and was rewarded with a good hustling
pace, making 18 mph on my pair of seven-mile loops. Unfortunately for
me, the fickle wind shifted direction between the first loop and the
second. On my first loop, I was cycling in the doctrinally correct
manner, pushing against the wind on the out leg and reaping the
benefit of the tailwind on the return leg. That created a nice reverse
split, where the back half was faster than the front half.
 
On my second trip around, I noticed myself daydreaming a little bit
about the book I was reading (Kate Atkinson's Case Histories)
instead of really pushing hard, and a couple minutes later at the far
western extent of the loop, I checked my time and saw that though I
hadn't pushed too hard, I had still beaten my corresponding split time
on the first lap. Of course, the return leg was a doozy because I was
pedaling into the wind. Takeaway lesson from that is: if it feels too
easy, it probably is and you should push more.
 
On that last doomed leg, however, I discovered something new: an extra
(fourth) gear. Not really a gear, as if I had an automatic
transmission instead of two leggy-pegs, but a metaphorical gear. First
gear is just pushing the pedals along, second gear drops the elbows to
relax the arms and lower the upper body while the legs start to move
the pedals in circles, both pushing down and lifting up (I have found
that not overlubricating the chain is actually a pretty good way to
determine this because I can hear the ruff-ruff of the mostly pushing
stroke, as opposed to the smoother circular stroke sound). Third gear
involves pushing the ischial tuberosities back off the end of the
saddle, which moves the fulcrum of my femurs slightly more distal,
like choking up on a baseball bat, shortening the pedal stroke. This
new fourth gear, which came upon me as unexpectedly as a power-up in a
video game, involves the same position as third gear except for a
slight extra bend forward and just more pedal strokes, more quickly. I
wonder if I'll be able to get to it again.

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Every once in a while I surprise myself. Somehow I managed to bring
myself from sleeping in bed all the way out to the second revetment
and home again, 5.6 miles, in the predawn chill.
 
It helped that I had turned the heat off last night, so the imminent
threat of freezing to death actually woke me up about ten past four,
about five minutes before the alarm went off. I rearranged the
blankets on top of the bed, instead of underneath it, and then the
alarm went. I remember exactly the moment I realized I was going
running: when I put on sweatpants instead of shorts to run to the ab
unit. From there, I just tossed on the jacket (I'd filled the pockets
with all the paraphernalia last night) and I was out the door on my
way to run.
 
As a bonus, I even managed to psyche myself into not turning around at
12th street, like I did the day before yesterday. It's cold out, sure,
and dark because the waxing moon has set long before I start out, and
the other day I told myself that it was okay to turn around, that the
marginal value of running an extra 20 minutes was overcome by the
marginal value of not freezing to death (I think there was a stiffer
wind Saturday, too). But today I felt OK and I realized that once I
was out there, dressed and warmed up, with warm, heavy gloves on, I
might as well just push the extra two miles. So I ran up the hill in
the pleasant darkness all the way to the second revetment and back
comme d'habitude.
 
Coming back home along the main boulevard, I pass the car wash and
ice plant, where it's always a little busy, and then there's one
block, between the firehouse and the stadium, where every morning it
always seems like toytown down here in the secret city: it's just so
quiet and peaceful. It reminds me of a Richard Scarry town before all
the madness begins, or maybe that's just my impression of my little
secret city here: by day, it's a little busytown, with the distinctive
rumble of the Mitsubishi standard-transmission 23-pax buses and the
water splashing out of the tops of the water trucks as they apparently
drive in endless loops around town. And every once in a while a house
or a bathroom will drive by (on the back of a flatbed, usually).
 

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