Why yes, yes it is… But it’s the first week of June, and I’m in California. How can it be snowing? I’m not sure if I’m saying these words out loud or just thinking them very loudly in my head as I pull my Subaru into the Kirkwood parking lot last Thursday evening. It doesn’t matter either way, because the fact of the matter is that whether or not it is June and whether or not I’m in California, it is indeed snowing.
My hopes of an enjoyable weekend of riding up and down 8000+ foot mountain passes on my road bike are beginning to dwindle. This enjoyable ride could become more of an epic adventure if the weather continues to do what it’s doing…. Oh well. It could be worse. Actually, if it has to do anything, I prefer that it snow instead of rain. You don’t get as wet when it snows as you do when it rains.
I had come to Kirkwood for the “Near Death Experience” (NDE), a training camp for people who were hoping to ride all the passes of the notorious Death Ride. For those of you who don’t know, the Death Ride is a 129 mile road ride which starts in the little town of Markleeville, CA and includes something like 16,000 ft of climbing over 5 mtn passes. It’s a pretty challenging ride and the NDE is set up so that riders can come out and get a taste of what is in store for them before jumping straight into the Death Ride. The camp is based out of Kirkwood, where I now stood glaring up at the ominous black clouds above me, wondering if this weekend was going to be a wasted trip.
I was trying to stay positive, at least I brought an indoor trainer. If it decided to dump rain and snow and the passes were too dangerous to ride, I could sit in my room on the trainer all day long if it came down to it. I hoped it wouldn’t come down to it though…
I had been invited up to the camp by the head coach of the experience, Rob Panzera. Rob leads a 2x weekly winter trainer class at the shop where I work in San Diego. When I heard that he was going to be up in Norcal leading people over the DeathRide course while I was going to be in the area, I couldn’t help but ask if he might need some extra legs riding through the group. The rest of the assistant coaches were San Diego based as well, so I either knew or knew of most of the other coaches and I was rooming with someone who used to wrench at the shop where I work down south. It seemed sort of funny to me that a training camp in Norcal, damn near on the Nevada border, would be staffed entirely by riders from super Socal, but I guess everyone at the camp really came from some place else, so why not from San Diego?
I won’t go into extreme detail about the camp, I’ll just say that I had a freaking blast! We had riders from all over Norcal and the Bay area, Oregon, Texas, even Canada. I got to meet a ton of cool people and I got to share some tips and tricks that have worked well for me on the bike. I really enjoy events like the Death Ride, not only because these events are what brought me into the world of cycling originally (I even rode the Death Ride in 2006), but because of the type of people who come out to these events.
Go to a Century, and look around you. You will see a group of people as diverse as you can possibly imagine. People of all shapes and sizes, from all different backgrounds and from every walk of life are all gathered around you, brought together by a common bond: the love of cycling. And it’s a true love. These are not racers, they’re not here to compete, they’re not here to represent a brand or to post a result. They’re here to test themselves and to have a great time. For the most part, they’re not trying to post a result, they just want to have a great time and go for a bike ride with a bunch of people who share their passion.
Bikes are an efficient form of transportation, they’re good for the environment, they give us something to spend our time and money on, they are the best stress relief mechanism on the planet, and they provide us withone more way to compete with one another. At the end of the day though, bikes are made for human enjoyment. I think that adding the competitive factor sometimes makes us forget this fact. I came to the NDE and immediately remembered why I started riding bikes.
I wanted to challenge myself, to prove to me that I could do it. There are no rules, no points to score, or goals to kick, no teams to be a part of. Just you, your bike, and the hill in front of you. Make it to the top, and no matter your time or your speed, the accomplishment is yours and yours alone. Complete a century ride and it’s yours. You did it by yourself, that’s something that no one can take away from you. It’s a feeling that is tough to find most other places in life.
When I started racing, my goals were the same. I wanted to challenge myself, to prove to me that I could do it. Sure there were a few rules to follow, but that never bothered me and for the most part racing was a lot like just riding. I always wanted to go fast, just to see if I could, I always wanted to ride farther and longer, just to see if I could. That was the lure of 24 hour racing. Could I do it? Could I finish one of these events? It seems that I can.
But something had changed recently. For the first time, the motivation to ride my bike was gone from my world. I would wake up, eat breakfast, and some mornings I would just go back to sleep until I had to go to work. If I did ride, it seemed as though my pedaling lacked purpose, it seemed like any time the ride got tough, I just wanted to give up, had no reason to push myself harder, and no desire to make it hurt to get up the next climb. For the first time ever, I was not looking forward to putting myself through hell. I just wanted to sleep, to rest, to recover, not to ache and be exhausted.
I’ve ridden myself to exhaustion before and more or less forced myself to relax and rest and recover, but I’ve always been uneasy about it. But recently, for the first time, I embraced the rest, found myself doing as little training as I possibly could, and welcoming excuses to take time off the bike. And I felt completely comfortable with it.
And why not? I had lost my motivation to ride. My motivation has never been to win. Never. Ever. I’m notcompetitive enough. I want to push myself, but I have little interest in where I stand compared with other riders. I have finished races in dead last and been completelysatisfied with the day’s results and I have finished races in first place and been unsatisfied with my finish because I didn’t feel that I had pushed myself as far as I could go.
I began to find myself thinking recently that I had proven to myself that I could ride my bike for 8 hours straight, or even 12 hours, or even 24 hours. And not only could I ride that long, I could also ride farther than a lot of the other riders present on many occasions. What did I have left to prove? Somewhere along the way, I had forgotten that it was a major task simply to complete a bike race and I had stopped wondering whether or not I could finish and began only concerning myself with whether or not I could finish in first place. I had lost sight of why I started riding bikes. I no longer cared about finishing; after all, everyone else seemed to think that my finishing was a given and that I should not only finish every event but I should win them too.
I didn’t realize it, but I had started to feel as though I was racing to gain exposure and sponsors and to not let everyone down. I wasn’t racing for me, and I had all but forgotten why I ride to begin with. It took a weekend in Kirkwood with a group of super enthusiastic cyclists to remind me that bike are all about fun, and not about winning or losing. Bikes are about challenging yourself and sometimes proving to yourself that you can do it. These riders showed me once again how much fun you can have on two wheels and over the course of three days, I remembered why I do what I do. I just want to see if I can, that’s all. I ‘m not out to prove anything to anyone, except for maybe myself. If I’m satisfied at the end of the day, then that’s all that matters.
On Sunday afternoon, we all drove out to the foot of Ebbet’spass and parked our cars at a campground. This was sort of a free day, the riders could ride up the front side of the pass and go home, or they could do both sides. I ended up riding the front side once and then some and did the backside three times as I went up and down the mountain to ride withriders at different paces and offer some tips, tricks and words of encouragement. I was going up the last time with the last camper and he asked what gearing I was running. 39/27. I felt weak. He was impressed. He asked me how long it took to finish the Death Ride the year I’d done it. Wasn’t sure, I was the 14th one to sign the poster at the end. He was amazed! The day I had finished the ride, I was very impressed with myself and super stoked. That Sunday afternoon, riding up Ebbet’s pass, I realized that if I had ridden the DeathRide with my current mindset and finished 14th, I would feel as though I had let everyone down and not been at all satisfied with my result because I hadn’t been the first rider done.
This realization hit me like a ton of bricks and I suddenly understood why I had been so unmotivated to get on my bike lately. I wasn’t riding for me anymore, I was riding for everyone else. Not only that, but I had forgotten that I ride bikes to have fun, not to win races. Wow. I descended the mountain as though a weight had been lifted from my back and for the first time in months, I found myself grinning from ear to ear when I dismounted my bike at the bottom. I just had fun on my bike for the first time in a long time. And, I realized that I had been having fun on my bike all weekend but I was so concerned with whether or not I was getting enough training that I hadn’t let myself notice.
I was the last one to leave the campground to head back to Kirkwood and pack my things. I was feeling like a new man, ready to go have some fun with the rest of my race season and start enjoying cycling once again. About 4 miles from the campground, my new found good mood got put to the test when quite suddenly, my trusty Subaru stopped running. Nice. No cell service, and no phone numbers to anyone staying at Kirkwood even if I could make a call. Hmmm. Tricky situation. Well, Markleeville was just up the road, there would be a phone there.
Back into my crusty cycling clothing and on my way to Markleeville. My Grandma has AAA, I’ll get it towed home, no big deal. Right? Yeah right. She has to be at the car in order for them to tow it. It’ll be $900 to tow it without AAA, so my Grandma agrees to pick me up at Kirkwood in about 3 hours. We agreed on Kirkwood because all my things were there and cell phones worked there so we could call AAA as Markleeville would be closed by the time she arrived. Oh, and someone had offered me a ride to Kirkwood also. Well, by the time the plan was figured out, that someone was gone. Crappy.
So, I got back on my bike and started pedaling. It was only about a 30 mile ride, and I had roughly two hours to get it done. About 25 miles (not kidding) of the ride were up hill. There was also the little lump of dirt otherwise known as Carson Pass (8600 ft) to ride over on the way. The weekend turned out to be pretty epic after all. I wasn’t bummed about the car situation. I had remembered why I ride a bike, and I was looking forward to tackling Carson after three trips up Ebbet’s. Could I do it? Only one way to find out. And hey, it could have been worse. At least it wasn’t still snowing…
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