ornoth_cycling | Entries tagged with wachusett

Time for an update on all the news since the PMC.

First was Jay’s annual Labor Day BBQ and ride up Mount Wachusett (GPS log). The ride was pretty fun; after the hill climb, we rode out to Comet Pond and back, but we didn’t stop because Jay was (as usual) stressed to get home before his party guests started arriving. The downside was that I started feeling horribly sick toward the end of the day, which was made all the worse because I was dependent on Jay for a ride home.

The following weekend was the Flattest Century, down in southeastern Mass. While okay, it’s never been my favorite ride, and this year it was made worse because I was sick again: this time *before* the ride. Despite a completely emptied stomach, I managed to finish the ride (GPS log), but it was a titanic struggle. Like CttC, I’m not sure whether I’ll be back for this one next year or not.

Then came Hub on Wheels, the city of Boston’s big organized ride. The weather was almost perfect for this 50-mile ride (GPS log). I only wish some of my friends would come out for this one, since it covers a lot of the parts of Boston that I love riding in, and most of my buddies never ride in town.

And a week after that was my final big ride of the year: a 115-mile jaunt with Paul and Noah that began in Wellesley, then ran southwest into Rhode Island, then crossed over into Connecticut before returning home again (GPS log). The upside was that I realized two longstanding desires: to do my first tri-state ride, and to visit the place known as Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg. The downside was that we had sporadic rain, and my GPS ran out of juice toward the end and stopped recording data. But overall it was a good way to get in the mileage I needed to close the year.

Details of that can wait, as I’ll do a whole separate post summarizing my 2010-2011 season.

One odd thing was how the last two rides ended. After Hub on Wheels, I came home, passed out on the bed for about an hour, then got up and went into the living room. I was doing something at my desk when I heard the characteristic sudden hiss of an inner tube bursting. When I investigated, I found a puncture near the valve stem. Thankfully, it hadn’t let go during the ride, but waited until just afterward, while the bike was just sitting idly in my apartment.

Then, after our tri-state ride I loaded my bike onto Noah’s car and we set out toward Boston. We hadn’t left the parking lot when we heard that same noise. Another tube burst, and again it was at the valve stem (although my rear tire, rather than the front). And again, it was just after I’d finished an important ride, when the bike wasn’t being used or even touched. Ironically, only five minutes earlier Paul had observed that we’d gotten through a 115-mile ride without anyone flatting…

So that’s how the last bit of summer trickled away. Stay tuned for my end of season summary coming up next!

Right now my life consists of work, cycling, fundraising, and occasional sleep, so my periodic updates this time of year tend to cover a lot of ground… like this one, which covers the past month.

July was a memorable month, but not for good reasons. Although I usually spend most of the Fourth of July holiday on the bike, with one of those days comprising a century ride, this year a terrible cold hit me Friday afternoon and kept me housebound the entire holiday weekend. Pure suckage!

The next weekend I had to go up to Maine, and convinced myself that I could get some training in by riding the 70 miles from Portland to Augusta. That ride wound up being really difficult, thanks to my lingering illness, a 25-35 mph headwind that hadn’t been forecast, and a mile-long section of muddy dirt road up and over a big hill in Sabbatus. But at least I managed to get some time in the saddle…

Which I needed, because the weekend after that was the CRW’s Climb to the Clouds, a very hilly century that goes up Mt. Wachusett, and is a traditional warmup for the Pan-Mass Challenge.

So CttC was just brutal. Combine my reduced training this year with oppressively humid 96-degree blazing sun and the CRW’s extremely limited idea of what constitutes a supported ride, and you can begin to imagine how difficult it was. Thankfully, I can say that my age wasn’t a factor, as my three buddies (all 17+ years younger) also concluded that they never wanted to do that ride again.

The ironic thing is that I spent half the day hammering, thinking I was chasing them, when actually I was ahead of them. Although I let them go ahead after the first 10 miles, they stopped at a water stop I skipped. I was surprised to see them ride past me in Princeton, where I stopped but they did not. So I got back on the bike and chased, unknowingly passing them *again* when they stopped at a convenience store. So I beat them over the mountain, and they only caught up with me after I’d spent 20 minutes at the next water stop, 53 miles in.

And as I predicted last year, the summit road was closed to us for the third year in a row, which was disappointing.

Toward the end of the ride, I was nauseous and unsafely overheated, and kept pouring water over my head to cool off. I stopped at the little Chinese grocery in West Concord and picked up their last two bottles of water, only to discover on gulping it down that it was seltzer! I sipped what my stomach could tolerate and poured the rest over my head and limped to the finish, where I pretty much just collapsed. But not before getting shit from the ride organizers for asking if I could have some ice. I was too destroyed to muster any argument when the guys decided to go home early rather than take the traditional postride dip in Walden Pond.

Definitely one of my worst days on the bike. There damned well better be some training benefit, after all that suffering!

And to make matters worse, my brand new $700 bike computer / GPS failed to record the quarter of the ride that included Mt. Wachusett and the following descent (GPS data). I had already left its heart rate monitor at home, because it had been malfunctioning. At least Garmin is replacing the HRM strap; hopefully the new one will last longer than the first one.

And then yesterday Boston tied the second hottest temperature ever recorded in the city’s 140 years of keeping records. Thinking I couldn’t get into much trouble in just one hour, I biked home from work in 103°F / 40°C heat. Against a convection oven-like 25 mph headwind, over three sections of stripped/grooved pavement along one of Boston’s biggest and fastest 6-lane arterials, and then stupidly up and over Dorchester Heights, just for fun.

That kind of heat will raise your heart rate 10 bpm no matter what you’re doing, and by the time I was done my heart was pounding and I was feeling very lightheaded. Kinda scary! Hopefully this stretch of intense heat will break and the weather will be more forgiving for the upcoming PMC ride!

And that brings me around to the tiny list of positive things that happened this month. First, Garmin did replace my problem HRM strap, and the new one seems to be functioning well; tho I probably will use it sparingly until PMC weekend.

Second, a question I’d sent in to the RoadBikeRider online magazine was published this week. The question was about how to fit a cooldown, stretching, shower, and recovery meal all into the half hour after stopping that is the optimal window for those activities. You can see the full question and RBR’s response here.

And, finally, the news that really matters: PMC fundraising. Once I finally started getting fundraising letters out, the money came in quite readily. I’ve surpassed the minimum and made the Heavy Hitter level for the sixth year in a row, and have settled at $7,200 for the moment, which is quite satisfactory, although there’ll be additional donations coming in over the next month or two.

Naturally, if you haven’t made your donation yet, please do so here.

And PMC weekend is only two weeks away. I’d normally be excited, but after the difficulties of the Maine ride and CttC and this brutal heat, I’m a little gun-shy about looking forward to riding. It hasn’t been a great year for any of my cycling buddies; just ask Lynda, who canceled her plans to do the epic 745-mile PBP ride; or Paul, who bought a pricey new bike only to have Jay destroy it by driving his truck over it on the way to the 150-mile Harpoon B2B ride that was supposed to be the highlight of his season.

The bad juju is in full force this year.

So we’ll see. There’s two more weekends before the PMC, and I don’t have anything special planned for them. Hopefully there’ll be a couple Quad rides and some hill repeats in there, and then a relaxing, rewarding PMC ride once the calendar turns to August.

Hopefully…

I’ve already had two noteworthy rides this month, so here’s a quick update.

On Laborious Day, my buddy Jay tricked me into going out to Princeton MA and riding about 50 miles to the summit of Mt. Wachusett and back. At 2000 feet, Wachusett is the highest point in Massachusetts east of the Connecticut River, and the only other time I’ve climbed it by bike was on the CRW Climb to the Clouds back in 2003… five years ago!

It really was a nice ride, and quite a workout. In 2003, I approached the mountain from the north, and the ride up to the park gate seemed much more difficult than the actual climb from there to the summit. This year we came from the south, and the approach wasn’t quite as bad. However, the climb up from the gate seemed more challenging, which means the approach from the north must be even more of a beast than I remember!

We hung out at the summit for a while, and then rolled out for a nice zippy little descent back to Jay’s mom’s place. It made for a really nice day.

Then yesterday Jay and I did the Narragansett Bay Wheelmen’s Flattest Century in the East, which is in his old stomping grounds of southeastern Mass and eastern Rhode Island. It almost didn’t happen, as the remnants of Hurricane Hanna blew through overnight, but by morning it was surprisingly clear and warm. The only weather-related complications were a gusty residual breeze and a ton of windfallen branches from the storm.

I really wasn’t up for the ride. My legs hadn’t recovered from the Wachusett ride six days earlier, and I hadn’t trained at all since the PMC, a month ago. On top of that, I was overtired, headachey, and too nauseous to eat anything for breakfast. That all showed in my performance on the bike, which was okay, but lackluster.

On the minus side, by the end it was a bit of a slog, as I started to feel the effects of not eating anything beforehand or on the bike. Both Jay and I were pretty exhausted by the end, but we felt a lot better after a shower and some ice cream at his friend Steve’s, then a big meal (fajitas for me) at Healthy Grille before returning to Boston.

On the plus side, it was nice to do a long supported ride where I felt no pressure to finish early. Unlike the PMC, we took our time at the water stops, even picking up some lemon ice cream at the 50-mile stop in Tiverton RI (they were out of sorbet). The day was glorious and the ride really pretty, especially where the route touched the Atlantic coast in Tiverton and at Elephant Rock.

But I think next time I’ll plan to keep my training up and get a little more food into my body, rather than doing the ride undertrained and undernourished.

Training just keeps going, but today was another major expedition: the Charles River Wheelmen's 60-mile Climb to the Clouds, including the ascent of the 2008-foot Wachusett Mountain, the tallest mountain in eastern Massachusetts. It was a real beast, but I did manage to set another personal land speed record at 43.2 mph. My legs are aching now, but the ride was excellent training for the PMC, which is now less than three weeks away. Speaking of which, I've been focused on fundraising, which is always the more difficult part for me, and am now hovering at $1155, about on par with previous years.

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