Don't Try This at Home

I landed last night on flight 216 from San Diego to Phoenix at 10:30 p.m., and drove home to arrive at my house around 11:40 p.m. I had a planned ride this morning with my common training partner, The Firefighter, and I wanted to blow it off because it involved waking up around 4:00 in the morning and getting potentially less then 4 hours of sleep. It just seemed kind of dumb. This is about the time I read this, and said to myself, "Alright, I can do this." When the very person you are planning to ride with blogs about the benefits of training with a partner having someone to hold you accountable, you can't just cancel on less then 5 hours notice. So I unpacked my bags and headed up to bed, put on my PJ's, turned off the lights, and realized that I was not tired in the least. I was fairly exhausted from a long day of 4 flights and then the drive home, but I was not ready for bed. It took reading 40 pages of a book, putting on a pair of compression socks to help my leg circulation, and taking three Advil, but I was eventually ready for bed. I finally hit the sheets at 1:30 in the morning. As I was dreaming about wonderful happy things, the alarm went off, telling me that, yes, I got only 2.5 hours of sleep and was about to embark on a 52.5-mile bike ride on a day with a high of 113 degrees.

A Marathon Bar, bottle of Gatorade and 32 ounces of water later, I was prepping my equipment to show The Firefighter he had definitely held me accountable. I really wasn't excited. They say that the workouts you least look forward to are often the best ones - the ones you really appreciate after. I did appreciate 5:00 a.m. and 91 degrees before the sun has come up, but not as much as I hoped I would. The ride started well, as I warmed up after a long run the day before and tried to get some blood pumping to my tired legs. Seven miles in, I started feeling pretty good as I met my training partner and we were off catching up because we had not trained together for a couple weeks. Twenty-five miles in, I heard him say, "I'm trying to push it more today, but we're not really going very fast." There was a little levity and excitement around mile 30 when another cyclist we saw biffed randomly and fell off his bike (he was okay). We had spent the entire ride up to this point with a headwind, and we were looking forward to rounding the corner into 12 straight miles of downhill riding...it would be like in the movies when a beam of sunlight parts the clouds and you hear angelic music in the background.


We reached our corner, only to find that there was no music, the sun was high in the sky beaming down everywhere, and the temperature was now around 97 degrees. This was only slightly alarming, but then the wind shifted and we once again had a headwind that felt like my wife was holding her hair dryer to my face. The dramatic high of the ride came around mile 44 when my tire popped and my water bottle holder broke mid-ride. Even with all of that, we had optimism and high hopes, saying that we would treat the last portion of the ride like a time trial and sprint home. Unfortunately, lactic acid had built up in our legs, and we were actually more tired than had we never stopped.

It was a gutsy ride if ever a training ride can be. A windy morning during the hot summer in Phoenix, blown tires, cyclists falling off their bikes...and all on 2.5 hours of sleep. And, the lack of sleep was after a long workday when I had also done a long run the day before. I can honestly say that the lesson for the day is that although this is the type of workout that can represent strong gains and mental fortitude, you can also hurt yourself by overdoing it if you aren't in mid-season training or you don't know your limits. The poor luck and follies I had today were really pretty fun in the moment. But had I not hydrated correctly (and had I not experienced symptoms of overdoing it in the past and learned if I had pushed too hard), I could have really hurt myself today by risking heat exhaustion or a pulled muscle. So the next time you read your friend's blog and he is doing the right thing by holding you accountable...don't be afraid to say "no" if necessary and just go back to bed.