When I started writing, it was ostensibly because I wanted to pass on my newbie experiences to the next budding Fredcyclist. The idea being I could answer some of those new-rider questions not with any authority, just the results of my own trial and error methods. It’s veered away from that and into a blather of this is what happened on my little commute today and that’s boring. Part of that detour off course is a result of this: I’m at a post-newb plateau.  I’ve learned the easiest stuff…maybe?

I’m not smart or learned by any means. My authority on matters cycling comprises the following nuggets: don’t pedal while leaning hard unless you enjoy pavement-surfing with your flesh; make sure you have air in your tires; ride as often as possible. On the other hand, here’s what I’ve learned:

• Yes, you do want stretchy pants with a chamois if you ride any distance unless you like friction burns on your most sensitive areas.
• “Slicks” or street tires on your mountain bike are definitely smoother and quieter but they were not the limiting factor in my quest for speed. The factor turned out to be me.
• Lube your chain or the squeaking and squawking will make you even more insane.
• Tires don’t hold air indefinitely – my 80psi slicks drop to 40 over a couple of weeks but make for a handy lie excuse reason you can tell yourself when you get Chicked.
• There may not be any car traffic on the bike paths, but a rear light will keep the rest of us from running you over in the dark because we are riding with
• The 3-LED headlight from MEC – makes an excellent targeting device for on-coming cars and may keep other riders from clipping you in the dark. Also serves as an excellent defense against establishing effective night-vision while simultaneously completely failing to illuminate anything far enough away to still avoid. Note to the city of Calgary – if you really loved cyclists, you’d fluoresce the yellow stripe in the middle of the path.
• If you insist on using a 1 million candle power strobe-light on your helmet while riding on the darkened bicycle path, I reserve the right to push you into the canal while claiming disorientation and blindness thanks to your head-mounted smugness device. Save it for the road where it’ll flash in everyone’s mirror after they’ve passed you and are no longer in a position to nudge you with a bumper.
• The colder it gets, the slower I go. I blame the increased air density and layers of clothing. It has nothing to do with laziness.

It was most definitely this increase in clothing layers and air density that turned me from rabbit to rabbit-chaser this morning. As is typical of my rides these days most of the path traffic is on-coming, which is good because my MEC night-vision-disruption light which as the name implies handily keeps my eyes from adjusting on the darkest sections of the path, combined with riding sans prescription glasses means I’m essentially navigating to work by muscle memory and feel. When I was kid with a big-block drum-brake hotrod, I learned all about over-driving your brakes – travelling faster than your brakes could stop you. I’m now over-driving my eyesight as, even at my reduced winter speed, there is little chance I will be able to avoid an unexpected obstacle.

Anyway – back to the engrossing tales of What I did on my commute this morning. I was passed, unexpectedly and totally off-guard by a high-cadence-pedaling rider whom I’ve seen once or twice before. My first instinct was to ignore the obvious Cat 6 race we were now in and continue as I was but as Dwernie noted last week it is not possible to simply ignore this challenge. I gave chase and didn’t lose any further ground until we got to the pedestrian bridge. I managed to maintain some semblance of speed but failed to stand and hammer when he did (note to self – stand and hammer is appropriate when in Cat 6 mode). By the time I’d reached the end of the bridge, he’d almost disappeared and our diverging routes put an end to the match. I was however given a small reward as I wound under 17th Ave and tried to run over a flagging rider making the climb up to 26th. I allowed myself a small degree of pride as I pedaled past him and he got off to start pushing. “At least I’m not pushing” I thought as I wobbled up the slope.

In recognition of the Cyclist’s Imperative to Chase Rabbits, I wish to congratulate Dwernie on his first blood. A successful pass and defense of position – job well done!  Way to represent Canadian Cat 6 riders abroad.

Dwernie

I’d let a lack of sleep, energy and the ever-present headwind slowly re-set my effort level from panting-and-sweating to I-put-some-effort-in.  Sure it was a real effort and you couldn’t say I wasn’t trying at all but it was far from my best efforts.  This all-out effort was one of the chief rewards I (re)discovered when I started riding this summer and I’d been letting it slip away.

Now I know, you can’t always perform at that level – there are days when nutrition, sleep, motivation and / or any number of other factors conspire to bring you down a notch or two.  I get that.  The difference – for me – is that while you need recovery days to, well, recover, you don’t grow by putting in a good effort – that’s not enough.  The mind and body and their remarkable adaptability will grow to perform almost any task you continue to throw at it.  The brain’s now-accepted plasticity means it will devote more physical brain real-estate to a task that has received focused effort and attention be it math, martial arts or cycling.  Anyone who’s ever done anything physical – shovelling dirt all summer, lifting weights in the gym, stone mason (okay that might be a long shot all things considered – lost art that one) – knows that your ability to perform the task after a few months of work is vastly improved.  Your mind and body have adapted.   Cool.

However, the downside to the adaptability is it’s conservation of energy.  It takes effort and energy to change – to grow new muscles, to fire more neurons and bridge more synaptic gaps – this is all energy intensive.  What does this mean?  It means you’re a bit like your co-worker who always does everything required, but never works overtime, never volunteers for extra work, never moves outside what you’ve asked of them.  Adaptation comes to a halt as soon as you give it the signal that hey – we’re good enough now thanks.  Progress comes to a halt.  You must push the bounds to grow.

As I rode out this morning, a couple of factors conspired to push me back into the panting-and-sweating zone from what has become my effortful-yet-casual mode of late.  I found myself pushing harder than I had in weeks, re-discovering the Grail zone in the process along the way.  As I approached the 8^th Ave overpass, another rider shot in ahead of me having come down from my right on the far side of the overpass.  His quick cadence implied that he was at least an attentive cyclist and the growing gap confirmed his speed was slightly faster than mine.  I briefly pondered following him but you know how that goes – we’re going the same direction, he’s not leaving me in the dust and therefore I must try.

I thought I was going to lose him on a couple of occasions as he managed to put some distance between us before I sorted out the best gear to reel him in.   I slowly bridged the gap and when I’d caught up to him, it occurred to me that I might not have it in me to get the job done.  It was not a quick pass and required an unsuccessful attempt at looking casual as we rode side by side for the eternity it took to get by.  I found a surprise burst of energy as he moved into my peripheral vision so I picked up my pace again, dropping him as best I could before taking my exit and heading east, while hoping he was headed west so I wouldn’t have to burn myself completely trying to keep my lead.

My point?  Good question.  Oh yes – that I wouldn’t have pulled that off if I hadn’t been in push-to-adapt mode.  Good enough wasn’t going to cut it.  The best part?  I felt fantastic all morning and that win – petty as it might be – fuelled my good mood (and sarcasm) all day.  I look forward to another adventure with the Grail tomorrow (assuming whatever sickness that is presently ravaging my wife is gone and I actually get out of the house – I arrived home this evening to find her sicker than I’ve ever seen her).

Unless you’re constantly surrounded by riders significantly more able than you and particularly if, like me, you ride 99.9% of the time alone, you begin to develop delusions of your ability.  I often find myself thinking “yeah – that’s right, I did just pass you like that, because I can”, while completely ignoring that they’re pushing their bike with a flat tire, thereby reinforcing my imaginary super-cyclist powers.  My favourite though is to be howling along the path with a wicked tailwind while watching all of the on-coming cyclists suffering, struggling mightily to keep above a jogging pace as their headwind acts like molasses.  This really inflates one’s illusory talent.

So with all of this pent-up talent inside, it’s only natural that I would want to find another rider and pass them.  In the beginning I was content to ride down anyone and took great pleasure in the pass irrespective of the age or condition of the rider.  Of course not being able to catch the rider towing a two-child trailer up a hill…that’s not something we need to re-visit.  Or visit.  Where was I?  Oh yes, chasing rabbits.  As my condition has improved over the summer, passing riders who aren’t trying has lost its reward.  I still try (well duh – they’re on a bike, I’m on a bike, they’re in front of me – who wouldn’t try?) to catch and pass them, but when I pull up beside them and notice they’re wearing a heavy wool trench coat, their high-heels and are riding a Townie it’s not the win I was looking for.  Unless they’re all sweaty and out of breath.  Hey – a wolf doesn’t pass up a meal just because the rabbit is missing a leg.  Not that I’m a wolf…

With the cooler weather comes the dwindling traffic  thereby causing an increase in the percentage of more serious riders.  This means fewer opportunities, but better chases.  I’m still not certain that I passed Bearded Single Speed legitimately because he finally cracked or if he simply didn’t want to ride beside me any farther.  Of these more serious riders, I routinely see two women, always going the opposite direction to my own.  Given their velocities I suspect I wouldn’t catch them if we were travelling in the same direction and that they would catch and drop me with relative ease.

One in particular who, for reasons I can’t fathom, reminds me of an acquaintance I met when we hired her to work our motorcycle booth during the Stampede.  Taisa rides but recently left town thereby removing the last 1% of possibility it was her.  When I see this unknown-yet-familiar rider, she is always riding hard and fast – determined.

Which brings me to my point…finally.  I was fighting my way home in the omnipresent headwind the other day trying to talk myself into finding some positive benefit to it (the wind, not the ride).  I’d earlier passed one of the aforementioned casual riders but had had the path to myself and my wandering mind for the bulk of things.  As I approached the Trans Canada, a rider appeared coming towards me in full tuck, in the drops and pedaling furiously with full advantage of the tailwind and I was immediately envious.  I took this all in within the split-second it took for her to appear.  Right on his wheel.

You’re probably asking yourself how I knew she was on his wheel rather than having just been passed.  Two things.  First, the path at that point is a blind, slightly uphill S-bend with a relatively narrow path and a fence on either side.  Second, she had a heretofore unseen gigantic grin on her face.  If he’d passed her on that bend, it would have been a totally uncool move by all measures and she would not have been smiling.  No – that was the enormous, predatory grin of a successful hunt.   The grin of a predator who knows the kill is at hand and the prey theirs despite their thrashing about.  It was, in the purest of moments and expressions, everything that hunting rabbits is all about.

The chase is not a male thing at all.  It’s a for-those-with-drive thing.  It’s awesome.

So it was that I was heading home and thinking that I’d not had a good rabbit chase since the weather had taken a rather permanent turn to cold mornings and cool afternoons.  The less determined / smarter cyclists have parked their bikes and returned to their BMWs until the sun returns and warms things up in the spring.  The reduced volume means reduced opportunities.  It also means when the opportunities come, the object of the chase is likely to be that much more determined to drop his (or her) pursuer.  Such is the position I found myself in this evening as I tried to reel in the rider in front of me.

I spotted him as his path from downtown and my own  both turn to head north but are separated by the canal.  At this point he had the advantage as his path carries on straight and I have to cross the canal before tucking in behind him.  He had a pretty good pace going and I wasn’t sure whether I was up to the chase however being me I quickly determined that I was unable to ignore the fact that he was out front and not dropping me any further behind.  I was able to put a half-hearted and half-assed effort into playing the game.  It occurred to me more than once that he might be one of those who enjoys allowing himself to be painstakingly  reeled in and then dropping his pursuer when they finally get close.  We would see.

I managed to maintain my half-assed effort and was rewarded with half-assed results – go figure.  By the time we got to the Trans Canada, he was roughly that distance away – him under the north overpass, me under the south.  He looked back to check my position as he wove through the train gate and headed up my nemesis hill.  As I made my way through the gate it occurred to me that I was feeling pretty good though still skirting around the zone and never quite in it.

I stepped up my effort and found my lungs, which is to say I worked up a good panting – as I continued to chase him.  I’d almost dismissed the idea of catching him given my particular relationship with this hill but I kept at it if for no other reason than to knock some of this hill off.  As we reached the end of the climb he was less than 10 meters in front of me.

This was as close as I would get to him sadly.  I’d all but exhausted myself and had to watch as he slowly drifted further and further away, putting another cyclist between us.  It took me more distance than I care to note before I caught the intermediate rider and I was not over-joyed to see I’d had to expend great (non-zone) effort to catch a bearded guy riding a single-speed.  Maybe I should grow a beard.

A recent commute home had also been in a stiff headwind with some sprinkling rain here and there in less-than-warm temps if I recall.  Rather than being disappointed about it, I put my head down, my man-pants on and got to work.  I pedaled as fast as I could for as long as I could and ignored the rest of the world.  When I got home I felt fantastic and was certain I’d just laid down a solid time for the trip.  I was shocked to find it was in fact typical of my miserable headwind rides.  Genuinely.  It didn’t bother me in the least however, just left me surprised.  If you were to ask me “how was the ride home”, I’d respond “awesome!”.  Question is, how do I make every miserable headwind-plagued ride an awesome ride in the zone?

Yesterday as I approached Edmonton Trail, preparing mentally for the climb up to Centre, there was a rider already stopped at the light.  Things, for me, got strange immediately as his stopped position was too far away from the intersection though he was clearly intending to cross it.  I do it one of two ways – in heavy traffic I wait at the crosswalk as it puts me ahead of most of the traffic so I have a clearer view of the intersection and nobody is trying to run me down making their right turn.  Or – if traffic is lighter I’ll ride up to the front of the empty right lane, but on the inside of it.  This rider was back a few feet from anywhere I’d normally stop, so without really thinking about it, I passed him and stopped in front.  I realized too late how it must look and it was admittedly rude but I don’t run into other riders at this light when it’s red.  Ever.  I didn’t really know how to approach it.  I commented on the wind and as the light went green he continued to chat about the state of the bike path.  This is all together new to me – stranger / cyclist chatting.  This too presents a conflict with my established habits.

As a new rider, a new, aging rider watching “the big four-oh” coming at him full speed, a new, aging, 40-ish rider with asthma and a not-that-long-ago tobacco habit, any departure from level ground to a positive angle – meaning uphill – is noted immediately and tends to be a challenge.  My normal course of action had until recently been to simply stand up and mash away while trying not to slow too badly.  As an experiment I’ve been staying in the saddle and dropping into the middle ring (the bottom of the middle ring if I’m honest) and pedaling furiously and while the results have been not all together bad, there are times when standing just seems to be the right thing to do.  Like this section of my ride.

So here we are stranger-chatting as we approach the first bit of incline, him on my right and me wondering if I’m capable of making this little hump while I’m still in the saddle without getting run over by the cyclist that suddenly appeared behind us.  I’m not sure if I earned it with all this headwind riding or if he opted to play nice but by the time we’d made it to the first false flat, he’d stopped chatting and slowly dropped behind.  Before we made it to the next intersection, he was far enough behind me that my habits were no longer his concern.  I rolled through the stop sign and continued to pedal up the gentle slope past the Handi-bus barn to 1^st street.  He gained ground behind me and I figured here was where he was going to drop me.  Heading south onto 1^st, it turns into a short, steep climb of perhaps 10 meters over 70.  Having ridden the previous 25 minutes home in a headwind, it was nice to have the wind at my back but I was a bit knackered so I stood up and mashed away pushing myself up the hill without so much as a Fred-mirror glance.  Again I was conscious of how it might have looked – me trying to drop my new chatting friend but I didn’t stop.

The truth is though, I wasn’t looking for him, no longer paying him any attention and I hadn’t noticed the 3^rd rider since we hit the first slope.  I don’t know if he followed me south on his own route or headed north instead.  I was tired, near the end of my ride and wanted to finish it my way.  I rounded the bend onto 34^th and made the climb up to Centre with everything I had and found Centre empty, so I crossed it and went home a sweaty, mushy, happy rider.

9 times or more out of 10, I ride my commute like a man possessed, pushing my mental limits, pushing my legs and lungs.  I like to ride like that, I enjoy that suffering, pushing the boundaries for more growth.

While I am absolutely helpless against chasing down a rabbit, or trying to run away as one myself, it’s  only me I’m competing against.  If I manage to chase down a rabbit, I’ve earned that pass.  I know I’ve been travelling faster for however long it’s taken me to catch them and I can continue that pace (probably).  Passing the rabbit is not a conehead move.  Likewise, being passed while I’m riding hard means they earned it – nothing coneheaded about that.  Pulling in front of another rider at a stoplight and then racing away on the green – it might look like I’m trying to drop them but –honest – they’ve just wandered onto my private track.

Thomas dropped by for a short visit this morning and commented on trying to find me on our morning commute.  His being on schedule (and faster by an order of magnitude) a coincident of our individual space/time continua would be…would be a coincidence.  Riding with Thomas a couple of times a week would be nice training though as my ego wouldn’t permit me to do anything less than fry myself trying to keep up.

My first morning commute took just shy of 42 minutes at an average speed of 20km/h. Today a typical fair-weather commute is 30 minutes-ish and I was over-joyed the first time I broke that 30-minute barrier.  Not having a new goal however has allowed for some degree of slacking.  As I’ve grown into a 30 minute commute, my efforts have slackened, my speed flattened out and my progress slowed to a virtual halt.  My 30 minute commute is starting to look more like a 31.

You know what I need?  I need daily rabbits, as evidenced by today’s superb commute home.  Still cold as all get out for a guy in shorts but my head was in the game. What to my wandering eye did appear?  Three riders together, 600 meters out.  I put my head down and started pushing, shifting up another gear and bringing my cadence up.  One Two One Two One Two no wait circlescirclescirclescirclescirclescircles oh this is stupid.  You can’t pace yourself into spinning circles.  I wasn’t making much progress though – they were slowly getting closer but my plans of catching them before the train crossing were slipping away.  The train crossing came and my rabbits still had 150 meters on me, and they’d just passed someone else.  Wait…what’s that?  It’s my purple rabbit!

He was so tantalizingly close!  I’m starting the climb from the crossing to the pedestrian overpass, my daily grinder.  I stand up, grab one more gear and stare at my front wheel, a long staircase in my mind.  I pump away, “up up up up up up” each time imagining another step.  I dare not look more than a couple of meters ahead of me for staring at the bridge is akin to looking Medusa in the face – all of your resolve and your will suddenly vanish as you realize you’re only half-way there on the little false flat.  ”Up up up up”, it seems to go on forever.  Maybe they’ll all head across the bridge and my chase will be over.

No.  Not today.  The four of them continued north and I continued to chase.  Mildly delirious I sat down and dropped a gear to give the legs a break but being slightly detached I spun madly away at a cadence that gave me the appearance of one suffering an epileptic seizure.  ”Gear stupid, grab another gear”, I shifted back up, went back to studying my knees and mashed on.

In my imagination I am a work of physical prowess, muscles all firing in a symphony of power and ability, bike and rider one with the universe as we blaze across the path.  A harmonious creature doing as it is designed to do.  The reality I’m told, is slightly different.  Weaving and wobbling all over the path, the mere concept of keeping my line, much less an ability to discern and then organize the required muscular responses to follow it are simply not happening.  I am foaming at the mouth, spittle splashed across my cheek and drool on my chin. Sweat is dripping down the inside of my glasses which you would think might inhibit my vision but I’m no longer processing at 30 frames per second and my world has become much narrower.  I am vaguely aware of my lower jaw coming unhinged and dropping away to open up the path to my lungs as I greedily inhale the air around me.    I let out a deep, gutteral growl akin to an angry squirrel.  Mice everywhere point and laugh.

Meter by meter I reel them all in.  A block before my route departs from the path I catch them, all four bunched up on the path.  I follow them down from 32nd around the power substation on freshly paved trail but there is no point in passing now and to do so would require an extraordinary act of obnoxious obtuseness I opt not to engage.

In reviewing the ride data at home, it seems I’ve set a new personal record for that grinding climb.  4 rabbits and a new PR – that’s a fine ride indeed.