Having good riding buddies is a great thing. I’ve learned a lot about mountain and road cycling from them over the years. But the hard part, kind of like how it is in life in general, is that they don’t last. They come. And they go. And when they go, the great experiences we’ve racked up together on bike rides are over, only memories.
I got into mountain biking years ago with a couple of guys, Mike and Mark, whom I worked with at a newspaper for a lot of years. We were gung ho for many weekend rides all over Northern California, with Mike nice enough to do the driving almost every time. We tried out trails in the mountains, along the coast, and sometimes joined other guys we knew who also mountain biked. We had plenty of adventures and laughs.
Mike was 10 years older than me and I was 10 years older than Mark. But Mike was something when he got excited about riding his bike. He and Mark were riding ahead of me on a lose rock stretch of a foothills trail, and Mark later told the story, which included a phrase we’ll all never forget.
“I was starting a fast descent that was rocky and technical and all of a sudden Mike flies past me and blurts out ‘You have no idea of the capability of these machines!’ He’s flying down the trail, and when I catch up to him at the bottom, he’s lying on the trail, bloody and groaning, his bike is flipped up on the other side.”
Mike was OK, he shook it off and got back on the bike, but I think he bruised or broke his ribs. Dude was crazy inspired on rides sometimes.
Another time Mike had Mark’s bike on his roof rack and on the way to get coffee, drove into a parking garage entrance. The seat of Mark’s bike grazed the low concrete ceiling of the garage, and Mike stopped the truck right away, realizing he’d forgotten about the bike up top. Mark’s bike seemed OK, until he was climbing on a ride we did later that morning with a few other friends. All of a sudden his seat post snapped, apparently it hadn’t escaped the garage ceiling without damage after all. And his seat flipped down unattached into the dirt. He turned around and rode back to the truck as the rest of us pedaled on, riding his bike with a broken seat post for a seat. Couldn’t sit down without painful results!
Another time, the three of us went on a ride with my brother in law Tony, in the mountains around Tony’s house. It was a pretty tough ride, with a long stretch of technical climbing at the end. When we got back to the truck, Mike gasped for air as he crawled behind the wheel, completely spent. He was like the guy on his hands and knees in the desert in rags, dying of thirst and hunger. I gave him a plum I had in my bag and he ate it pretty fast. It was wild, he must have been completely out of blood sugar, calories, fuel of any kind, because he looked like he’d never get his wind back. But soon after he downed the plumb, like magic, his breathing normalized. It was like he’d gotten an intravenous drip of glucose, he was suddenly good to go.
That same day we rode a two-lane curving mountain highway to get back to the trailhead to Tony’s house, and Tony rode about 60 yards ahead of me on the narrow right edge of the road. On the right of us was a steep embankment that looked like it was best to avoid careening into. A huge semi trailer truck roared by me and it felt like it was about one foot away from me, as I tried not to be blown off the road and down the embankment. I stayed the course, but looked ahead as the semi bore down on Tony. Holy crap, he had less room than I did, and the truck did the same thing to him. I winced as I watched Tony disappear over the crest of the hill, I couldn’t tell right away if he made it. Somehow, I found out soon after, he managed to hang in there. It was funny when we talked about it later, but pretty hairy to experience. Could have ended badly.
And then there was the time…
The toughest mountain bike ride I’ve ever been on was with my buddies Kevin and Nils. It’s called the Hole in the Ground, and is a high altitude mountain bike trail near Donner Summit, a ski resort northwest of Lake Tahoe. This ride wasn’t much different from running a marathon, hours long and grueling. We parked at the end of the trail, then rode a paved two-lane road looking for a turnoff where the trail started. We missed the turnoff initially and ended up riding a couple uphill miles before we turned around to look harder for it. We finally found it, but wasted some valuable energy getting there. I remember at the beginning of the trail, having a foreboding feeling that this trail was going to completely kick our asses. Guess what? It did.
Right from the beginning it was steep and technical, our heart rates were immediately up in the high altitude and thin air.
We rode under the interstate and got on the steep trail through a pine forest that led to a series of uphill switchbacks. It wasn’t far from scaling a very high cliff. Kevin was more fit and a better technical rider than Nils or myself, and he got to rest at the top as he gladly rested and waited for Nils and me to straggled up, airless, legs beat.
We rode on along an exposed rocky ridge, then did a quick technical descent that Nils took too fast. He flew off the front of his bike and did a chest plant, luckily on some fairly forgiving dirt. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I hadn’t hydrated nearly enough and my quads cramped up, the result of the nasty switchback climbing. I stopped and tried to get my quads to quit barking, but that made them scream out more bloody pain. I rode on, and they calmed down, but by now, this trail was giving all of us a serious beat down.
Although the next part of the ride was technical, a lot of it was downhill. If I’d been in better shape and properly hydrated and fueled up, it would have been a lot more fun. But cramped up, it was more about riding defensively, trying to keep from crashing. We stopped to rest and we all got this creepy feeling like we were in a snowstorm that was piling up snow quickly around us, and that what we needed to do was keep moving.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” said Kevin, who then took off ahead of Nils and me.
We rode on through the rocks and woods and stopped at the top of a steep, soft dirt downhill. Kevin went first, then Nils, then me. Once at the bottom we had about a mile of uphill dirt, rock and gravel road that wasn’t too steep, but just steep enough to put the hurt on big time after the physical smashing we’d already suffered on the trail. When we finally made it back to the cars, we were done, absolutely fried. I got into Kevin’s car, and both quads cramped mercilessly. Yep, we made it to the end of Hole in the Ground. It was a torturous ride none of us would ever forget.
Til next time, remember to strap on a helmet every time you get on the bike. Then, keep the rubber side down, ride safely and don’t forget to have a blast.
-- Mark Eric Larson
No comments:
Post a Comment