Blog extras #1: The Daily Routine

Wake-up & breakfast

Each morning starts with a 6 am alarm clock.  However, many mornings, I’m already up long before then.  It’s really weird.  You’d think that, with all the exercise from the previous day, I’d be so exhausted as to fall quickly into dreamland and sleep well into the night.  But that’s rarely the case.  Most nights, I wake up once or twice during the night.  When I’ve talked about this with fellow riders (of ANY age), they all share similar experiences.

Once I’m up, I do some stretching, then hop in the shower just to warm up my muscles and get a bit looser.  Then it’s putting on whatever cycling outfit I’m wearing that day on the road.  Not the formal dressing, but to wear something.

From there, it’s downstairs for breakfast.  Most of the hotels we are staying at offer a full buffet breakfast.  The selections vary, depending on both the country as well as how many stars the hotel has [we’ve usually been staying at 2 or 3-star hotels, occasionally a 4-star (Novotel or NH in Spain)].

Breakfast is all about loading up on fuel for the day so this becomes our major meal.  Although it varies with each person’s capacity and taste, but we usually have three courses:  Some eggs and bacon, some form of potato (or a combo in Spain with their tortillas de patatas) and maybe tomatoes; followed by either toast or fresh baguette with ham/jambon/jamon and cheese; then a bowl of cereal with fresh fruit and either milk or yoghurt.  Fresh juice and coffee or tea.  And, sure, if there are fresh croissants or pain au chocolates, at least one of those as well (those seem to now be universal and no longer the strict provenance of France).  By the way…we’re burning somewhere between 3500-5500 calories per day on these rides.

Pre-ride

Back in the room, it’s time to hit the bathroom one last time before the ride starts.  There are few, if any, places along the day’s route to stop and take care of business (which is why we all carry a small baggie with toilet paper and a wipe, just in case).  Then it’s taking off what I wore to breakfast to lube up.  There are many products but I use a combination of chamois butter and Bollocks, a butt balm from England.  Applied to those areas that will take most of the chafing action during the day as well as to the chamois in my bike shorts.  Then it’s getting dressed again and including either an undershirt, a vest, a windbreaker or a rain jacket depending on the weather conditions and the outside temperature.

Check list of everything I’ll need to carry with me today:  Road ID wristband (left wrist), phone in a waterproof baggie (center back pocket), small waterproof case (with cash, credit cards, ID and extra electrolyte tablets) (left back pocket), lip balm, aforementioned toilet baggie, and energy gels (all in my right back pocket).  We don’t look fashionable, but we carry what we need to get through the day.

Next is bringing our gear downstairs so that Jesse can load the car.  Once we’ve done that, it’s back to the room to bring down the bikes. Either in the lobby or right outside the hotel, everyone tops up the air in their tires with the one floor pump we’ve brought along for the trip.  Then it’s one last check to make sure the brakes are aligned, the Garmin’s are set and showing today’s route, and the front and rear lights are all working (when riding on a tour such as this, it’s pretty much standard to have both front and rear flashing lights to help warn oncoming traffic of our presence).

The ride

When everyone is ready, we take off.  We usually ride as a group when we are leaving a town.  The “strength in numbers” philosophy applies until we’re beyond the city limits, at which point we begin to ride at our own pace.  We might stay together or we might not see each other again until either a SAG stop or at the hotel at the end of the day’s ride.  Jane and Gene will ride together.  I might follow either Michelle or Laura depending on the number of hills.  James is the fastest in the group and quickly is off on his own.

Along the ride path, we usually stop either for a SAG stop or to take pictures.  The SAG stops are all about topping up our water bottles and getting a snack, usually some kind of energy bar (more on that in another segment).

Post-ride

When the ride ends, Jesse has already arrived at the hotel and unloaded the bags from the car. Sometimes we have access to the car and sometimes it’s locked away for the night.  So he’s gotten used to knowing the importance of having everything necessary out of the car and within reach for whoever needs whatever.

Once I’ve checked into the room, it’s the start of a major post-ride routine:  Showering, stretching, washing clothes, charging the Garmin and flashing lights and, if it’s early enough, eating a late lunch. By the end of a long day’s ride, the Garmin is down to about 15% power levels. That’s the first one to get plugged in. Then it’s my rear flashing lights. Their internal batteries are recharged by plugging in as well (my front light runs of AA batteries).  Then I recharge my phone.

The clothes washing is done in the shower.  We don’t always have either access to or the time available for a trip to a laundromat to do a proper clothes washing, so “sink washing,” as it’s sometimes referred to, is the only way to ensure that you have (more or less) clean clothes to wear for the next few days, even if you’ve brought extra shorts/shirts/socks/gloves.  There’s no way to wear sweaty clothes without suffering the consequences.

One of the tricks I learned years ago from past cross-country rides was the 2^ndwringing of clothes to help them dry quicker.  The first wringing of the clothes is in the shower itself.  Once I’m out of the shower and have dried off, having left my now clean bike clothes in there to start to drip dry, I wring them out.  Then (and I’m usually good at getting extra towels to do this), I lay out the wrung-out clothes on a towel and roll the towel up with each clothing item.  When it’s totally rolled up, I do a 2^ndwringing of the towel with the clothing inside.  That soaks up even more water and the clothes come out drier. The rest is hanging clothes up in the room (I’ve also learned to bring a set of foldable travel hangars) or laying them out the window or, in some cases when we’re on the ground floor (and it’s sunny and hot outside and it’s a casual country hotel), lay the clothes outside on either hangers or chairs or, as was the case outside of Bordeaux, on the hedges alongside the hotel.  You’d be amazed how this crowd has learned to keep clothes dry in time for the next day’s ride.

After all that, and maybe after having lunch, everyone retreats to his/her room to relax, reflect or take a nap.  Once in a while, we’re in a town that’s worth having a walk around to sightsee.

Drinks/Dinner

Around 6pm each night, we get together downstairs at the hotel bar, or at a neighboring facility, for a couple of beers/cokes/waters/whatevers, and catch up on each other’s take on the day’s ride.  Everyone is swapping stories about their own experiences including what they saw along the way, how they avoided getting a flat tire or a deer crossing the road, etc.

The true cyclists are downloading their daily ride data on Strava, a cycling website that records and catalogs the routes.  It can tell you if anyone else has ridden the same or similar route as well as whether or not you were faster/slower than others.  Yesterday alone, Laura clocked in as Queen of the Mountain on those three nasty climbs.  In other words, no other woman had either ridden up those hills or had ridden it faster. We all like to think that, for Laura’s sake (as she’s a true cyclist), it was the latter.

Then it’s on to dinner, usually between 7-8 pm depending on the country and what we can find locally. By 9:30 pm, we’re all tired and heading back to our rooms.

Post-Dinner

I’m usually trying to write up my basic notes and downloading the photos of the day during the afternoon hours and adding whatever extra color commentary, as well as swapping the photo that I missed but someone else had, and vice versa, during dinner. Back in the room, I’ll finish off the blog post and publish it.

The final things to do before going to sleep is topping up the water bottles, adding an electrolyte tablet to one of them, and lubing my bike chain.  The electrolyte tablets are to help prevent muscle cramping.  We don’t have Gatorade on this trip, so I brought enough tablets for each day’s ride throughout this route.

And then, hopefully, it’s lights out and a decent night’s sleep.  Tomorrow we start again.  

Rinse, lather, repeat. 

Or, as Jesse put it when talking to a friend of his with great amazement early in the trip, “These people are crazy!  They get up so early in the morning; eat more for breakfast than you or I consume in a day; ride 75-100 miles in the heat or rain; meet up later in the day before dinner and knock back more drinks that I’m comfortable admitting having; eat dinner where they consume more alcohol; go to bed and wake up and do it all over again the next day!  I mean, how cool is that!?”