Many aspects of this long ride can be broken down into two parts: The physical and the mental.
Physical
The physical aspects are easy to appreciate. Cycling for five to seven hours each day is all about working.
It took all of us months to train for a ride such as this. It’s not simply getting one’s legs in shape. It’s also about building up core muscle strength, to help relieve the pressure on the lower back. Arm strength is also important, especially when climbing. There is so much work your arms do in helping “pull” you up the mountain.
But when the ride comes, all the prep work is put to use. Immediately. I really feel it in my thighs, especially after a long day of climbing. And, even after stretching and rolling out my legs and lower back, they still ache. We’re not having much luck finding ice available at the hotels after a day’s ride, so I can’t ice my knees and thighs. Biofreeze helps a little but it’s palliative at best. So I just grin and bear it.
But fatigue does set in, especially when there are daily climbs. There are no “rest” days on this trip that consist of a totally flat stage. Every day of this tour has included either mountain or steep hill climbs, or rolling hills. Yes, the latter are less challenging, but they still require your legs to get you up them.
Besides my legs, there are sometimes issues with my hands. One of the reasons I’m moving my hand positions during the day’s ride is to alleviate the pressure put on them. The constant pulling from my hands as I climb up miles of hills can create a numbness in them. Even on long, fat sections of the ride, the same sensation can occur. Many people think that all your weight is on your seat when you ride. In actuality, much of the weight is divided between your feet and your hands. You want as little weight on your seat as possible as that can increase the potential for saddle sores (discussed previously so, as a promise to readers from the past, I won’t go into detail on that subject J).
I see every rider doing the same exercise with their hands. One hand will come off the bike just to get the circulation flowing back again. Then it’s a switch of the hands and the other hand gets the same treatment. That routine will repeat itself about once every five miles or so.
After two weeks of riding, the physical toll of our riding begins to creep in. We are slower getting up in the morning. We are slower to get a good rhythm going when we start to ride. Some of the better riders are, two weeks into this ride, starting to become aware of their leg fatigue. So it’s not just wimpy me feeling that way! J And starting and stopping, as when we break for lunch along the ride route, can also be a challenge. My ability to rebound after a prolonged break shows how long it’s taking for me to recover.
Mental
The mental aspects of the ride are, in many ways, even more challenging than the steep mountain climbs. Why? Because the minute I stop paying attention to the road, something bad can happen. I might miss a turn. I might miss seeing a pothole or other debris in the road that would damage a tire, the wheel or the bike itself.
Just as physical fatigue kicks in either at the end of a long day or after two weeks of riding, mental fatigue can do just the same. It can result in my daydreaming and not focusing on the road. Or it can cause me to lose my focus on something as simple as picking up my water bottle to drink while riding at 18 miles per hour and absent-mindedly putting it back in a slot that doesn’t exist (I’m looking at the road ahead and not down at my bottle cages). Result? My water bottle goes careening off my bike and onto the roadway.
Another example is the simple act of moving my hands around the handlebars. I might readjust my hand positions, usually to relieve pressure on certain parts of my palms. In doing so, if I’m not deliberate in placing my hands in just the right spot, I might hit the top of the bars or the brake cowlings (not the brakes themselves). That simple act of bumping into something could cause the bike to veer off and lose my balance, potentially causing a crash if I totally lose control. Yes, it’s that kind of simple thing that requires me to remain focused all during the ride.
And there are distractions that can cause that loss of focus. A rabbit running across the road. A car suddenly appearing out of nowhere from a side street and starting to enter the road in front of you, even if it doesn’t actually make that turn. All those thing as well as great sights along the way, can cause me to lose my focus.
A typical ride day
There’s another aspect of the mental challenges of a long day’s ride. You could almost break up a day into three parts: The morning ride out of the hotel, the last miles into the next town, and everything in between. It’s like an Oreo cookie. The starting section out of town and the ending section coming back into another town are two halves of the same cookie. All the spaces we ride in between those population centers is the cream filling.
We start off early in the morning with a bounce in our step and a fresh perspective on the day. There’s an enthusiasm for the day ahead. Bodies are fueled. Minds are fresh. We’re off on another adventure.
The morning ride is sometimes a slow-going affair as we wend our way through traffic to get outside of the city. We are awake so we are cautious of on-coming cars and trucks and it’s usually a cool, bright sunshine morning. We’re all smiles.
Once we’re out of sight of the town and in the countryside, we’re the “in-between” section, which can range from 40-90 miles. We hopscotch for one town to another with few aspects of an active human population in between.
For me, it is all about getting through the day. There are days when we are riding past one farm after another. Or past a series of industrial complexes. Or through canyons or along rivers. All those sights can take my mind off of the road, or the miles yet to ride.
But even if there are many interesting things to see along the route, as the miles go on, I usually am doing a series of mental exercises to figure how far I need to ride. I use the various distances from my training rides to remind myself that, for instance, yes, I can do the next 50 miles; it’s no different than my training ride for Point A to Point B.
I also am “playing music” in my head. We don’t ride with headphones. It’s too dangerous on these long rides. In the past, some folks have hooked up Jawbone speakers to their Camelback water backpacks, so they can listen to music that has been connected to their phones via Bluetooth.
Depending on my cadence (how fast/slow I’m spinning), I am usually listening to a song at that same tempo (anything from Green Day to Squeeze). But things along the route can trigger a song (a “long and winding road” – The Beatles; a long road to nowhere – Miles to Nowhere – The Smithereens, “ten miles behind me and ten thousand more to go” – James Taylor, etc.). My head is like an iPod.
The last five or so miles of the day is almost a repeat of the morning, but in reverse. When we start seeing signs for the finishing town, we all wake up just a bit more. Not because there will be more traffic (although that’s important) but because we’ll soon be in a hot shower and off our bikes. There’s also a bit of urgency, especially after a grueling day dealing with the distance, the hills, the heat or any combination of the three. We just want to get there.
There’s a keen sense of that anticipation as we see our bike computers counting down the miles. The pastures and the barbed wire fencing are behind us. We change our cadence and our tempo. We wind down from the long hours in the sun along emptier and less well-paved roads.
But the entering into a new town also wakes us up in another way. The roads are now filled with signs, with people walking along the sidewalks. We have traffic lights and cars to deal with again. There’s a spring in our step; an acceleration in our pacing. We’re almost home for the day.
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