Things I learned yesterday

1. Do not eat a leek & spaghetti omelet before a century (sure there might be people who'd advise never to eat such a concoction ever again)
2. Do not plan your future when climbing up under the sun to the even more scorching pass
3. Doing a self-supported century us much harder than an organized one, even when the organization is poor.
4. Heat kills. OK, I did not learn that directly, but I had a feeling that it's not too unlikely to just step over the tipping point
5. If you can't choose the weather, take your time, pace yourself carefully.

The course:

Virtual Etape

Cycling.tv has posted an excellent Rider's Guide to the Ultimate Sportive (note: if the link does not work click on "Video on Demand," and look among the free2view selection). And the "ultimate sportive" is of course none less than this year's Etape du Tour!

It's still winter in the Pyrenees and the Cycling TV team previews this year's course talking about gearing, nutrition, allocating one's energies to be able to finish the course. The two main climbs are detailed, as well as the two preliminary ones.

With the Tourmalet climb being the main event of the day and therefore somewhat "accounted for" in everybody's mind, there are two things that emerge from the video. First, the Tourmalet descent will be scarier, and much longer than the recent experience descending Deer Creek (although pavement could hardly be worse, unless completely absent). In the video of course the snow and ice still present on that side of the mountain make things seem probably a little worse than they will be with the summer in full bloom. Second, the final climb to Hautacam will probably be the hardest bit: all happening in the last 15 kilometers with relatively steep terrain and probably very little left in the legs. Clearly that will be the time to go down to the 34x25, but time is also a factor: the organization has posted the course with the elimination times. In other words, "just making it" won't cut it this time, least suffer the indignity of the voiture balai.

How to train for something like this? Short of arriving in loco a couple of months earlier to try out the course, the best that I can imagine doing is to do multiple centuries at a steady pace, interspersed with extended climbing weekends. After working on my "base" for four months, and sweating my way up and down the Santa Monicas in the Mulholland Challenge, it's finally the time for the serious miles.

Entwined

I make a point to stop along my daily bike commute take in the details of the world we live in. Every day there something new, or something old and usual that sparkles in new light. In the good season, there's an old lady sitting on the porch of her trailer. Sometimes she knits, always wrapped up in a heavy winter coats. She's there when I bike by in the morning, she's there when I come back in the afternoon. More than once I have seen vultures praying, sitting on top of a pole spreading their wings to salute the sun.

Sometimes I take pictures, never enough, I never seem to have my camera when something cool happens. I love bicycling as it renew the physical contact with the outside, something that most car drivers have long forgot, anesthetized in their airtight cabs, their brain stunned by bubblegum muzak. How much do they miss of their lives?

Today I was flying down the bike path, wind in my favor, when I saw a cyclist, stopped on the side of the narrow ribbon of asphalt that crosses the once glorious Goleta slough. I glanced in passing to figure out what he was looking at, and soon I was braking and doing a quick about-face. Non two yards from the bike path, two gopher snakes were mating, dancing, the entwined lovers moved slowly in the grass, twisting more and more around each other, their tongues flicking, looking for each other. I had never seen anything like that "live". Beautiful, and surprisingly tender, in an unexpectedly wild way. Soon people started to stop and see what was going on, observing at a distance, talking about their own reptilian encounters. Try doing that on 101.

But the biggest difference is in feeling truly alive, our hunting genes being satisfied by the physical exertion, our natural curiosity by the sheet beauty of every day's discovery.

"I never feel that I am inspired unless my body is also. It too spurns a tame and commonplace life. They are fatally mistaken who think, while they strive with their minds, that they may suffer their bodies to stagnate in luxury or sloth. A man thinks as well through his legs and arms as his brain." -- Henry David Thoreau