Saturday was an almost perfect ride day- 75 degrees and a lovely route from San Rafael out to Stinson Beach (thankfully no bike accidents like last year's ride on this same route on Memorial Day weekend). The day was just barely marred by chilly weather close to Stinson, but really I couldn't even go so far as to say that was a negative. The Death Ride team was also out in West Marin, and it was fun to see them breeze past our last SAG stop, shouting out jovial greetings.
Sunday was a different story entirely. Our ride left from Yountville in the Napa Valley. It started out innocuously, and in fact pleasantly. The IronTeam met at the same park where we started our ride. It's always fun to fraternize with the other teams, and once you've been involved in Team in Training for a few seasons, you start to know a lot of people from the other sports. It's like those cool crossover episodes where the detectives from Law & Order go to Baltimore to investigate a case with the guys from Homicide: Life on the Street.
I saw my friend Phil (aka IronPhil) from IronTeam and we wished each other well on our respective rides and runs and hoped to see each other back at the park around the same time 6 hours later...
The first 20 miles of our ride wound along the Silverado Trail, HWY 29, and through the beautiful Pope Valley. We're talking rolling hills along quiet country roads, surrounded by vineyards and oak trees hung with Spanish moss. Beautiful. But, oh, how it was to end so abruptly!
Pope Valley view
As we began to follow a road that rose out of the valley toward Lake Berryessa, the temperature also began to rise. It quickly reached the point of being unbearable once we were in sight of the lake. We lost all tree cover and the sun beat brutally off the asphalt, reducing me to my lowest gear on even the slightest uphill grade. With each exhale of breath, a new expletive escaped my lips. Every time the road offered a little bit of descent, it spitefully began to climb again in a relentless succession of up and down. At first I was riding conservatively to preserve energy, but after a short time I had to out of necessity. We've had such a mild spring that none of us has trained in temperatures above 75 degrees, and we were not conditioned for this kind of heat. By noon temperatures had soared to a whopping 102 degrees! And who knows how much hotter it really was on the asphalt?
Thankfully my teammate, Libby, decided to pull off the road and rest in a lone shady spot. I'd already had one dry heave, so it was good to stop and sit for a while. Although my pride tends to stop me from bailing on a ride, instinct told me that I had the onset of heat exhaustion: rapid pulse, nausea, and chills. From that point, I never got back on the bike and disappointingly decided to SAG out at mile 43 of what should have been a 65 mile ride.
Me and my other teammate, Sarah, let a couple other people get picked up and driven off the route first, and we ended up waiting for over an hour to get rescued. The roving SAG left two lawn chairs for us, and as we sat in our diminishing patch of shade I was amazed at the number of motorcyclists and shirtless 20-something guys in trucks towing boats that honked and cheered at us from the road. I couldn't figure out if they were mocking us, or if we somehow looked cool. Maybe they thought we were just chillin' on the roadside with a hidden case of Bud Light- I don't know? I suspected most of them were already drinking on their way to even more drinking and boating.
Lake Berryessa fauna example 1
Lake Berryessa fauna example 2
Happily we were picked up just before we would have had to move our lawn chairs back into poison oak by the base of our shade tree. I hadn't been this hot in I don't know how long. My cycling clothes were salty and I couldn't stop sweating. Riding back along the road in my teammate's car, I realized that, yeah, there was no way I could have finished that ride. There was no tree cover and the sun pounded the road all the way back to the park. After gathering my gear and my composure, I went to find IronPhil to see how he had fared- he had to SAG out, too, after throwing up on both the run and bike legs of his brick. Okay, I didn't feel so bad.
Everyone is expected to have one bad ride a season, and this was mine. Sometimes there are rides that are just bigger than you- clearly a lesson in self-awareness and humility. Strangely, I want to go back and do this ride again, but maybe not until November.
