August 2

When I drove home last night I was cross-eyed. Hammerfest was terrifically brutal. Here is the way my mind remembers it:

Chaos! Lap 1: Gunshot and burning legs, too fast, very hot, Al and Court and Don go too FAST every freakin’ time on the first lap. No time to properly prime the engine. Al has his legs back. SW wind makes 238 very fast. Don’t like taking my pulls but stubbornness prevails. Swollen legs and who the hell is on the front?! Might quit this one after a couple laps and just ride slow by myself. 97 degrees or something close. Measure your ENERGY, MAN! ...and no hero-pulls. One, two laps done in record time and where in burning Hades is everyone?! Drop half the group in three laps. Long pulls down 238 on the false-flat going 27 up the hill and my torso is rocking left to right, right to left already...forearms parallel to the ground, hands hanging over the hoods, head cranked up as far as I can with eyes fixed hard and steady two guys up...don’t look at the wheel in front of you, just sense it and don’t overlap...but definitely stay close...no more than an inch or three. Echelon snakes right to left with tremendous wind and it’s really hard to hold a line. Huge rocky minefield all along the shoulder on this stretch and the noise in my ears is thunderous. Snipers firing from all directions...razor sharp boulders everywhere! Someone has booby-trapped this thing...they are hunting us with wind and heat and terrible, terrible speed. Across the bridge at 32 and hit the hill full-force and why the hell does it always have to be ME that gets stuck with the damned hill?! Stay in the saddle and drop a gear and pedal hard and keep the cadence above 90 and now there’s only like six of us left and it’s SO FREAKIN HOT! Around the corner onto 136th and you finished the hill, stud, so you have to start the 136th run so do your best to get back up to speed before you blow up and can’t get back on because Don and Court are next up and there you go...you made it. Down the hill and across another bridge before the double-tier hill past the rock-garden where Logan fell (Logan’s Run) and son of a B you get the hill again but it’s okay because it’s lap 4 and your systems are coming on-line now and the snipers have all gone home for dinner and a pull from the jug...get this thing in the books before they come back with worse aim but more aggression and blood-lust. Up the hill and through the S-curve and back up to 32 with a cross-tail wind and we are lapping people and some of them get back on and then they get back off and I think there are just four of us left now...Damian and Don and Court and Chris. Now on to Cyntheanne where we have headwind all the way but a little bit of a windbreak on the right side of the road. No matter...still fast and hard and HOT but it’s smoother now because we all know how to rotate well and that means a faster average speed.

Mind starts to wander as I think about this and realize that this is why a good break can gain so much time on a huge field...guys that know how to properly rotate and stay smooth can conserve so much more energy than the gnats that NEED to do stupid hero-accelerations when it’s their turn to pull just so they can demonstrate how strong they are when all they really do is disrupt rhythm and cause the guy in back of them to exert more energy than necessary thereby causing a chain-reaction of bad-craziness that eventually leads to a slower pace. Hero-pulls are for legitimately chasing a dangerous break or for keeping a break alive when it’s about to die. Hero pulls should be a minimum of 30 seconds to a minute...not five seconds of stupidity. Hero-pulls are NOT for just taking your turn in line when you have no intention of doing anything of consequence beside demonstrating your impotent vanity.

And enough with all that...my calves are cramping, probably because of my insistence on shoving my cleats all the way forward on my shoes because I theorize that by creating a longer lever and keeping it rigid with very strong calves, I can increase my torque on the cranks and produce more power. I am actually still convinced that this is partially true but my calves do tend to wear out when I go hard for more than a couple of hours. Jeff Frame says this is patently ridiculous and he’ll prove it to me with a 30-second Wingate test for max power with my cleats all the way back. I may take him up on it but I may not. I’m not sure I want to be proven wrong. And anyway it doesn’t matter now because it’s lap six...

...and it’s now just Don, Court and myself and Court just laid down a vicious run going down 238 to dump Damian and it took Don 30 seconds to get us back on. Thanks Don but you better grab some cover because the Billies are back and their gin-blossoms are glowing white-hot with the sort of rage that only the truly oppressed can muster. It’s all self-directed in truth but don’t get in their way...more dangerous than a starving wolverine (which will attempt to kill anything that moves, even a moose). Up 238 hill, around the corner, accelerate smooth, down the hill and across the bridge...up Logan’s Run and around the S-turn and finally on the back-stretch and headed for the last corner. Very sweaty now and I look back and we are already out of sight. I know full-well that I can usually out-jump Court or Don but I am full-on knackered and cross-eyed and I vow to take every last pull until the end because that’s what this ride is for...hard training. Headwind hits hard around the corner and we march down Cytheanne toward the church and the little bridge-hill and the 1K to go line and I JUST CAN’T GO ANY FASTER and the terrible screaming wind sounds like banshees chasing us to our doom. Then the anticipation as we get to 500 to go. I just go to the front to avoid any confusion and do my best to lift the pace to at least 27ish. We all sprint at once and my right sartorius snaps like a rubber-band and ends up somewhere in my chest cavity near my liver and I swear it would have been a photo-finish. I honestly don’t know who “won” and I don’t care. I am in oxygen debt for about five minutes and my tongue is weirdly stuck to itself on the underside because I have no moisture left in my mouth. Court’s eyes look like Schwarzenegger’s in Total Recall when they used that machine to generate an atmosphere and it took a little while and Quaid and that girl fell down the side of the mountain and couldn’t breathe and their heads almost blew up with their eyes the size of bloodshot oranges. Yeah...bloodshot oranges. And we call it a day.

Back home to a protein shake and bed. My awesome wife made dinner but I could not eat it because my stomach digested itself to feed my quads and hammies. She also made triple-chocolate brownies which were just coming out of the oven when I got home. She then took them ALL to work today to give to SOMEONE ELSE! (she promised to save me...two)

-Richterissimo