the body bountiful

On Wednesday I come home from work at lunchtime because the colleague behind me is about to deal with messy living away from home arrangements for a 15 year-old boy, parlaying all afternoon between intransigent parents, the foul-mouthed lad, and a government department.  

Besides, work is boring. I have no pressing tasks in the three working days between Yuletide and New Year. And I feel really, really crap.

During the afternoon working at home, I get a clue why every turn of the pedals in the morning was a struggle. My throat turns red raw and my head starts to ache. My daughter and her partner have given me this contagion. I sleep badly but make it through to 5:55am.

Arsenal play Wigan at 6:45 EDT on Thursday morning, fall behind to a penalty, equalise then lead, then drop two precious points in the title race by putting an OG in the net for a 2-2 result. Why does my team put me through this?

I walk the dog and feel better, but by lunch my head throbs and I resort to pharmaceuticals. My manager emails to tell me not to come near her: she’s not had a cold this year and doesn’t want one on 30 December. I had a cold not three months ago, my first for several years, and wonder why I’m so blessed.

The big question is: should one ride when feeling this crap? This is, after all, the body’s way of saying “Ease up on me, Big Boy!” But the (large and strangely powerful) perverse part of me tells me to get out there, go hard, and blow the bastard away. And that’s what I plan to do in the morning at six o’clock. It’ll be 39 degrees later in the day.

I compromise. I'll ride, but will restrict myself to a nice flat trundle out to the eucy farm. I don’t get to sleep until after one, then at 5:15 the alarm snaps my trance and tells me to get up and get out there. Orange juice, weeties, a hasty cuppa. It’s 12 degrees and not a breath of wind. Perfect. And indeed, I feel great. My legs are as sprightly as they were dead 48 hours ago on Wednesday morning.

There’s always a spoiler, eh? This morning it’s my bowels. I almost insist on shitting before every ride: I’ll hang around waiting for the urge, sometimes for hours, days, but right now I’m so intent on getting going that I neglect the motion, the movement. It doesn’t neglect me.

Somewhere out the back of the racecourse the first pang alerts me. Once on the bike and pedalling it’s not hard to beat off the urge; in fact, it rarely arises. Not today. Within minutes the lower intestine is attempting to tie itself in an elaborate preventative knot.

I back off the pedals twice as cramps paralyse my lower abdomen and it pleads for relief. I pass a couple of Redback Dunnies on building sites and consider trespassing and leaving my mark. What if they’re bolted? Once I’m out of the saddle I’m cacktus.

I imagine that in the past I might have seen a Lions wayside stop for travellers at Huntly and hope it’s more than a picnic table and a couple of rubbish bins. As I approach I espy the familiar shape of a Besser brick shithouse.

I dismount inside the door, my bowels loosening by the nanosecond, grapple with my helmet buckle while simultaneously trying to peel my jersey off, but perspiration glues it to my torso. Mozzies swarm in the grubby cubicle. A frenzy of arms, bike clothing and mozzies ensues but I make it. Sort of. Thank god for reams of cheap toilet paper.

From there the ride out to Hartland’s Eucy Farm is a breeze. My speedo reads 44.66kms at 27.3kph when I dismount in Baxter Street. I feel great. It lasts about an hour until the next wave of nasal congestion takes hold. 

weightlessness

I wake just before six and decide it’s an omen. I can fit in an hour on the bike, an hour dog walking, and be at work close to on time. 

I never ride on an empty stomach. I must eat breakfast no matter how early I’m on the road. But not today: orange juice is all I have time for. Besides, the truth is that I have a stomachful of fish and chips from the previous night. When buying them I tell myself that this will be the last fish cake, minimum chips and potato cake for quite some time.

In 2005 I stood on the scales one day and was 102.5kgs. For a while before that I was around 100kgs. By mid-2006 I got down to 87-88kgs, but almost got depressed doing so. For the last year I’ve been about 92-94kgs. I would like to be under 90. In my wildest dreams I will go to France around or even under 85kgs.

This morning I haul 93.8kgs around the Mandurang circuit. It’s 29.4kms of ups and downs and I average 26.3kph. I work all the ups, although my legs still feel like shit, and I grind up One Tree Hill. Pedalling close to 200kms in five days in a smack-in-the-mouth reality check on my fitness.

When I get home I ration the weeties, measuring them into the bowl with my smallest bone china mug. I slice half a banana on top. I add milk, full cream, and sugar, a heaped spoon. And after walking the dog and showering, I have a nice slice of toast and vegemite.

There will be no famine here. I know how to lose weight. It’s the very simple formula of exercising more—no problem there—and eating less and less often. This will be much harder to do. Some things need to be all but eliminated over the next six months—chocolate, biscuits, buns and bakeries.

Oh dear.   

the anatomical snuff box

FoxSports 1 from 6:55am till 9:01. (Yes, that’s what the online guide says.) Arsenal 3 Chelsea 1. The it’s pump class at 10.

So no ride this morning. Life conspires to do this sometimes. Today’s ride is 55kms at an average of 27.1kph around the Shelbourne loop in 26 degrees of afternoon sunshine. There’s no climb on the Shelbourne loop and I made no detour to One Tree Hill and all those squats and lunges at pump class turn the legs to jelly.

*        *        *

I should explain the broken scaphoid alluded to in my first post.

I didn’t break it falling off the Red Rocket the day before. I did it a year ago diving into the surf on a Queensland beach. The sea floor was closer than I thought. A year later the bloody thing still hurts.

The scaphoid is one of eight carpal bones that make up that most complex joint—the wrist. They are trapezium, trapezoid, capitate and hamate—the four distal carpals, being further from the bones of the forearm—and the lunate, triquetral, pisiform and the scaphoid—the proximals.

The scaphoid is about the size and shape of a cashew but 60 per cent of carpal fractures are to the scaphoid. It’s notoriously slow to heal because a fracture can disrupt what is already a tenuous blood supply. Rapid treatment is important. Like most people, I had no treatment, assuming I’d just bruised the base on my thumb.

The scaphoid sits behind a natural groove in the wrist, the anatomical snuff box, created by hyper-extending the thumb.

Sometimes a broken scaphoid just doesn’t heal even in a cast. Surgery is needed and a Herbert screw is inserted.

I read that Hubert Opperman had incredibly strong thumbs. Did he develop them through cycling? My thumb doesn’t hurt today but my legs are having a fit of the henries and could do with some Herberts. Or Huberts. Or both. 

finding legs

TThis morning I hit the road just after six and concoct a ride or 50.48kms around the southern, eastern and northern fringes of Bendigo at an average of 25.3kph.

I have promised myself a climb on every ride, but decent climbs of any length are hard to find in or around this city. Mount Alexander is the nearest serious climb. The northern climb is shorter and tougher, being from five to seven kilometres—depends on what you take to be the start point—with long stretches above 10 per cent.

The southern ascent is not so gruelling—a grade of seven per cent is common and it only arcs up to double figures for a couple of short pinches.

Closer to town is One Tree Hill. I rode the west side two days ago: a mere 700 metres with a couple of nasty ramps, the final one touching 14 per cent. This morning I ride the southern approach, much longer and a bit dippy. It’s nasty because it’s the first thing you do: straight out of bed, no warm-up, uphill. Ouch!  

So, two rides and two climbs up One Tree Hill. I’m taking it gently. The Col du Galibier is the equivalent of 61 times up the west side of One Tree Hill. I have a way to go.

While riding I decide on these guidelines for my training.

Ride at least every second day, and at least four days a week. Commuting to work and buzzing around town on the Rocket do not constitute training rides.

Any ride should be minimum 30kms, and 200kms for the week. Each week should contain one ride of 80+kms. As the weeks pass, my weekly total should increase to 250kms, with at least one ride of 100+kms.

I go hard every ride: no pootling along, no hanging off because I don’t feel so good.

By February I should ride Mount Alexander at least once a week and by March I should ride it both ways each time I go up there.

I’ll catch the train to Gisborne some weekends and scale Mount Macedon: it’s a brute with grades up to 15 per cent. After moving back to Croydon in April I need to make it up Donna Buang each and every weekend.

I’ve got to find the climbing legs that hauled me up the Tourmalet (twice), the Aubisque, the Peyresourde and the Plateau de Beille.

I’ve never been a climber and never will be. It’s not possible at 59 years and over 90kgs. But with a will and a rhythm I can pull myself up anything.  

an ordinary beginning

Christmas day. First serious training ride. Fifty-two kilometres around the north and western fringes of Bendigo, averaging 26.2kph, and done with a broken scaphoid, grazed elbow and bruised fingers.

My deposit is paid, my ticket bought. I fly to Paris on Tuesday 5 July 2011 and depart for home four weeks later on 3 August, arriving just in time for my sixtieth birthday, Alpe d’Huez and the Col du Galibier in the bag.

The Cervélo is serviced and ready to roll—bent hanger straightened, new chain, and then, of course, a new 39-cog chain-ring. I like to tell people that the bike is superior to the rider, and indeed it is. A year of spamodism has seen to that.

Spasmodism is an easy-to-acquire syndrome if you don’t race and are not obsessive. It means your cycling happens in fits and starts: some weeks you’re all fired up about something—dropping a couple of kilos, getting back into the beauty of pedalling—and you rattle up 200kms for the week, no worries. Other weeks are blighted by zero kms: work spreads across the week with meetings in Melbourne or Mildura, or inertia, sloth or a good book keep you off the bike.

There are false starts, like last week. You book a friend’s holiday house at Venus Bay, lug two bikes down there, intending to ride 80kms a day, and the weather turns viral: the sky is livid, the rain is horizontal, and the coastal breeze blows the spots off your dog.

Then the VDO Z1 bike computer dies … well, the battery anyway. So I lose all my data and spend half of yesterday setting it up again—synching with the two wireless transmitters (speed and cadence), keying in wheel-size, clock, personal stats, blah, blah. But it’s no bad thing. I’m starting from scratch, ground zero. So is the Z1.

Yesterday I suffer a get-off, my first for some time. I ride the Red Rocket up my street to deliver a card with the wrong address on it, misjudge the gutter I’ve decided to hop, and land on my left elbow and right hand, losing skin and bruising everything, including my dignity.

This morning I wake at half past two, step out for a piss, and never get back to sleep. I do some interweb banking, bake Anzacs, strip and canister some dried oregano, talk to my good woman in Serbia on Skype, eat weeties and toast, scoff two cups of char, and wait for the dawn.

It’s light enough to ride just after six. I’ve promised myself a decent hill every time I straddle the machine: this morning it’s One Tree Hill, a mere 700 metres, but with two pitches into double figure gradients. I struggle; a year ago I caned it.

There’s a long way and a long time to go. But I’ve begun.