sighting Alcatraz

Thinking about later, I could understand the disconnect.  Here I was, a tanned, fairly fit looking bloke with a nice bike who even knew what arm warmers were; who wouldn’t think that a climby ride around and up Mt. Tamalpais wouldn’t be a walk in the park?  Watching Andy come into view around one of the bends ahead of me, five hundred feet above the surf, an apt metaphor popped into my head.  It was kind of like saying enchanter at a dinner party in Paris, a bit well-practiced and native-like, and then fending off the the passe composer for the next two hours as the other guests slowly change their initial assessment of your language skills.

So it is this morning.  I could have guessed as much.  The pollen is out big time; I’d just spent the better part of two days driving from Colorado to California; and we landed at my sister-in-law’s home in the midst of a party that lasted until past midnight.  Why wouldn’t I feel amazing on a early morning ride?

All that said, it is beautiful.  As the grade evens out to a less leg numbing five percent grade, I close the gap on Andy and we talk.  As I’ve aged, one issue that’s come to the fore is my need for a longer and longer warm-up before ramping up the effort.  This morning the air is damp and thick and the pretty yellow flowers on the sides of the road emit something that feels like sandpaper in my lungs.  For today’s warm-up, I coasted downhill for three minutes, greeted Andy and then started a twenty five minute climb.

‘We’ll need to slow it up for a bit, until I warm up.’  He looks surprised; who’d he think he was riding with, Eddy Merckx?  ‘My lungs will start to spasm if we don’t.’  He’s polite but probably disappointed.  I hate explaining all of the nagging shit that I work through to avoid an inhaler; it makes me feel old.  ‘Go ahead and I’ll catch you on the downhill.’

‘Nah, it’ll be a social ride.’ 

So we ride, me wheezing up the first climb like an tubercular patient in a wheelchair.  Andy explains that we need to keep an eye out for packs of motorcyclists.  They have a habit of using cyclists as the apex of their turns.  In a few minutes we hear the muffler tone of the first group of twenty or so riders, hitting the hairpins, coming up behind us fast.  Each slices by a foot or so from my shoulder, confident in fat smooth tires on a damp road.  Andy slides forward and I meet him again at the top, talking to one of the bikers.  The guy’s dusting himself off.  The fat tire let him down.  Literally.

We descend through the Muir Woods and I soon realize that Andy is far behind me.  At one hundred kilos, descending is one of my super powers on a bike.  I quickly hit fifty and start leaning into the hairpins, the coast a whole lane away off my left shoulder.  It’s exhilarating, like hang gliding on wheels.  Andy I reconnect on the rollers that come next.  Hard effort, descent, hard effort, descent. 

On the next descent I follow him and notice he’s getting thrown off his line by a too-upright position.

‘Did you ever ride a bike?’  We move between the two denotations: bicycle and motorcycle without much context.  He talks about buying two CBR’s fifteen years ago after his wife rode on the back of a Harley.  A month into their ownership, they decided it wasn’t for them and they got a race car instead.

‘You gotta counter steer in the turns in order to hold the right line.’  He tries it on the descent from Mt. Tamalpais and has a big smile on his face at the bottom.