September 21, 2024
Day 34: Tough Day
Distance: 118km
Climbing: 1620m
We knew there would be hard days. This was my hardest by far.
Last night I had a bit of stomach upset - it was minor enough that I couldn’t really tell if it was actually anything intestinal or if I had just worked my core muscles a bit harder than usual.
Through the night I struggled to get comfortable and slept very little. My stomach still felt the same in the morning, but I got down a full breakfast. I never threw up or even really felt any nausea. I just had no energy so I think my digestion had slowed. All day I could only put out a limited amount of power: grinding slowly up the hills and soft-pedalling when it was flat. I spent the entire day fighting the urge to just lie down. I also took ver few pictures despite there being interesting sights along the way; fortunately Andrew took some.
Andrew had a good analogy: it was like being in the last six miles of a marathon where you often hit the famous “wall,” but all day long. The wall in a marathon is the point where your readily available stores of glycogen for your muscles is used up and you’re relying on your body digesting what you eat along the way fast enough, or it starts to pull energy from less efficient sources such as by breaking down muscle. I think my digestion was feeding me energy at say 100W so in the long run I could only exert 100W.
The day’s elevation profile was a gradually steepening climb to a peak at about 2/3 of the total distance and then dropping all that elevation in the final 1/3 in the town of Grants.
The first half of today’s ride was in a classic dessert - water cut sand and clay features, cacti, very scarce water, etc. The ACA maps show possible water sources. We checked several but only found one we could use but as it happened, due to cooler temperatures, we would have been fine with the water we already had, but you never know ahead of time so extra margin is always appreciated.
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The weather tried extend my bad day with rain right where we didn’t want it: New Mexico dirt roads. As it rained the ground started to turn to peanut butter and it was like watching an unavoidable train wreck as the mud started to form and stick to the tires. We were probably minutes from having to stop when we unexpectedly popped out onto a stretch of paved road. The rain ended shortly afterwards but we probably would have had to wait an hour for the road surface to dry out if it weren’t for the paved section. Then the climbing started in earnest and it was a very hard mental battle to just keep turning the cranks.
We climbed out of the desert and back into the forests like the ones we’d had a few days earlier. Mountain and elevations collect the water in this sort of climate so you can go from desert to forest by gaining altitude.
Along the forest we saw people who had driven up sitting amongst the trees gathering something: pinion nuts it turned out. These are the pine nuts of the pinion tree.
Once in Grants we got a hotel room, went to Denny’s, decided to skip laundry entirely, and leave grocery shopping for tomorrow. We may even take a rest day tomorrow depending on how I feel when I wake up. Another day like today would be a bad idea - this is supposed to be fun, and every other day has been fun in varying degrees. Plus, to do this day after day the output has to be sustainable- you have to be able to recover enough from one day to the next and today I probably dug a hole that needs extra time to recover from.
Today's ride: 118 km (73 miles)
Total: 3,834 km (2,381 miles)
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2 weeks ago