IM Canada: Week 21 – Chen’s version (i.e., that time I wiped out at mile 20 of our last long ride and had to ride 100 miles on a stationary bike instead)

Posted by Chen

My first real cycling fall. I knew it would happen; I just didn’t know when. “When” came on Friday during our last long ride of the training cycle.

The plan was to ride 110 miles with Mt. Diablo towards the end to over-simulate the last climb in Whistler. Rachel, Travers, and I headed out at 8am, and all was going swimmingly. We wound around through Oakland, Piedmont, and headed down towards Castro Valley.

Somewhere around mile 20 in Castro Valley, Travers was leading the way, followed by Rachel, and then myself. I can’t remember what exactly I was doing – I was either reaching for my water bottle or putting it back into place. Regardless, I clearly wasn’t looking forward and didn’t notice that both Rachel and Travers were braking in anticipation of turning right.

All of a sudden, I was speeding straight into Rachel, and as my front wheel ran into her, I instinctively threw myself to the right, taking Bert the Bike down with me. Everything happened so fast that I can’t quite remember what happened after that, but I know that I landed on my right hand and then flipped over, with my chin scraping the curb as I came to a stop.

My first thought was, “I just heard a lot of crashing. I really hope Rachel didn’t fall too.” I yelled behind me and asked if she was OK, and I learned that she had miraculously stayed upright and was just fine. Thank you sweet baby Jesus (I would have felt HORRIBLE if I’d caused her to fall too).

My next thought was to assess my physical situation. I’d felt some scrapes as I went down, but nothing hurt too badly, so I slowly stood up. I wiped my chin where I’d scraped it against the curb and saw some blood and also saw some blood coming out of my left shoulder. Although I didn’t feel much pain, I feared that I was somehow gushing blood somewhere and just couldn’t feel it, but Rachel assured me that my scrapes were minor. After examining myself for a few seconds, I realized I’d been really lucky and somehow only had those minor scrapes and a bruised palm from where I landed. Hallelujah.

It's kind of hard to see, but I swear there's a scrape on my chin

My palm turned all sorts of fun colors

After that, Travers examined my bike (because I still don’t know enough about bikes to know what looks right vs. wrong), and everything seemed OK, so we continued on. I quickly realized, though, that my right brake had become misaligned during the fall, so at the next stoplight, Travers worked his cycling magic and fixed it with some tools he had on hand. Crisis averted, or so I thought.

We started up once again, but after a half mile or so, as we headed up a steep hill, I went into my lower gears and then all of a sudden heard a bunch of loud rattling. Not good. Not knowing what was going on, I went back into a harder gear, which made the noise go away, but the hill was getting even steeper, so I tried a lower gear again. Same crazy rattling, and then all of a sudden, my pedals locked up.

I managed to clip out in time and pulled over to take a look, and the issue immediately became evident. My back derailleur had become so bent during the fall that it was in the plane of my wheel and had gotten all caught up in my spokes.

Well, crap.

Travers took a look again and sadly concluded that this would require a new back derailleur and hanger, and that this wouldn’t exactly be a quick fix (I don’t know how he knows so much about bikes, but it sure came in handy that day). My ride would be ending right then and there.

I surprisingly wasn’t that upset about having to stop at the time, probably because I was just happy to be in once piece after my fall. As I parted ways with Rachel and Travers, though, my thoughts immediately went to how the hell I was going to get a 100+ mile ride in at some point that weekend.

I had a half hour walk to the BART station to contemplate this, and I decided that if I was somehow able to get my bike fixed by Sunday, I would try to join Matt and Katie for their planned century ride that day. If not, I would head to the gym after dropping my bike off and plant my butt on a stationary bike for 5-6 hours. One of these options seemed more appealing than the other.

My journey on BART was probably my low point of the day, mainly because my right palm was hurting quite badly at this point from the fall, so lifting my bike up and down as I navigated the station stairs / escalators was a little bit excruciating. I eventually arrived back to my car in Oakland and immediately bee-lined it to my bike shop in SF.

The bike shop staff took a look at Bert and came to the same conclusion that Travers did: new back derailleur and hanger required. They would put the order in right away, but Bert unfortunately wouldn’t be ready to pick up until Monday.  Bummer, but also somewhat expected.

I headed home to grab my gym bag and eat a quick snack, and then before I could get too comfortable, I drove to the gym to begin my longest gym workout ever. I was too lazy to change into new clothes, so I felt a bit ridiculous walking into my gym with a full-on tri kit, carrying two water bottles and 1760 calories of food.

I felt like I was temporarily moving into the cardio room as I set up camp with my water, food, towels, and entertainment (iPhone plus headphones). While you might think I would have felt an enormous sense of dread, knowing what was ahead of me, I felt like I was just moving on auto-pilot. I had made up my mind and was determined to make this workout happen, so I was just going through the motions and not actually thinking about what I was doing.

The bikes at my gym have a 65-minute limit, so I was able to naturally break the workout into 65-min segments, getting up to refill my water and change out towels as needed (I sweat a lot regardless, but this issue becomes exacerbated indoors). I used some pre-programmed hill/interval workouts to keep things “interesting” from hour to hour, and I rationed the use of my iPhone battery by watching my gym’s TVs for as long as I could before I resorted to Netflix.

My view for over 5.5 hours. It was enthralling.

I watched several rounds of people cycle through the gym over the course of the afternoon / evening, and while I definitely felt a little bit (OK, a lot) crazy, the workout actually wasn’t nearly as mentally challenging as I thought it might be. Again, I think I was just on autopilot, and I think I was also somewhat amused at myself at the time. I mean, you kind of can’t NOT laugh at the situation.

In the end, I covered 100 miles in 5:33:08. I know that stationary bikes are a bit generous with their distance and speed, so that’s why I overshot and ended with 120 miles for the day (100 stationary, plus 20 outside before falling). After I finished, I looked back on the workout and was kind of in disbelief at what I’d just done. I kept mentally shaking my head at myself, thinking that shit was insane.

Side note/question: I wonder if all other stationary rides in my life will automatically feel super short in comparison?

The rest of the weekend consisted of a long swim on Saturday (5000 yards, slowest swim ever) and a final 20-mile run today with Rachel. Both workouts definitely suffered from the great stationary ride of 2015, but all in all, it was a successful weekend of training and successful peak week overall.

3 weeks of tapering until race day!

IM Canada Week 21 Recap:

Monday: 

• Rest. I can’t wait until rest days don’t come with an enormous sense of guilt.

Tuesday: 

• PM: Running Bay Trail easy effort (Tuesday is normally tempo day, but it was hot as ballz out and super windy, so I settled for a steady effort): 10 miles in 1:21:38 (~8:10 pace)
• Immediately followed by swimming 2200 yards (average pace of 1:51/100yd). This swim felt wonky as all hell. Not sure what was up.

Wednesday: 

• PM: Trainer Road FTP test: 17.37 miles in 1:00:00 (17.4mph), followed by a 30-minute easy spin to cool down; total distance: 25.29 miles. After my last failed FTP attempt, I should have been happy that I remembered to enable VirtualPower this time. However, I ended up with an FTP value that wasn’t exactly believable (239), so I left the workout feeling frustrated once again, wondering what the hell I’d done wrong. I triple checked that I had selected the right trainer, which I had, so I’m at a loss. Maybe I need to do the FTP test on Rachel’s or Katie’s trainer to get a true reading :-P.

Thursday: 

• Running Bay Trail easy with goal marathon pace finish: 8 miles in 1:04:37 (~8:05 pace)
• Immediately followed by swimming 3200 yards, including 1000 swim and 2000 pull (average pace of 1:51/100yd)

Friday: 

• AM: Biking Oakland to Castro Valley with Rachel and Travers before wiping out: 20.79 miles in 1:34:54 with 2000+ ft of gain (13.1mph)
• PM: 100-mile stationary bike ride in 5:33:08 (18.0mph)

Saturday: 

• PM: Swimming 5000 yards, consisting of 1000yd intervals of swim, pull, and paddles (average pace of 1:54/100yd). I was feeling super worn down from the previous day and could tell early on that I wouldn’t have ANY speed in me, so I just cruised through and got the distance in.

Sunday: 

• AM: Running in the East Bay with Rachel: 20 miles in 2:58:36 (~8:56 pace). This was a tough one. My body was feeling wrecked at best, plus it was quite toasty and humid out, so we kept the pace slow and just focused on forward motion. I was really glad that Rachel was there with me, because I’m not sure what would have happened if I’d been alone. I’d probably be in a grocery store somewhere eating pickles instead. Speaking of salt, we got brunch and delicious coffee afterwards, and it was amazeballs:

Machaca con huevo from Molcajete: Scrambled eggs with onions, pulled pork and serrano chiles

The prettiest latte there ever was from Coloso Coffee