Geeky Bob

If you've read my blog posts over the past several years, you'll notice that one of the topics that I used to frequently post about is bicycling, where I would talk about my misadventures riding through the deserts near Tucson, AZ. However, a few years ago my posts ceased rather abruptly, so I thought that I'd explain why that happened.

I loved riding around Tucson in my teenage years, and I rode in other areas of the country as I moved from state to state. That being said, my favorite locale was Tucson, because the weather is amazing all year round, and the desert is a wonderful place to ride. The further I would ride out of town, the fewer cars I had to deal with, which made for an even better cycling experience. With that in mind, after I returned to Arizona in 2013, I became an avid road cyclist.

Shortly before I stopped posting about bicycling, I wrote a post about being diagnosed with a neurological disorder called Essential Tremor. My diagnosis didn't originally have an impact on my cycling, but eventually the disorder caught up with me.

One of my favorite routes to ride in the Tucson area was Saguaro National Park East, which had few cars, gorgeous desert landscapes, a one-way path, and several difficult climbs that kept me in shape. However, around a year after my diagnosis, hand tremors prevented me from braking during a rapid descent into a steep turn. I was coasting downhill around 35mph at the time, and I only managed to make the turn by unclipping one foot and jamming it into the ground to arrest my speed (although that technique is not advisable for slowing down). I pulled off the road once I rounded the corner and could safely bring my bicycle to a stop, and the surge of adrenaline combined with tremors left me shaking uncontrollably for quite a while.

Make no mistake, if I hadn't managed to slow my descent, I'd have been just another statistic in a long line of stories about cyclists who died after losing control of their bicycles. As a result of that near-death experience, I haven't ridden outside since.

Today's afternoon cycling adventure through the desert was not the hottest ride that I've been on, but it was the second-most.

I had to force myself to ride slower and constantly douse myself with water from one of my water bottles to keep from overheating. As a result, I added a little over a minute to each mile on my ride, but I managed to keep my heart rate low as I kept saying under my breath, "Don't kill yourself," which was meant both literally and figuratively: I didn't want to push myself too hard and overheat, and I didn't want to make dumb choices that would simply get me killed. (Although it is arguable that riding in that level of extreme heat is a dumb choice by itself.)

When you somehow manage to bump the camera button on your phone in its waterproof case during a desert ride and it creates an experimental bokeh-art film in your honor...

As I was riding my bicycle through the Arizona desert outside Tucson yesterday afternoon, I saw a good-sized Gila Monster, which was my first sighting for this year.

This fortuitous discovery came just a few days after I had seen my first rattlesnake for the year, which got me thinking: perhaps I should track a few of the familiar objects that I see every year, which quickly expanded to common occurrences and mishaps. A few minutes later and I had randomized several of my semi-routine desert riding experiences into the following bingo card, where I have already encountered a few of the more-prevalent items this year:

As you can see, there are several items which I have yet to see or do for the year, but only four months have gone by; there's plenty of time to fill up the list.

During today's 32-mile ride through the deserts on the east side of Tucson, I probably should have called it quits when the temperature hit 120 degrees on my GPS... but then again, I was out in the desert with nowhere to stop, so my choices were: 1) keep riding, or 2) die. Or as Winston Churchill famously remarked, "If you're going through hell, keep going."

Originally this was supposed to be my usual 40-mile Saturday ride, but I decided right before my departure to drop the 8-mile loop through Saguaro National Park. (Which in hindsight was undoubtedly a really good idea.) On a positive note, there appeared to be no other cyclists riding today, so I had the roads all to myself.

(PS - I didn't get a photo for when the temperature hit 133 degrees on my GPS because my cell phone shut down due to the excessive heat. Of course, my lack of cell phone meant that I was also unable to abort the ride and call my wife to come find me.)

I tend to pay attention to this warning sign more than any of the other warning signs when I'm riding around Saguaro National Park...

PS - True story: the sign depicted above is posted right before a very steep descent into a 90-degree right turn, which is immediately followed by an almost 180-degree turn to the left into a steep climb. I have ridden that section of the park almost 200 times, and yet I still navigate it very slowly, because I am reminded of the cyclist I once met who lost control of his bicycle in that section of the park; he woke up in a hospital with a femur which was broken in four places and no memory of the preceding two weeks before the accident.

I first mentioned this in my Ride Notes for Cool Breeze 2015 blog, but I like to rewrite classic rock songs with a cycling theme while I'm out on my weekly rides. As a reminder of past contributions, I came up with the following offerings during the Cool Breeze Century:

• Sung to the tune of "Safety Dance":
  "We can pass if you want to,
  We can leave your friends behind.
  'Cause your friends can't climb, and if they can't climb -
  Well they're no friends of mine."
• Sung to the tune of "Hotel California":
  "Welcome to the Cool Breeze California,
  Such a tiring race, such a grueling pace.
  You'll question your mind at the Cool Breeze California:
  I'm no competitor; why'd I register?"
• Sung to the tune of "Margaritaville":
  "Climbing the hills again in California,
  Wondering why I'm still here at all.
  Some people say that there's a friend I can blame,
  But I know - it's my own dang fault."

During this week's ride (on a particularly blustery day) I penned the following:

• Sung to the tune of Jim Croce's "You Don't Mess Around with Jim":
  "You don't coast on all of your downhills,
  You don't ride into the wind,
  You don't pass the leader before the first mile marker,
  And you don't buy a bike from Schwinn."

I saw two good-sized Gila Monsters and a four-foot rattlesnake during this evening's bicycle ride around Saguaro National Park. I won't stop for the rattlesnakes, but I did manage to get a photo of this little guy as he was crossing the road.

And of course, this leads to the question: "Why did the Gila Monster cross the road?"

1. To get to the other side.
2. Because of his crimson hide.
3. He was chasing some stinkbugs and flies.
4. If he bites you you'll swell up and die.

Another year has passed since my last ride in the El Tour de Tucson. This year is the 34th anniversary of this annual fund-raising event, and once again I signed up to ride the full distance - which was 106 miles this year. This year was thankfully warmer than previous years, but holy cow - the wind was terrible. But I'll get to that in a minute.

The night before the ride I packed up my bicycle gear, and I made sure that I wouldn't repeat last year's mistake and forget my helmet. As I was putting my things together, I discovered that my bicycle had a flat tire. It was no fun changing it, of course, but it was so much better to have fortuitously discovered that problem the night before rather than the morning of. After that issue was resolved I set my alarm for 4:30am climbed into bed around 10:30pm. However, for some reason I could not fall asleep, so I probably did not drift off until sometime around 2:30am, which meant that I was hauling my exhausted self out of bed after only two hours of sleep. (Would someone please remind me why I do this every year?)

Anyway, I was on the road by 5:00am, and after a brief stop at a McDonald's for some carb loading via an Egg McMuffin, I headed off to Armory Park in downtown Tucson where the ride was scheduled to begin. I had studied the map before the ride, and I noticed that the route had changed for this year. First of all, the long, uphill ride on La Cañada Drive was gone, but it appeared to be replaced by an even longer uphill ride on Oracle Road. In addition to that change, the end of the ride had been changed from the 20+ miles riding Tangerine Road and the Frontage Road along I-10 to Avra Valley Road and Silverbell Road. This was all new territory for me, so needless to say - I did not know what the the day would have in store for me when I would arrive at those sections of the route.

Sometime shortly after 5:30am I arrived at the Tucson Convention Center (TCC), which is where I always park my car for the day, and after a few minutes putting the last of my things together, I hopped on my bicycle and rode over to Armory Park to get in line for the ride. I arrived around 10 or 15 minutes before 6:00am, and there were perhaps a couple hundred riders in line before me. (That number includes the "Platinum Riders," who must have had a ride time of less than five hours during a previous year.)

Arriving near the start line.

The group of cyclists in front of me. (The banner in the distance is the actual starting line.)

As I waited for the ride to begin, I talked with the cyclists around me, and I met a guy whose wife had inadvertently cheated on one of the shorter distances during the previous year's ride. It seems that she didn't want to deal with the large crowd at the start line, so she began her ride 1 hour earlier than the rest of the riders. This meant that she wouldn't have an official time for the ride, but she didn't care. However, she was the first woman to cross the finish line for her distance, so they erroneously listed her as the winner. This isn't an actual race, so it's not that big of a deal, but nevertheless she registered for this year's ride under a different name. ;-)

As I mentioned earlier, the temperature was a little warmer than in past years; it was somewhere in the low 50s while I was waiting. But I had learned from some more-experienced El Tour participants during my 2014 and 2015 rides to wear something disposable like pajama pants while waiting in line, and any clothes that are abandoned near the start line are donated to charity once the riders have left. With that in mind, I had bought a large set of black pajama pants to wear over my legs as I waited, and I had made sure to leave the tags on to show that they were new. As the start time drew near, I removed those, folded them nicely with the tags showing, and placed them on the side of the road. (Other cyclists simply threw jackets and pants over the barriers that lined the street.)

As has happened in previous years, in the last few minutes before the ride begins, all of the cyclists don the last of their equipment, and then all the riders bunch up toward the start line, thereby filling up all the gaps in the crowd.

Cyclists pushing toward the start line in the last few minutes.

Shortly before 7:00am we all sang the National Anthem, and after a few perfunctory words from local politicians, they sounded the horn that announced the start, and we were off. I will admit, it always fills me with a small amount of nervousness before arriving at the starting line when I think about heading out as a lone cyclist within a sea of thousands; I am always afraid that I will fall over and get hit, or someone else will fall over and I'll crash into them, but every year it is an orderly affair as the cyclists cautiously start out in unison. (It seems that everyone else is also concerned about avoiding an accident.)

30 minutes after the ride had started I found myself at the Santa Cruz River crossing, where all of the cyclists are required to dismount and hand-carry their bicycles across the dry river bed. Once again, a Mariachi Band was playing music for everyone as we arrived on the other side of the river.

Once across the river, I climbed back on my bicycle and headed off. However, this is where I need to mention the wind that I had alluded to in my opening paragraph; the first 35 miles of this ride is predominantly uphill as we rode south, and we had a great deal of wind blowing to the north, which meant that the first several hours were uphill into the wind. There were brief downhills and a few respites from the wind here and there, but for the most part the beginning of my day was spent tucking my head down and riding into the wind. One of the biggest sources of relief for everyone was around the 25-mile point when we turned north onto Kolb Road and had the wind behind us for a change. It was only for 2½ miles, but still - I heard dozens of other cyclists verbally reacting to the difference, and throughout the rest of the day I heard cyclists complaining about how awful that wind had been.

Of course, one of my personal demoralizers is when I hit the 30-mile mark; that is when the route passes Pima Community College, which is the start of the 75-mile route. I always think to myself, "If I had done that ride, I would be starting from here, rather than having just ridden 30 miles."

As we turned off Kolb Road onto Irvington Road, we entered my section of town, where I train all the time. In fact, I had ridden the northbound climb on Houghton Road and Escalante Road a couple of times that week, so I was quite used to that terrain and the climbs did not bother me. Shortly after reaching the end of Escalante Road, the route turned north onto Freeman Road, where we were all treated to several miles of fast-paced, downhill riding. (With no winds!)

At the bottom of Freeman Road the course followed the familiar route of Speedway to Houghton to Snyder, which took about 30 minutes to negotiate, and then it was time for the second river crossing. By this time I had been riding for over 3½ hours with no breaks, and I was running low on water, so I stopped to refill my water bottles, eat a few snacks, and remove the last of my cold weather gear.

After a brief 20-minute rest stop, I was back on the road. My next obstacle was the steep climb up East Snyder Road near North Rockcliff Road. I have mentioned this hill in my other blogs about riding in the El Tour de Tucson, so I won't go into detail here, except to reiterate what I have said in the past - thankfully this climb is only a few hundred meters in length.

Once I had put the Snyder Road climb behind me, I had a short ride to Cowbell Crossing, where my wife, Kathleen, was cheering on passing cyclists around the 52-mile mark with a group of her coworkers and our dog, Boudicca. Kathleen had been watching my progress via my Garmin Live Track, although what she was seeing was a few seconds behind my actual location, so she barely had time to run to the side of the road with Boudicca and wave as I rode by. (I had thought about stopping, but their group was set up on the opposite side of the road so I chose not to stop. In hindsight, I probably should have at least stopped to say "Hi" to everyone.)

The route meandered west along Sunrise and Skyline Drives, then we climbed north on Oracle Road, which was a departure from previous years of climbing north on La Cañada Drive. This extended the length of the climb by a couple of miles, so I'm still not quite sure if I approve of the changed route.

Around the 60-mile point I ran into an interesting predicament; my Garmin Cycling GPS announced that it's battery was almost depleted and it was going to shut down. I had fully charged it the night before, and I had used my Garmin GPS on several 100-mile rides with no problems in the past, but this year I had more devices connected than in previous years. For example, my GPS was linked to my cell phone for Live Tracking (which was constantly updating my location for family members to watch), and my GPS was paired with a Garmin Varia Radar that helps me know when vehicles are approaching from behind. Fortunately I had planned ahead; my cell phone was already attached to a spare battery and was still fully charged, and I had brought a spare USB battery pack in case of emergency. With that in mind, I quickly pulled off to the side of the road, and then I attached a USB cable from the battery pack to my GPS. Once I had all of that connected, my GPS showed that it was charging and I hopped back on the road. (Note: By the end of my ride, the GPS was fully-charged once again and the battery pack was still half-charged.)

I was running low on water as I reached the 75-mile mark, so I pulled off the road with dozens of other cyclists. I quickly refilled my water bottles, and I also availed myself of the Girl Scout cookies that the volunteers had provided. (No Thin Mints, of course, because those would have melted in the heat.)

After a 15-minute break I was back on the road and heading west on Moore Road. Thankfully the worst of the climbs were behind me, and the next 10 to 15 miles were predominantly downhill, which was a welcome change after the miles of climbing earlier in the day.

As I rode by a family that was cheering on the riders, their boys were all holding out their hands for high fives; most riders passed them by without obliging, but I held out my hand and swatted them all - thankfully without losing my balance in the process.

As I have seen on other long rides, I encountered a variety of interesting bicycles throughout the day's ride; most cyclists were on road bikes, of course, but there were a lot of mountain bikes, several single-speeds, a bunch of tandems, a smattering of recumbent bikes, and a couple of complete novelties - someone was riding a an ElliptiGO for the full 106 miles, and another guy was riding a unicycle. (I have no idea what distance the unicyclist was riding, but it was before we had merged with the cyclists riding for 28 miles, so the unicyclist was riding at least 37 miles.)

The route headed down Avra Valley Road and then onto Silverbell Road, which I mentioned earlier was different than riding down the Frontage Road in previous years. There were a few things about this new route that were a welcome change; namely that the ride was nowhere near as boring as 20 miles of riding along a frontage road next to an Interstate. The biggest drawback was, however, that riding south meant facing into the wind - again.

Nevertheless, after an hour's ride south on Silverbell Road, the route turned east on Speedway, then shortly after that the route briefly turned onto Mission Road and then 22nd Street, thereby retracing the final miles of the route from previous years. After that we turned onto 6th Avenue for the final stretch to the finish.

Turning onto 6th Avenue for the final mile.

Approaching the finish line.

I crossed the finish line around 8½ hours after I had started, although my actual riding time was just shy of 8 hours. (The remaining half-hour was spent on my two stops and the several intersections where I had to wait for the street lights to change.) It should go without mentioning that I was exceedingly happy to be done with the ride, and after picking up my silver medal for my time category, I found a quiet place to stash my bicycle for a few minutes and I bought a slice of pizza with a bottle of Gatorade to celebrate my successful completion of another "Century Ride."

Looking over the miles that I rode, my ride began with 25 miles of riding uphill into the wind, and it ended with 20 miles of riding uphill into the wind; so just shy of 50% of the ride was spent riding uphill while enduring a steady wind in my face. That was subpar, to say the least, but there wasn't anything that could be done about it. I would estimate that the wind added at least an hour to my ride time, although it would probably be more accurate to say that it added 1½ hours to my ride time.

Ride Stats:

• Primary Statistics:
  • Start Time: 6:58am
  • Distance: 106 miles (105.6 miles on my GPS)
  • Duration: 8 hours, 36 minutes (7 hours, 52 minutes on my GPS)
  • Calories Burned: 3,074 kcal
  • Altitude Gain: 4,259 feet
• Speed:
  • Average Speed: 13.4 mph
  • Peak Speed: 32.7 mph
  • Average Cadence: 73.0 rpm
• Temperature:
  • Average: 72.1 F
  • Minimum: 48.2 F
  • Maximum: 86.0 F
• Heart Rate:
  • Average: 147 bpm
  • Maximum: 183 bpm

So, I went out for a late-night ride on my mountain bike last night... I left the house around midnight, and my route took me through some of the desert on the northeast side of Tucson.

FYI - It's a little unnerving when a whole pack of coyotes starts sounding off near you when you're by yourself with nothing but a single headlight to keep your bike on the narrow path. Just sayin'...

Perhaps a midnight ride wasn't my best idea.

PS - The coyote image is from Michael Frye, who has even more amazing artwork on his website.