E vestigio

My legs ache. Like I knew they would.

On Sunday I repeated Saturday’s early morning bicycle ride – the loop on Blackwell with the killer hill. Except I did it in the early afternoon, after the morning rain had cleared and the sun had come back out and the roads had dried.

And then last night I added half again to the mileage I’ve been riding in recent days. You normally wouldn’t do that, but with the embarrassingly small base from which I’m beginning I knew it would be okay.

Except that it would hurt.

The start of a bicycle ride is just like a run – it sucks for the first couple of miles while your muscles slowly warm up. Your body has a reluctant torpor to it, a dull feeling of not wanting to do this. And your legs pointedly remind you that they’re still tired from yesterday. But then it slowly gets better as the sheen of sweat builds across your body. Sometimes a lot better.

My rides during this getting-started phase have been marked by a press to incrementally increase distance and pace. My heart rate has averaged within 10-15 beats of my heart’s maximum. That’s too high.

So I dialed it back just a bit, riding with just a hint of deliberateness.

The epiphany came late in the ride, when I was into a distance I’ve not seen before this year. When I should have been getting more and more tired. When my speed should have been slowly declining. When I should have been riding in lower and lower gears, sapped by fatigue.

Instead, I got stronger.

It’s the first time I’ve ever felt that on a bicycle. When the burn in your legs and the heaving of your lungs after a hard climb give way, not to growing fatigue, but to renewed strength. You coast for a few seconds. Then you click into an easier gear and just spin easy for a little bit. It only takes moments. Then your legs recover. You click back up into a higher gear, rolling steady now, pressing to keep your speed up. And then on the next rise you lift up out of the saddle and are surprised by how great it all feels. How strong you feel.

There’s a miracle in there somewhere.

Today, my legs ache. It’ll be a rest day.

A mile into the ride I break out of the canopy of trees and into the early-morning sun.  The mist rises from the field to my right and the flat angle of the sun lights it from the side, imparting to it a look of faint mystery.  The air seems unusually clear for the first day of August.  But then it is very early, not yet even 7.  Not yet time for the sun to bake the humidity into a hard haze.  Maybe it’s because I’m not wearing sunglasses, but looking at the awakening world with naked eyes.

Slightly chilled when I began the first coasting descent just a few hundred feet from my driveway, where my ride began, I’m feeling better now as my muscles warm to the task.  This is the first long uphill grade and as the road rises in front of me I shift down into the lower gears.  The burning in my legs grows, but it’s not too bad.  Nothing like the awful pain that the hill on Blackwell will throw at me in five miles.  I laugh at myself and pull my mind away from that torment to come and simply savor the surprise of how pretty everything is.  I’ve done it on a motorcycle, of course.  Loved the early morning quiet and solitude and newness of everything.  But this is the first time I’ve ever taken a bicycle out so early.

I was a runner once.  That ended when I began working where I do now – the long commute and the necessarily long days.  But I remember it.

One of the things I remember was that training days begat more training days; while missed training days led to more missed training days.

Put a string of evening runs together, in other words, and you’ll have no trouble convincing yourself to get out there tomorrow when you get home from work.  But let a few days slip by without one… and the excuses become seductive.

Same thing on a bike.

I’ve fiddle farted around with road bicycles for years.  It’s a sport I’ve always enjoyed, they being a cousin to the motorcycles which have long colored my life.  But I’ve never really given them a serious shake.  I’ve always just done a little ride here, a little ride there.  I never once put a string of training days together.

Until now.  In the past eight days I’ve ridden my bicycle six times, slowly increasing my speed and distance.

I’m having a good time.  We’ll see where it goes…

After the Ride