Hot, Hotter, HOTTEST

Tuesday, July 24

Now that I've reflected on the recent ride, I want to share a bit of what it was like last week.

For the first two hours of the ride things were going pretty well. I do almost all of my riding on an unloaded road bike, and whenever you transition to a loaded touring bike the shock is immediately noticible. It's like going from a Mini Cooper to a Ford F-350 truck. I was fortunate that the cloud cover blocked the oppressive July sun.

My mouth was dry and I consumed three liters of water by the time I started the nine mile climb on the Beeline highway to Payson. Normally, this rate of water consumption would serve as a red flag, a warning that conditions were pretty extreme and it would be best to find a cool refuge somewhere. In my determined excitement I kept rolling slowly upward. The turnoff to Four Peaks served as a reminder to eat again...I stopped for some calories just in time for the cloudcover to burn off. And BOOM, who just turned on the broiler! I have ridden the 90 miles to Payson AZ at least a dozen times over the years and this was like being on another planet...close to the sun.

A quick inventory of water revealed about four liters left; eight pounds of the only thing that really matters in the desert. The sun was baking hot on my face and neck...and I really felt it on my neck in such conditions. I pedaled slowly upward facing 10,000 feet of climbing over 90 miles. Man, this ride usually goes faster than this, I thought. Another hour in the saddle and I stopped for food and water transfer. Just five feet away, I saw a snake that - when alive - would have been nearly four feet long. It had somehow met its untimely end and was so dried and dessicated, the wind made the corpse move slightly making it appear alive again. Not possible...not out here. This should have served as my second warning. I continued upward, ever so slowly while the sun started to raise doubts in the back of my mind. Prehistoric man would have taken cover somewhere, out of instinct. But being more "evolved" and highly motivated, I foolishly continued onward. Hard climbing on a heavy bike...envision doing half squats in a sauna. The third and final warning came when I dropped my next to last water bottle when I missed holstering it in the bottle cage. The bottle rolled under the guardrail towards a steep ravine. Clumsy, I thought, what's going on? It doesnt take long to stop when you're only rolling along at five miles per hour. After jumping off the bike to retrieve the bottle I was beseiged by powerful hamstring and quad cramps. Bad! Warning number four. I climbed over the hot guardrail and retrieved my bottle, the air conditioned cars speeding by seemed to mock me...cool space capsules in a foreign land. Honestly, in 22 years of riding in Arizona and I have never been so hot. EVER.

I was 50 miles from Payson and nearly out of water.

In years of bike racing one learns how to put pain and discomfort on a shelf...you recognize it and compartmentalize it in order to deal with the discomfort. You must persevere in spite of the conditions. That's the normal mindset, but this situation was far beyond normal.

There was no shade around. I could see an overpass about a mile up the road; four easy minutes in normal conditions. But on this day, it took all I had at four miles per hour to cycle 5,280 feet, uphill, to reach the only shady sanctuary for miles around. Will someone just please turn the sun off!

Thankfully, I'd gotten a 4G smart phone for the ride. I don't think my old phone would have worked in that remote, mountainous area. The new phone enabled me to stay in touch with my brother John who was handling the blog and media from Minneapolis. We discussed the options and really there was only one - I needed to stop in this the hottest summer since 1936 and recover from the symptoms of heat exhaustion and stress I was experiencing. When its this hot and you start having chills it is a big warning sign.

I was able to contact friends Bob and Ginny and they coordinated things with their daughter Amy who drove up to pick me up and give me a ride back home. After a day or so of Gatorade and bananas, I recovered my electrolyte balance and feel fine.

I'm looking at doing a loop tour up in Colorado, with a promise of cooler temperatures.

Brad