What It's Like

At the risk of sounding whiny, I thought I'd take a moment to describe what it's really like biking 2000 miles in the middle of July.

My hands ache constantly. A road bike keeps you pitched forward, I guess because it makes you a more aggressive peddler. As a result, however, my hands support much of the weight of my upper body, all the time. The only thing which mitigates the pain, and I stress mitigates, is to readjust my grip on the handlebars. My hands hurt so much that I essentially spend 6 hours a day playing paddy-cake with my bike.

A good bicyclist will also keep his body propped up with his back muscles, specifically his lats. Not strong enough to do this, I ride hunched over, head nearly dangling, not unlike the panting character atop this blog. To raise up my head and upper torso (it's occasionally nice to see the road ahead), I pull upward using my neck and traps, both of which have simply thrown in the towel at various points on the trip.

With every thrust of my leg, my feet burn in my shoes, and either my left or right butt cheek pounds into my saddle, and every once in a while, my feet slip off the peddles entirely, sending my entire body crashing downward onto a region of the body I'll call the Neitherlands. The pain sears.

I'd avoid this prostate bodyslam by staying clipped into my peddles were it not for the left knee tendonitis the peddles seem to have engendered. There are times when I must throw the left leg behind me and one-legged peddle my sorry rear for countless country miles.

The 25 pounds of cargo have started to wear my bike down, especially on the back wheel where my strained, ever-loosening spokes rub against one another with a click I hear with every rotation of the wheel. The only time I don't hear the bike groan is when my own groaning drones it out.

Ed, by contrast, appears to have biked out of the womb. His pace is crisp and consistent. There are times when I stay behind him and benefit from his taking the wind away, until I am felled by something off the ever-spinning affliction wheel (see above), or else from a pothole on the road which I failed to see around his barn-sized back.

We bike from mid-morning to early evening, breaking for lunch, restroom stops, and sporadic sobbing. It's hot as the dog's bollocks. Despite spf 70 sunblock, I sport multiple tan lines, suntoos, and other flights of bodily chiaroscuro about which people snicker, and understandably so.

But once the bikes have parked for the night, the fun doesn't stop. I was lucky enough to buy a defective sleeping mat, which deflates roughly 2 hours after I inflate it. I mark the night in such intervals, as I am time and again reacquainted with every stony contour of our earth. Not to be outdone, my sleeping bag zipper has broken, transforming my bag into a sleeping blanket, and a scandalous one at that. I generally wake up splayed out on a public beach like the victim of a strange crime. Unable to successfully dry my clothes, I am forced to sleep as God once intended. This compounds the problem with my sleeping blanket, for me and for all early beach-goers.

The morning arrived, I groan, stretch out my knee, apply a new coat of sunblock over yesterday's layer of dirt, dried sweat, blood, mucus, and insect bite puss, do the same for Ed's splotchy-haired back, and prepare to crank out a few more of the 2000 sweaty miles.