I deliberately avoided posting this for a while because you need to understand the context behind it. But I always like to tell all of the stories that I’ve done.
Between November 2010 and Febuary 2011, I’ve been looking for a job. This means that I had to drive to work a few times because I didn’t want anybody to notice that I was out and CalTrain would take over an hour to get there. This also meant, between layoff stress and job-hunt stress and trying to get work done, that I’d been under a LOT of stress. Because I can’t just drop everything at work. If none of the opportunities panned out, I still wanted to stay in decently good graces at my current job.
I managed to get through the previous 200km just fine. But I’d been feeling really sick and really stressed as the hunt heated up and I turned down job offers and stuff.
So I’d been sick all week. And, more than that, I’d been interviewing. And I’d just gotten an offer, but there were some complications that I still hadn’t resolved yet.
And I couldn’t sleep the night before. I was crashing in a hotel and it was too hot in the room and I couldn’t stay asleep.
So I start the ride.. but I’m running a smidge late. So, by the time I had gotten my bike together, it was 7:01 AM, after the start time. I was about to take off when I realized that I didn’t have my pump attatched, so I had to fetch my pump. And by that time, everybody was gone.
So I was going, pretty much as fast as I could. But I was behind, and I didn’t have people to follow and paceline off of.
I had to stop at the Mikes Bikes to drink some water and take a break because my stomach hurt. That was the first sign of real trouble.
I met up with some folks around one of the turns, but I couldn’t keep up with them up the first hill. That’s fine, I get dropped all the time uphill because I’m not a climber.
But in Larkspur, I realized I wasn’t going to make it. I wasn’t totally over whatever I’d had before. And my digestive tract was in full uproar. In a long ride, it just gets worse and worse unless you take a good long break. And I really didn’t want to deal with an unhappy digestive tract in the middle of nowhere and I was already so far behind that I’d have to ride really hard just to keep up.
So I called my wife and called the point-of-contact number and headed home. And I felt quite sick afterwards so I felt fairly justified in saying that it would have been a disaster had I HTFU’d and kept going.
I did realize that I needed to make my ‘dropped off at the ride site’ setup simpler. The big thing there was getting rid of the park frame pump and getting a Lezyne pump instead.