Ease On Down the Road
I made another ride today, along the US 202 Parkway Trail. But unlike Diana Ross’s rendition of the title of this Blog post in the Wiz, there was not much ease about it.
I drove from my apartment in Broomall to the Wawa at the intersection of US 202 and SR 63 in Montgomeryville, a 25 minute journey. There is a very spacious parking lot behind the store, so I parked there and got the bike off the rack and ready to ride. Before I left home, I watched a video on how to “de–squeal” my bike brakes. I hadn’t ridden it in maybe five years, and when I began to ride a couple of weeks ago, the brakes made this horrific, screeching sound that raised the hairs on the arms of anyone within 100 yards of me. Turns out the rims needed a good cleaning with alcohol and the brake shoe toe–ins needed adjustment. Afterwards… Amazing! Blessed silence. Off I went.
Checked tire pressures, packed two liters of water and my laptop (no kidding I will explain shortly), and took off from the Trailhead.
The Trail was nice and flat then got steeply downhill quickly. Whee! I love the wind blowing in my hair. But I quickly realized that all this downhill at the beginning of the ride would have to be paid for on the return trip. It got worse.
Down, down, down, with an occasional up. The route is spectacularly well maintained, smooth asphalt all the way from end to end. The scenery is equally spectacular and beautiful. I made the 8.6 mile outbound leg in 45 minutes for an average speed of 11.5 mi/hr and arrived at the end of the Trail on the outskirts of Doylestown wheezing only moderately.
Now, as I have previously and repeatedly posted, the English language is a source of both delight and despair to me. Why is it that every entry/exit point on a Trail is a Trailhead? Are there no Trailfeet? I know it should depend on your direction of travel. Anyway I paused for ten minutes to hydrate and rest my joints, then I returned to my starting point. It was a real slog and took one hour.
Why did I take my laptop? My good friend and Bridge Partner Jane lives in Doylestown, and I was hoping to pedal the additional 4 miles to her retirement village and take her out to lunch. If that happened, I was not going to get back home in time to play in a scheduled online Bridge game at 3:15 PM. My plan was to play from her apartment on my laptop, which I had oh so cleverly packed in my saddlebag. I did not stop to think about how pungently aromatic I might be by the time I got there. But she is not an early riser and did not respond to my messages by the time I reached the end of the Trail, and that is why I turned around there.
So there is not much more to say about the ride itself, except I want to spend some time talking about the Zen (and Physics) of Bicycling. On a flat ride, one can make very good time without getting dangerously hypercardio, if that is a thing. Not so with substantial elevation changes. It’s not the downhill of course, but the up.
The energetics of the system (bicycle plus rider plus the environment) reduce to one critical consideration, how to achieve the most efficient transfer of power from the rider to the ride. Here, we are dealing with a rotating system of pedals, sprockets, gears, tires, and the legs of the rider. I want to focus on the legs and the pedals, since these are the primary source of energy and the means to apply it to the system.
In Physics, Work means a very specific thing, force multiplied by distance. Power is the rate at which work is being done calculated as the total amount of work divided by the total time doing that work. Since distance divided by time is velocity, Power can be expressed as force times velocity. In a rotating system this is equivalent to torque times angular velocity. The torque is a measure of how hard I am pushing on the pedals multiplied by their distance from the rotation axis. This torque is relatively constant when I am riding in my comfort zone, about which I will say more shortly. So the key to transfering power efficiently is to keep the angular velocity as high as possible without going hypercardio.
My resting respiration rate is about 12 lungfulls per minute (lpm). I have to make up these phony units because breaths per minute (bpm) would be the same abbreviation as my cardio rate in beats per minute, which at rest is about 65 bpm. And I cannot use respirations per minute (rpm) because that is for revolutions per minute, the angular velocity of my pedal turnover rate. For me, this is about 70 rpm, or just a little more than one full revolution per second, when I am in my comfort zone.
When I am approaching a hypercardio condition, my respiration goes up to about 30 lpm and my cardio rate up to about 170 bpm. This is where I am distinctly uncomfortable and must reduce the power I am supplying to the bike. This happens, of course, on steep uphill inclines. This is where the gears on my bike come in. I have 18 of them, three sprocket diameters up front multiplied by six rear gear diameters. Not all of these are unique. In fact, the beauty of my bike is that the gear ratios available to me are interleaved between front sprocket diameters. I think that’s all I’ll say, except that this means I have only 12 independent gear ratios, and the ones that are optimal in any situation depend on my speed and the severity of the incline.
My quadriceps are my dynamometer. They provide an exquisitely precise measure of the optimal power level I am supplying to the bike. When they start to burn at a very specific level, I know I cannot sustain that effort and remain subhypercardio. I have to slow down, and this reduces the pedal turnover rate such that I have to shift to a lower gear so I can pedal faster and stay at the optimal turnover rate. On the steepest inclines, I have to drop all the way down to Granny Low and just pedal steadily until I crest the incline.
So here is where the Zen comes in. When I am climbing these inclines, my peripheral vision disappears and I enter a state of tunnel vision, with my head down and nothing visible except my hands on the handlebars and a piece of the road no more than six feet in front of my front tire. The world vanishes, and my existence narrows to the present moment alone. The passage of time is marked only by my respiration and my feet on the pedals, turning, turning, turning. These are of course the critical parts of the engine powering the ascent. I concentrate on my breathing to the exclusion of all else. In, out, in, out, breathing from the diaphram and fully inflating the lungs, exhaling completely before inhaling again. Over and over, detached from time. There is no past, no future, only the now. It is as close to pure meditation as I have ever experienced.
Eventually my body senses the crest of the incline before my mind does, as the pressure on the pedals eases slightly and I suddenly am pedalling freely, almost without effort. I shift to the next higher gear, then the next, then suddenly I am descending and accelerating rapidly. There is no sense of elapsed time, and I cannot determine how long this went on, because there was no beginning or end, just the now, the moving present. For a little bit I catch my breath, my pulse rate goes back down, and I feel as if a boulder has been lifted from my shoulders. Then I bottom out and DOG help us here we go again. Here is what one of these potentially soul destroying inclines looks like from the bottom. If I did not have the Zen of Cycling to sustain me, despair might seep in and drown me. But I do have it, so I put my head down and pedal.
So that’s how it went today. I blew through my modest Great Cycle Challenge of 75 miles by the end of this month on yesterday’s Chester Valley Trail ride, and with today’s ride I am now up to 107.8 miles. I have raised $125.88 for the cause, but this is considerably short of my goal of $500 by the end of this month. If you are able and so inclined, please make a donation, however small, at my GCC page at https://greatcyclechallenge.com/Riders/rexsaffer so that research into finding a cure for childhood cancers may continue. Every dollar helps, and every young life saved is precious beyond measure. Kids should be living their lives, not fighting for them.
All the best,
From Broomall, PA at 9:40 PM on Sunday, 09/26
Rex
