Suffering

10 miles left.

No water.

Cramping legs.

Never before have I been cursing society more for making us fear drinking from nature's streams.

Friday, a group of 10 of us from the club and the team decided to migrate over to Mt. Hood and climb some real climbs. Not these little prissy 2-3 mile climbs like we have around Portland. Real hills. Hills that you climb for a solid hour or more.

The ride started well for me, with the first climb being a few miles into the ride and lasting a good hour. My heartrate was high; not sure if this was from the heat or the elevation (probably the heat), but it was a consistent 10bpm higher than normal for the power output. Then a hair raising descent along a narrow, gravel road for five miles; full of potholes and teeth rattling washboard.

We make it to a store at the bottom of the descent and restock. Each of us have three waterbottles, except for one of us, the smart one, who brought a camelback. He was the only one of us who didn't run out of water on the following monster of a climb. The climb in front of us now is 25 miles long. I don't comprehend this. I don't think I've ever done a climb that's required over an hour to ascend.

We start out at a hard pace. 90% of ftp, is the number I am looking at warily on the display of my powermeter. 90%. Can I hold this for two and a quarter hours? Really? 300W and I am keeping up with the group. Then I drop off, my heartrate, which is still higher than I am used to for the power output, at 180bpm. 270W and I am losing ground. 250W and I am starting to suffer. My heartrate isn't dropping with the decreased power. I look at the readout and do a quick manual reading of my pulse. Yup, I'm really pinging 180bpm.

I am going through my water at a worrying rate. Then the first twinges of an impending cramp. I pry an electrolyte pill out of my jersey pocket. Hopefully that will keep things from cramping up completely. I am starting to get chills. That's not good. It's a sign of impending heat exhaustion, when the body temperature starts rising because the body can't regulate it's temperature anymore.

I can barely eak out 200W now. Then the full cramp. I wait it out, stopped, straddling my bike. My plan is to wait for some of the guys I know are behind me, but I wait and wait; they are very, very far behind. One guy, the guy with the camelback, passes me and declines my invitation to stop. He's probably the smart one. Legs tend to seize up if you stop for too long. I have the opposite problem. I pop a couple more electrolyte pills, this time chewing through the capsule to make them take effect faster. I get going again, start catching the guy who passed me, then cramp again. 10 miles of climbing to go and I have 2 inches of water in two waterbottles left.

I round a corner and find the team regrouped and waiting. We stop and wait for the rest of the group; two more who were behind me, one with a flat, and one who was suffering worse than me. All regrouped, I get another waterbottle filled with stream water and iodine from one of my teammates. At the behest of another, I put in some Alka Seltzer, which is rumored to buffer against cramping. Off we go again. Feeling better, I still get dropped, but I'm no longer getting chills. Probably because there is a headwind now keeping us cool while obliterating the legs. Exchanging one poison for another, I walk a fine line between making progress up the hill and cramping.

Finally, it ends.

I reach one summit, go downhill for a ways, then climb over another, smaller summit and there's the rest of the group at a store. Then 8 or 9 miles of downhill back to the start.