Why we don't ride together...

When I first decided I might be bitten by the biking bug, my biker was thrilled. Now we could spend those long Sundays together, I’d understand why we had to spend so much money on bike stuff, and we’d have something really important to talk about – bikes. Of course if we were both out riding, who would get the ‘pick up’ call? Well, let’s worry about that later.

Of course, I couldn’t be introduced to biking on just any bike, so off we went to the local bike shop. Now, I had done some distance riding in the past, but it was a very long time before. I was a rider of the toe-clips, shifters-on-the-down-tube era. Now I had to clip in, I had to figure out how to brake without accidentally changing gears, and all the rest. A nice bike was picked out for me, a Giant road bike, aluminum of course (although it may have had a carbon fork), and some Shimano road shoes that still get used for spin class almost ten years later. After my initial trepidation and continual practice flips of the shifters, I finally set out to ride around the parking lot. I got a flat in the first five minutes. I should have paid attention to that warning sign.

Our first rides together in Dorset, England were fine. Nice quiet country roads, only one hill I couldn’t get up (and my first exposure to ‘oh my god I have to stop and I can’t unclip’), a few helpful pushes here and there, and nice country pubs to stop for lunch.  It wasn’t long before I even ventured out on my own. So far, so good. Not much for the bikewife to complain about.

It all changed soon enough. Bikers, as all bikewives know, can’t just go out and ride their bikes for fun. No, for them it has to be ‘base miles’, race to the stop sign, a major bonk, and riding in all kinds of stupid weather. This was not my idea of a good time, but our rides soon turned into less an opportunity to spend time together, and more an enforced training ride. 

The worst one came about a year later. It was a metric century ride near Watership Down (yes, it’s a real place), and a bike buddy and I wanted to give it a shot since it was in beautiful countryside. Biker asked if he could come along. I had a bad feeling about it but I agreed. It turned out to be exactly the tragedy the little rabbits experienced in the book – a good thing gone very, very bad. After the third puncture, biker was getting irritable. It was cold, the roads were covered in cow poop, and biker had little interest in the gossip and chit chat of bikewife and her bikebuddy. After about 45 of the 60 or so miles, biker takes off into a headwind; sullen, unable to so much as nod a goodbye, and disappears ahead down the road. 

Bikebuddy: where’s he going in such a hurry?

Me: I don’t know, maybe he thinks times will be published somewhere.

Bikebuddy: Maybe he wants to go home?

Me: Well, I’ve got the car keys so good luck to him. 

When I did get back to the car, he was standing there, cold and grumpy. I pointed out that (a) he could have asked for the car keys and (b) if he’d given us a draft we’d all have gotten back sooner, and (c) sorry we took so long but we stopped at a little café and had coffee and cake. Biker swore he'd never join me on a randonee again. Or at least not until what became know as the Isle of Wight 'Ride and Fight' a couple years later.

It wasn’t too long before I got into more competitive bike racing – time trials (because I’m a solitary type). The down side for biker was that I now had bikefriends who weren’t his friends, I was spending money on nicer stuff than his, and I was noticing the backsides of some of my male two-up time trial partners more than his. So, biker suggested we do a two-up time trial together. Okay, sounds like it might be alright. I picked a local ten mile two-up, close to home, on a course I knew well. I’d done a few two-ups, so I knew how to hold a wheel. 

It all started out just fine, until I discovered that doing a two-up with a road racer/triathlete, with no knowledge of time trialling and who really didn’t want advice from his bikewife, just wasn’t going to work. I tried to hold his wheel, but biker rode like he always did, that is, as if there was no one right behind him. After broadening my vocabulary about his sudden changes of speed, our racing together came to an end when he nipped around a drain, leaving me - snug on his wheel -  to crash straight into it. Oh yeah, that was why I always rode in front when we did our rides together. Now I remember why I never took the draft. 

Yeah, you better love your bike, because I won't forget this for a looooong time.

Then we tried something new – of course, biker had to find some type of biking I wasn't good at to reassert is bike authority. So we tried mountain biking. I got a bike that was cheap and didn’t fit, and off we went to the trails, seeing as how I could ‘figure it out’. Well, when your riding experience is time trialling, which doesn't require either turning or braking, a mountain bike trip to a place called 'Hell’s Glen’ isn’t going to go well. 

After my fifth fall in cold, snowy winter weather I decided I had had enough of this and of him. I sent him ahead to go and get the car, because we were back on roads and the end was near (although it involved traversing a place called ‘The Rest and Be Thankful’ (yes, it's a real place too). He set off, skipping up the hill, and I trudged along. I hadn’t gone far when I was brought down by an unpleasant blend of 12 percent grade and an angry sheep. As I lay in the road, tasting blood in my mouth, wondering why my lungs wouldn’t work, still unable to unclip, and thinking ‘well, this is a beautiful place to die’, I was thankfully rescued by a passing motorist - which out here really was a sign form God. We couldn’t carry the bike in their car, so we pitched it on the side of the road and they helped me into their car and drove me down to the parking lot. Biker was there, just getting loaded up. I crawled out of their car, still doubled over with what turned out to be fractured ribs, and he says:

‘Where’s your bike?’

The final nail in the coffin of riding together came on Mother’s Day, about three years ago.

Biker: What do you want to do for Mother’s day?

Me: The weather is supposed to be nice, why don’t we have a little bike ride and ride somewhere for lunch?

Biker: Sounds great, I’ll find a route.

And find a route he did. 36 miles. Every hill in a 15 mile radius. No lunch. Seriously, did he think he could turn my relaxing Mother’s Day ride into his training ride? Of course he did.  About 25 miles out, this ride went the same way as the Watership Down disaster, except that this time it was me who rode off into the distance, taking advantage of a long downhill to get a break, tears of rage streaming down my face. As we climbed a long hill close to home, we were passed, unknowingly – by our neighbors, driving home from a lunch probably much like the one I wanted. They later told us they had seen us, and that we didn’t look very happy. It has become known in our house as the Mother’s Day ‘Ride of Silence’.

Watership Down. Hell's Glen. Mother's Day. Three strikes. You’re out. Go ride with your little bike buddies and tell me all about it. That way maybe – just maybe – we’ll stay married.

Bikefood...

We’ve had a little chat about bikefriends, now let’s talk about another way bikers and their bikelives encroach into the lives of bikewives. Food. Now, I know plenty of athletes, some pretty talented, some even at an international level in their sports. And I’m not talking table tennis or golf – I’m talking real sports,  international runners for example. None of them impose the same nightmare on their kitchens as the biker.

I’m not a bikewife who cooks, and if you are, you really have my sympathies. I can afford to ignore a lot of the biker’s bikefood behavior because I don’t have to prepare it, but it still gets into every aspect of bkiewifelife.  I can’t even begin to imagine the frustration of bikewives who have to buy and prepare this lunacy for their bikers.

First of all, the bikefamily is subjected to all of the latest fitness food trends, regardless of any scientific basis. The South Beach diet (commonly called just “low GI” by bikers hiding the trend factor from their bikewives), carbo-loading, the citrus diet, the list goes on. Let just one of your little bikebuddies offer an ounce of an unsubstantiated report that some food fad may have improved his most recent mid-peloton finish by a place or two, and the whole bikefamily is signed up to the misery of the bland and the boring. Yet somehow, when you get sick of it, suddenly there’s a diet ‘loophole’. So tell me, biker, how exactly did that pizza and beer fit into the latest “Tour diet”?

The kitchen itself suffers too. The pantry is no longer a storage space for the staples of a healthy family diet, but instead becomes the repository for half-empty containers of all kind of mixes – not just the sticky crap you put in the water bottles (which inevitably speeds up the mold process when you leave your bottles in the garage or the back seat of the car), but recovery mix, protein mix, off-season mix, turbo session mix; again, the list goes on. 

And there’s more. Gels, “Gu”s, power bars, you name it. Most of it half-used, and all of it past its sell-by date. That may be because you keep buying peanut butter Gu which no one in their right mind will like, not even you at the height of a base mile ride bonk. Nope, you’ll bring that pack of peanut flavored snot back home to keep in the pantry for the next long ride. Supplement trends are fun too. As if the bike parts don’t cost enough, you have to spend on the latest fad to maximize your performance. Yep, a little Creatine is going to have you in the Cat Two’s this season for sure.  That’s definitely all it will take. Now, in cleaning out the pantry, I’m not sure why you also keep udder creme in there, but maybe I better not ask.

A sample of the pantry store...yes, the Clif bar is open (yuck), and the oldest item was eleven months past it's sell by date!

 The cupboards are targets too. Part of the latest “this year I’ll be Cat Three” diet plan is always a lot of kitchen equipment. A fat free griller, because you won’t touch anything fried – at least not until next Friday when you give in to a “cheat day” and fish and chips, or tell yourself that stir fry doesn’t count if it’s fried in sesame oil. What was the latest juicer in its day still sits in a cupboard, the crusts of some bizarre veggie juice concoction still gracing the bottom of the jug. I’d love to throw them away or garage sale them, except that I know there will come a time when the smoothie/juicer/grill/whatever fad will roll around again. Please, though, don’t let the next fad be going vegan, or I swear, bikewife and bikekids will eat elsewhere.

Now, biker, explain to me why you buy all that stuff, then I see you cramming your face with a mocha whip  and a chocolate muffin at the “rest stop”? And don’t tell me that muffin was okay because it’s “low GI”. Sure, I know, you were close to a bonk, and didn’t want to let your bike buddies down by slowing down the ride. Of course you needed to refuel – so why do I find a half empty water bottle with $5 worth of some kind of carbo powder left in the garage, and catch you putting a handful of squashed energy bars back in the pantry? Oh right; they were the peanut butter ones…

Patronizing bike friends

Being a bikewife isn’t just about you and your biker. Oh no. Being a bikewife means you also sign up to a whole bunch of bikefriends, bikeparties, and even bikefood. But for this post, let’s start with bikefriends.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I really do love to talk about bikes, so I’m not going to say biketalk is a problem, or that biker shouldn’t take me along to bikeparties or try to keep me away from bikefriends. I was a biker myself once  -  I time-trialed for a few years. Not blazing fast, but certainly respectably mid-division, even in good company. I have a few club trophies, and a few nice bits of clothes and gear I won fair and square. I’ve raced – and finished - cross and mountain too. I finished a 100 mile randonee in under 8 hours. I’m not a bike idiot. 

So, bikefriends, don’t talk to me like I’m one. Even if they don’t race – or even ride – the bikewife will learn about bikes. They have to – it’s necessary for the fiscal stability of your household.  Bikers sneak in stuff, lie about what it cost, and claim that they will sell old stuff or swap it over. They don’t. Bikewives know the difference in price between 105 and Dura Ace, and they know those wheels are new and that you haven’t borrowed them just for this one race. And as for that old chestnut, ‘don’t worry Honey, I’ll sell the old groupset/wheels/frame on eBay’ – why do you even bother? I know the old stuff will be cluttering up the garage for many seasons waiting to become that mystical ‘rain bike’, ‘pit bike’, or ‘just-in-case spares’. It certainly isn’t going to become cash any time soon.

So back to my point. Recently, I was invited to a party hosted by biker’s bikebuddy. That’s really okay; like I said, I like bikers, biketalk, and certainly enjoy the company of other bikewives. Bikers usually have nice homes and throw great parties with great food; and this party was no exception. The trouble only came when standing with my wine glass among my biker and some bikebuddies, the conversation inevitably turned to bikes, or bike parts, or something like that. I offered a few contributions to the conversation, and one of them looked at me and said:

‘Look at you, talking about bikes!’

Let’s get something straight. We bikewives know more than you think. When we nod reassuringly when you tell us about the ‘mechanical’ that meant you got dropped from the pack in the cat 4 newbie-fest, it’s not because we are sharing your ‘agony of defeat’ or the injustice of a mechanical akin to what spoiled David Millar’s Tour chances not that long ago. You hear us say, ‘Yes dear, of course your rear derailleur let you down, yes of course you should call the LBS and complain, of course, yes, look into buying a new one’. What we’re really saying, is ‘Yeah, what a shame, all the other boys were faster than you. Suck it up.’

If you are a bikewife who bikes, then the patronizing bikefriends really sting. I recall a mountain bike trip with a bunch of bikewives, all of whom were quite competent bikers with a more than rudimentary knowledge of bikes and biking, when one came out of a very tricky section of trail with a bent derailleur and a broken chain. We could straighten out the derailleur, but weren’t sure what to do about the chain, and we didn’t want to do any major damage to the drivetrain with a misguided trail repair. I called the local bike shop from my cell phone, and asked for the mechanic. I explained what had happened, that we had a chain tool, and asked, can we fix this enough so she can ride out?’

He said: ‘No, you can’t.’

Me: ‘But surely we can just take out the broken links and reconnect it; at least enough so she can single gear it out of here?’

'So what was thing called again?'

He: ‘That is possible.’

Me: ‘So what you’re saying is ‘one could fix this, but I can’t’?’

He: ‘Yeah, pretty much.’

Me: ‘Humor me, why don’t you, and let’s just see?’ (or rather, I said something like that – the important thing is he wisely decided to give me a little help).

We removed the bent and broken links. We reconnected the chain snugly enough over a ratio that she could manage to ride out. 

So there, Mr. Mechanic (or something along those lines)…

The Excuse Book

Ahh, race season is underway. The long Sunday ride has been swapped for the Saturday all-day drive and race. Don’t worry biker, bikewife will take care of it. I’ll take the kids to T-ball, do the grocery shopping, and get everything done so when you get back from your race you can relax. And Sunday? Of course, that’s your ‘recovery’ day. I understand.

What I don’t understand is why you do it. You spend all winter preparing for this; for your ‘big year’. We eat what you want, we buy what you ‘need’, and we wave you off for your Sunday ‘base miles’ then come pick you up when you bonk. We love you, so we support you. But somehow, that ‘big year’ just doesn’t seem to arrive. You race, and race, and it looks good to me. So you were ‘in the pack’, ‘top twenty’, or whatever. Good job, and I mean that. You raced, you played with your friends, you got some exercise, why can’t you be happy about it? This is supposed to be fun after all, right? So why, why, do you always have to come home with an excuse?

Bike wives have heard all your excuses for a mediocre race performance - some of them several times. We don't let on that we know that really, once again, you just weren't fast enough, because we really are proud of you - anyway.  For our sake, though, this year see if you can come up with new ones, because frankly we're bored with the old chestnuts of the Cyclist's Guide to Race Day Excuses. This trusted volume has many, many chapters, but let’s take a look at a few of the most dog-eared pages…

The Mechanical Chapter

These are the easiest and best excuses. ‘How’d it go?’ your bikebuddy will ask back at the parking lot. You’ll shrug, look nonchalant, and say, ‘Great, until I got a mechanical’. If you’re really smooth, you can even get that to replace your DNF or your mid-peloton position on the results sheet. No one ever says what their mechanical was, lest anyone look into it too closely. No one ever says, 'my rear derailleur packed up, would you mind taking a look at is and see if you can see what’s wrong?’ And your bikebuddy won’t ask. It’s an unwritten rule of the weekend warriors. He’ll nod knowingly, and say, ‘man, that sucks, better luck next time.’ And you both will pack up your (not broken at all) toys and go home.

Yep, it was definitely a mechanical...

 

If you’re lucky, you might actually get close to a real mechanical, and therefore close to a real excuse. One of my favorites occurred at a big race in France. A bikebuddy of mine (whose own bikewife opted to enjoy the warm sunshine at the beach with the kids instead or waiting for another mid-division finish), was clearly upset about his fair-to-middling performance that day. So, 'What happened?', I asked, expecting to see him take the excuse book out of his jersey pocket and flip through for an answer. No, this guy was ready. 

Him: Mechanical.

Me: What exactly?

Him: Well, I had a flat.

Fair enough I thought, that is a mechanical. But at this race we had race cars. He should have had a wheel right there.

As if reading my mind he said: So, I got my spare wheel, and got it swapped round real quick. But, I didn’t realize the rim was wider that my aero wheels. I didn’t adjust the brakes and was dragging on the rim the whole way.

Okay, I thought. That’s sort of a mechanical. It’s also sort of stupid. 

The Fitness Chapter

I know you have trained hard. I know you are at the peak of fitness. And I know you were ready to win. You would have too, if you hadn’t gone skiing yesterday, overtrained with that heavy-duty power interval session on the trainer last Wednesday, or…bikewives, you fill in the rest.  The best ones are when it’s bikewife's fault, although biker won’t say it directly. Yeah, mowing the lawn yesterday must’ve really taken it out of your quads. Really? Is that so? 

Or, maybe you messed up your training plan, the one that needs eight spreadsheets on the computer and all kinds of complicated equipment to measure. Maybe you didn’t do the right base/intervals/sprints or whatever. Maybe you got your ‘periodization’ wrong and weren’t really at your peak. Maybe you need to do a VO2max test and find out what’s wrong. Or maybe - you need to just ride your bike a little more? No, you’re right, it’s all in the science. After all, your motto is ‘don’t train harder, train smarter’. That’s why we pay that coach, right?

The Other Guy Chapter

No, I don’t mean you acknowledged the other guy was faster, stronger, better prepared. No I mean the other guys that messed up your race. The newbie that couldn’t corner so slowed you down every time (and probably prevented your own demise). The team mate who was supposed to lead you out but was nowhere to be seen at the sprint finish. The other team’s guy that cut you off as he turned up to lead out their eventual winner and messed up your rhythm. That other guy.