UniChris

Cool temps, stalled project at work, rain predicted for tomorrow and then unbearably hot for a week.

Yet everything needed to actually go for a ride right now feels "off" - starting late, moderate chance of rain, bandaged road rash on my knee from a ride on Friday that similarly felt wrong from the start. And the only ride that really feels "worth doing" in the sense of meaningful training is a rail trail that goes off in the boonies for miles 19-49, where the only options are pressing on to where it meets an active commuter line, or retracing almost the whole way back.

How do you reconcile fleeting "opportunity" with the feeling that "today is not the right day" ?

I can go for a brief ride this evening, but between playing with new gear and various distractions it's been a month since I did a true limits-stretching distance ride. We've already turned the corner to the days getting shorter, and it feels like I'm not only not making progress towards the goal of doing this ride round trip, but after a good start to the season a month ago, seeing the fitness to even do it one way slip away.

Perhaps I just start early on Saturday or Sunday and go for it despite the predicted 90 degree heat. Unfortunately, avoiding riding through the middle of the day just isn't an option for me at these distances - if I wait until late afternoon, the most I'd manage would be 30 miles or so. If I get out there early enough I can have maybe 50% more time than I actually need, so I'd still have to deal with mid-day heat, but could at least afford to slow way down in it.

In the time I've spent pondering this, the opportunity to go and get it done has passed - by the time I could get up to the trailhead I'd be cutting the finish too close. Yet in the same time the clouds have pulled back some and sitting it out feels even more silly.

Hoopdriver

I feel that way a lot, but I remind myself that I have never regretted deciding to ride.

thumpism 

Go out and cut/split/stack firewood as I intend to do. Any diversion, like doing a candyass bike ride, seems sensible and doable when facing that task.

billyymc

I'm confused. How long is the ride you are talking about?

If you don't feel like riding, don't. Find something else that you feel like doing until you feel like riding.

Unless you're being paid to ride, then go ride.

UniChris

I'd *almost* agree - it usually feels great to be out there. Except that a big part of how I got hurt on Friday was going faster on new unfamiliar equipment, in no small part feeling pushed to finish the distance in time. Fortunately when I went down I was a mile short of the last bailout point.

If I had a ride that felt logistically safer but still worthwhile, it would be different. I could do something closer to home, but what's available for that is 50 km chock full of annoyances, with only a few stretches where I can just spin the pedals for even a mile or two without interruption - it has its nice parts, but the accomplishment is more the "dealing with" than the distance training.

Being that it's too late now, I sort of want it to rain to validate the decision - though that would be a bit unfair to those who did get their act together or will.

UniChris

Seven to eight hours (multiply the actual distance to something that would take you that long); there aren't really shorter versions that have a decent balance of enjoyable parts and accomplishment for the annoying parts in the first half of it.

The problem with that is looking into a week of predicted bad riding conditions.

TrojanHorse

Agree.

Go put your gear on and THEN decide. That's usually the tipping point for me when I"m feeling lethargic

billyymc

If you want to ride, but don't have time for the ride you were thinking about, find a different ride. Sometimes riding doesn't have to be about pushing it. There are times I go out and just wander. I may end up doing 15 miles, or I may end up doing 50 or 60 miles. I might ride hard on some sections, and just chill on others.

Maybe that's not practical for you in your location. I can leave my door and ride any kind of ride you can think of pretty much.

Or like I said before - if you don't feel like riding, just don't ride. Nobody will point at you while you're walking down the street.

Milton Keynes

Only time I feel like not riding is when I feel like I still need some sleep when my alarm goes off at 5 AM. If I can't get motivated enough to get out of bed and ride, then I'll reset my alarm for an hour later and plan on riding the next day.

f4rrest

I took a day off work to go ride up a mountain today.

Weather is beautiful. Traffic is light, being midweek.

But I'm just too tired, so I walked the dog (slowly) instead.

I don't feel guilty.

UniChris

That's pretty much what happened the last two times I decided to set up for a long ride. Only I cancelled the alarm after a few hours of trying to sleep when I was still awake at 3 AM.

On Friday I then slept until mid-morning, figuring I'd just do the ride one-way rather than a partial round trip to break my previous personal distance. But by the time I actually got up to the start of the trail it was after 1pm, which meant there was no tolerance for anything to go wrong. Trying to keep speed up, I fell.

The problem is that I've not done over 20 miles in a month now. The little rides are not worthless, but they're not maintaining my ability to do 50 or 60 miles, or push that north of 70...

There's some truth in there though - often the rides that have been nice I've started with the feeling of "let's get up to the rail bridge and then see" rather than "I'm going to ride 70 miles today... er, well maybe 50?". Of course the rail bridge is about 60% of the way, and north of all the annoyances, so I've never felt like turning back from there to face them again rather than press on.

Riveting

You should ride EVERY day, except for the days that you don't want to, or can't. It's that simple.

dennis336

There are some days where I don't feel enthusiastic about going for a ride but I feel I "should" either to keep up with my conditioning or if, for some reason, the next few days look like I may not get out (weather, schedule, etc). What I'll sometimes do is just go for a ride, mentally giving myself permission to cut the ride short if I'm not enjoying it. Invariably, once I get out, the endorphins, or whatever, get flowing, and I end up doing the full ride I targeted.

RidingMatthew

Do or do not. There is no Try. - Yoda

just do it or don't... don't beat yourself up for whatever you decide.

UniChris

I do that some, too. But to an extent, if I'm going to ride less than 31 miles, I should just head out my door and deal with all the urban interruptions of the greenway. While if I want to go for a "real" ride, I should spend 45 minutes to an hour on trains to get to the start of the 49-mile rail trail. That time on the train, the muddy first mile of the trail, etc hardly seems warranted if I only end up doing a 20 mile ride on it.​

I'm in the office, feeling like I took a day off from riding to work.

At least the code that wasn't working yesterday is now, though figuring out how to make use of it is still a mystery.

UniChris

...and my alternate reality self seems to be pulling into the train station at the northern end of the trail, only lightly sprinkled. Jealous.

Milton Keynes

This morning I only did half of my usual morning ride, since it was so warm out even at 5 AM. Since I tend to work out in the heat I didn't want to do too much this morning.

woodcraft

Are you talking about on one wheel?

How does the effort of a long ride compare to two wheels?


Sometime, if I bail or miss an activity I'll think that maybe it was

my guardian angels preventing me from getting hit by a truck.

Leebo

Bad weather? That just changes every 10 minutes in New England. In 20 years I've never had a bad day riding. Flats, broken frames, double flats, lost, food bonks, heat stroke, lost/food bonk/dark, rain, sleet, ice, snow. Some rides better than others, yes. Sense of adventure and fortitude, bring some of that along with you. $ 20 and rain jacket are big helps as well.

Clipped_in

OP what are you training for? You ask a really good question, but if you have clear goals they should help you to answer it.

My guess is that you probably should have done the ride that sounded attractive to you. It sounds to me like you need a little mental recovery by doing something different than your regular riding routine.

Good luck!

UniChris

Ultimately trying to do a century as a round trip on a rail trail that I've done one way three times, and a metric as a partial round trip on twice.

Wednesday didn't feel like the right time to ride it - I wouldn't have accomplished anything new like pushing distance into the 70's, at best I'd have had time to do it one way again, and it didn't feel prepared or safe in more ways than just questionable weather.

Current plan is to see if I can get out there early tomorrow (getting to sleep early enough for an early start is being a challenge itself) and do the one way version with plenty of time available. It will be brutally hot, but should be able to survive that with a lot of fluids and no pressure to keep the speed up. Essentially at this point the immediate goal is just to prove that I can still do what I could do a month ago and last summer.

Yes, large unicycle. I'd sort of been hand-waving away the difference under the theory of "just multiply by whatever factor and the challenges are basically the same." When things are going well, that's almost true. It's not really more effort (since the gearing is absurdly low) but definitely more time, revolutions, and saddle soreness than biking the same distance would be.

But I'm realizing that some of the hesitation I felt comes more uniquely from what I'm riding. When I crashed I was probably going about 13 mph, at say 11 I'd probably have landed running on my feet as I did in an earlier oops that day. So far I've only done the whole ride on a giant 36 inch wheel that rolls over anything and is very stable, but which I've found I waste a lot of time trying to jump back on top of in situations where the trail climbs from a road crossing. When I crashed I was riding a smaller and so less stable wheel (yes, I just called a 29x2 marathon "small") that's easier to get onto, with an internal gear hub raising it to about 45 gear inches. That hopefully means wasting less time remounting, and makes me a hair faster, but it's harder to stay on, and at higher speeds the consequences of failing to increase.

Right now I also have the dilemma that I don't think I can wear knee pads over the still-healing road rash. I'd not been wearing them on the large stable wheel, but got them for the smaller geared one. So I'm sort of leaning towards going back to the big stable one for the ride tomorrow, even though I'm now out of practice at jumping up onto it. Or maybe I ride the smaller geared one, but make a point of doing so slowly, to have just accomplished the entire course on that and continue to build my skills for riding it. And maybe it helps me figure out the huge difference between rolling at 11 mph and a consistent history of accomplishing less than 7 miles per hour spent on long rides - instead of upping the rolling speed, if I can improve the rolling percentage and get up to about 8 miles in each of 13 hours of daylight, it becomes possible.

Anyway, those extra concerns aren't really on topic here, and my having hand waved them away in the initial post invalidates my question a bit.

I was debating yesterday, if I can't do the ride I want to by the time the days become short enough to preclude it, if there's a point when I should just get a folding bike (all I could store), do a couple of rides to shake out the mechanism and get used to spinning cranks longer than 125mm, and then do it on that just to have done the distance.

But then I think, if I just had a long piece of perfect protected pavement, I probably could do the distance, it's all the incidental challenges that are the real obstacle.

billyymc

I totally missed that you're talking about a unicycle.

I'd recommend getting a second wheel to make everything easier! ha

I've been thinking about trying a unicycle. Next time I see one cheap on CL I"m goign to get it and see if I can even do it.

UniChris

My "fault" for writing a question that was more about generic pedaling long distance aspects. In retrospect I realize that left out too much that actually matters.

Absolutely! And craigslist is totally the right place - get a 20 or 24 from someone who gave up and eventually decided it was time to clean out the garage. Might need a longer seatpost, new tube, etc but they're pretty simple, just watch out for anything that looks like a loose crank.

Takes maybe a week to learn on average, a few more to learn to jump on without holding anything, then you decide what's interesting - tricks, off-road, distance... for me it was the latter.

UniChris

Failed yet again to get enough sleep for a 7am start - was in bed and sort of zoned out, but didn't actually sleep. Cancelled the alarm and got up mid-morning.

Didn't actually get to the trailhead until 2:30 pm.

Took another spill while riding fast hoping to get to a key junction by 8pm. Very fortunate to have only a tiny spot of road rash on my arm, but I found myself sitting legs extended on the trail and utterly locked with cramps - was several minutes before I could even get up as any attempt to gather my legs made the cramps worse. Someone southbound was nice enough to stop and wait until I was back on my feet. Had to walk a ways to loosen up before I could ride again. Got back on and made it to that junction at 8:20 instead, and rigged my lights there (sunset was officially 8:30 or thereabouts).

Finished the last ten miles of the one-way ride slowly under a headlamp.

So I can still do what I could do a month ago. But cutting the time close is not smart. Snapped a picture of the taxi dispatch booth at the train station so now I have their phone number...

Was very glad to have the larger more stable wheel that I feel like I can trust, at least once I'm up on it. Realized that up-grades after road crossings usually mean the crossing road is on an incline too, so a couple of times mounted up on the road's downgrade and then did a quick turn into the trail.

Drank something like 8 liters of fluids, and it pretty much all came out as sweat. Mostly water with nuun tabs, some gatorade, gatorade with nuun, etc but cramps suggest I was still too far on the water side. Was very glad to have dry clothes, a long sleeve shirt, and a ski hat for the heavily air-conditioned hour and half train ride back.

UniChris

Weather was actually looking promising and had managed 4 hours of sleep by 3:45 am. But took too long getting ready, to meet my roundtrip goal need to be riding at 5am, not leaving the house at 5:15 most of an hour from the trail. (already determined 10 days ago that wheels down at 6:30 won't work, though at least this time I got some sleep)

Currently trying to sleep in bike shorts and chamois butter, will shower again later and go to work, let it rain all week and try again on the weekend.

Peanut butter, jelly, and banana sandwiches won't freeze, will they?