Eat, sleep, hydrate

The Friends for Life Bike Rally (F4LBR) mandates — more like encourages, tbh — six-day riders to do two back-to-back 100k rides. I can do these rides. I have done them. But sometimes I get arrogant. And when you mix arrogance with forgetfulness, you get an almost suicidal maniac. I left my house for work on Friday morning, after breakfast. I eat food only for sustenance. The sentiment that people have about foodgasm eludes me: I eat so I may live. The downside of this is that left alone, I eat only when my body starts to beg for help. So I went to work and had two samosas. I returned home around 7 pm and took a needed nap. Football was in two hours. When I woke up, it was too late to eat before football. I went out, played, and came home. By then, it was almost midnight. While I had hydrated a lot during the day, as I have been forcing myself to do before a riding day, I have been lenient about nutrition. Getting on my bike after a night out, barely fed (except for bananas I had before leaving the house), my water bottles forgotten (Sylvie, my grey-haired friend for life, borrowed me hers; we had to ride to her place to get them), I didn't need a sage to know it was going to be a day saddled with pain. The Warden to Goodwood ride was taking us far away from Toronto into other parts of the Ontario province, where we would meet lots of farmland and uninhabited spaces. Still, I persisted. I started happy and good. I led out the peloton for about 10k. I wasn't exerting too much energy. I ate a bar of energy gel, just to be safe. But when you are in as much deficit as I was, your bills start coming in around the 20k mark. So I started suffering at 1/5 of the way into the ride. I drank my electrolyte-laden water as the weather went from 21° to 29°. If you are wondering whether this gets better, the answer is no. At the halfway point (52k), we stopped at a cafe in Goodwood for some snacks. My body refused food. I stuffed it, nonetheless. Sylvie, who had been riding with me so far, joked that I was distracted today. Simon, whom I somehow keep finding my way back to, laughed and decided to ride with us. If I thought I knew pain before, I was about to know a different kind of pain. My legs, even as they rotated the pedals non-stop, felt like heaving a log of wood. Two logs of wood. The food I forced my body to take, it wanted to give back. In that moment, I had a thought that had never occurred to me before: DNF. DNF: Did not finish. That's for people who get into accidents. People who can't push their bodies anymore. People who let ego get in the way and bonked too early. I was not any of those people, right? I was. I had bad nutrition, my hydration was subpar, and the sun was killing me. So I said I would call it in at the next stop where it was safe for me to be alone before the support car got to me. We took one turn, and the next turn was roughly 2km. I persisted. I could do it. Get to a good place and call the support ride to pick me up. Instead, we got on this amazing stretch of road where I was overtaken by a flow of good rhythm. Ajebutter22 was playing in my earphones, the road was mostly flat, Simon was riding at a slightly slower pace with Sylvie, and it felt like I could hold their tail. So I stayed there. 70k. 80k. My pain returned, but I had done 80k. Why not finish the thing? On and on and on I went. I lost space between me and Simon and Sylvie. But it didn't matter. We were back in Toronto. The traffic lights served as buffers to catch up and catch my breath. In bits and pieces, I made it back to the kickoff spot. And finally, home, where I stuffed myself with veggies and carbs and protein made by my partner, whom I had told how much I was suffering on the ride. Lesson learned: Eat, sleep, and hydrate.