That was fun part 2

First of all THANK YOU everyone for checking up on me. It was really nice of ya'll. I can assure you all I'm not nearly as bad off as most of you seemed to think. So to sum up today:

I woke up really early this morning, and there was a low throbbing pain in my back, right underneath my right shoulder blade. This was kind of ignored though, in favor of the boiling cauldron of hell that I was experiencing in my, you know, area. I also noticed I had been drooling a LOT while I was asleep, which I was pretty much going to chalk up to the percocet, but then I noticed there was a lot of blood on my pillow near my mouth as well. I was also having some trouble breathing

I decided it was time to give up and go see the doctor, and went to go take a leak real quick. Oops, tons of blood in my urine too. Now I was back to panicking a bit. I debated calling an ambulance but settled on a cab. I took the cab to the hospital, got admitted pretty much straight away, and the first thing they do: Morphine.

UMC is like the most morphine happy place I've ever been to. "Oops I stubbed my toe" "10 mikes morphine, STAT!!!" Unlike the phantom side pains I had back in June though, I was pretty okay with it this time. So I wait for like an hour with the resident, the doctor comes in and asks me to rate my pain, tell where it hurts, whatever. He doesn't seem too impressed, and is writing something in those infernal notebooks I'm convinced they write "Patient is a little girl and came in to whine about his owie" in, when I started coughing badly and hacked up another decent amount of blood.

That kind of got them going, so they gave me a CT scan and an echocardiagram. The diagnosis was cryptogenic hemoptysis, which sounded like an awesome House disease, but it turns out that it just means they don't know why I'm coughing up blood. The peeing blood was caused by a badly bruised kidney, apparently NOT by the shot I took to the sensitive bits by the nose of my saddle. The doc assumed it was a bruised lung causing the mouth bleeding but admitted it seemed like a bit too much blood for that. They offered to do a lung biopsy, but honestly if they're not worried I'm not.

They then told me I wasn't to use the bike for at least a month, because the bouncing and stuff was going to fuck up my kidneys worse. I'm going to level with you folks, I've been trying reallllly hard to just give the facts without trying to inject any drama into the proceedings, but at that point I laid back down and while I didn't start bawling or anything, I did start crying a bit. I was exhausted, frustrated, scared shitless of the fact that various parts of me are bleeding, and now some guy is basically blowing up my whole trip by saying I've gotta take a month off. There's just no way i could get back in shape in time if I did that, I'd be done.

So I plead my case, told him it didn't hurt that badly anymore (not that he was worried about that) and that I could just stand in the pedals for any large bumps. It's not like I'm taking it down a cliffside or anything, I'm on improved streets. I could deflate the tires a bunch to soften the ride, I'd come in for checkups, whatever he wanted. He asked why it was such a big deal and I explained it, and i gotta admit, the guy was really cool.

I have to come in for another CT scan and some other tests later this week, to make sure the bruising isn't getting worse, but he said I could keep riding and probably be okay. They released me later, I took a test ride, and it's really not that bad. I even made it into work later on. I can walk fine, it still kind of hurts to sit, and I'm not gonna lie it doesn't feel particularly good on the saddle, but it's certainly doable. All the bike needed was a new wheel and stem, didn't even bend the fork.

I'll be peeing blood for a few more days apparently, and taking deep breaths isn't really an option for awhile, but otherwise all things considered I'm pretty damn lucky. I took another look at where I fell and I have no idea how I convinced myself I landed on grass, the other side of that curb is straight sidewalk. I got all these bruises because I went end-over my handlebars and landed flat on my back on the sidewalk going about 20. Could have been a lot worse, so I'm looking at the bright side.

Again, thanks for all the well wishes and stuff, but it ended up not being a big deal. All's good.

Hey that was fun

I've been hit by cars twice before, and honestly, it doesn't bother me as much as you'd think it would. When push comes to shove, I'm a bike on a street with cars. I mean, yes they're supposed to give me 5 feet, and yes I technically have the same rights as them, but they're supposed to come to complete stops at stop signs and put on their headlights 30 minutes after sunset too. Cars drive the way they do.

Tonight I wasn't actually HIT by a car, but I'm more annoyed this time than the other ones. So I'm biking down Campbell, on the short section where there's no bike path. So I'm more vulnerable than usual. But it's not usually a big deal. I'm cruising along, most of the way home and my head's, well, not where it should be when I'm the road. I tent to drift. Another point against me.

Suddenly I realize I'm hearing a car engine over my headphones. And it's VERY bright ahead of me. I sneak a glance back and see I'm being born down upon by a fucking huge truck. It's literally 5 feet behind me. And christ, the engine is loud.

The lights, sound, and all of it kind of made me panic. I was all the way to the right so I couldn't really bail out. Luckily there was a driveway right in front of me. I turned into going about 20, but didn't exactly make a full turn, I just merged over a bit. Unfortunately, this wasn't a crosswalk or anything, so the curb isn't on the side of the intersecting road, it's just a curb. Maybe 4 inches high.

I then proceeded to do absolutely everything wrong. I freaked out and tensed up (you're supposed to relax so your arms and legs take some of the shock) and I also stood up in the peddles a bit (didn't know you're not supposed to do this, but trust me, you're not)

So I hit the curb. The front wheel jumps up, then the seat immediately follows. The nose of the seat then rams up HARD into...well. I want to be delicate here. It hit me somewhere in between where it would've kicked me in the nuts, or anally violated me as badly as Michael Clark Duncan would. Still a pretty sensitive area.

I fall off (into some dirt luckily) and immediately hop back up, walk over to the idling truck in front of me, rip the driver out of his seat and proceed to administer a beatdown of Old Testament proportions. Nah, just kidding, that would've been nice to do. I writhed around on the ground like a fish for about 20 seconds, then spit up a fair amount of blood. Probably somewhere between Neo in the Matrix where Agent Smith kicks his ass for the first time, and Jubei from Ninja Scroll. As far as I can tell I'm not cut and didn't bite my tongue, so that's a bit worrisome, but I'm also concerned for my poor nether regions.

I did eventually get up (the truck was long gone) and thank goodness I was close to home, so I managed to walk the bike the rest of the way. The front rim is WRECKED, and maybe the fork or stem, but other than that it seems okay. Those can all be replaced easily.

As I got home I coughed up blood a few more times, but less each time. I vaguely considered going to the ER, but it was pretty far away and I don't think it was serious enough to warrant an ambulance. I got the bike home, went in the house, found the last two Percocet from my phantom side pains back in June, and swallowed those about 20 minutes ago.

I'm gonna try to get some sleep and see how I feel in the morning. I almost certainly have to go to the hospital, but I don't want to be all melodramatic and call an ambulance or call someone to come get me. If I still feel like shit in the morning, I'll go. If no one's around, I guess I might call a cab. I don't think anything's seriously wrong. It hurts to breathe, but I hit the ground pretty hard so I probably just had the wind knocked out of me. I stopped coughing up blood about half an hour ago. I still taste it, but my mouth was kind of full of it for awhile so I'll probably taste it for awhile to come.

I certainly can't sit, I'm curled up in bed with my laptop as I write this. It actually doesn't even hurt that much down there, it's more kind of numb and throbbing. Also Percocet is pretty awesome stuff. I guess I should probably start worrying about how to get to work and around for the forseeable future, but I highly doubt anyone's going to question it if I call out of work tomorrow and spend the day figuring all that stuff out.

I swear to God if I ever find the dude that came up behind me I'm going to break his fucking neck.

Mechanical Problems

You know, I'd always assumed a bike is a reasonably simple machine. 2 wheels, a frame basically consisting of two connected triangles, some gears. This past week has disabused me of that thought process.

About two weeks ago, a bit less, I ran over some caltrops. Caltrops basically look like the metal things in a game of jacks, except without the little balls on the end. They were invented to stop cavalry charges about 3000 years ago, you'd seed the field with them and the horses would get their feet messed up by running over them. In the ensuing 3 millenia, however, apparently their purpose has changed somewhat, in that they are now designed solely to piss me off.

So I ran over the caltrops, which didn't just fuck up the tubes in my tires, but the tires themselves. I didn't realize that at first, naturally, so I just replaced the tube and it kept blowing up within 3 seconds. The tube was poking out of a gash in the tire, and popping from being under too much pressure. At this point a reasonable person would've simply replaced the tire too.

"Nonsense" I declared (to my cat), "I'm not going to spend TWENTY DOLLARS on some new tire when all this needs is a bit of clever monkey wrenching!" First I tried just inflating the tube to 40 PSI, instead of 110. This worked for a little while, but the extra heat that created (I don't know why underinflated tires heat up more than fully inflated ones, ask someone smarter than me. They just do) caused the rubber to start to fail even worse around the gash, so the tube started popping out again and blowing up.

So then I decided to use some tire patches on the inside of the tire, which would prevent the tube from sticking out. "Genius!" I cried (to my cat, who gave me a look of deep disdain and wandered over to the corner to lick her own crotch somehow) and figured all was well. Except I still had a small tube graveyard, and no new tire tubes to replace it with. I decided that it would be foolish to buy new tubes, because if I did that I'd spend as much as I would've on a new tire, and then this whole sequence of events would've seemed stupid because if I'd just bought the tire in the first place I wouldn't need new tubes and I'd have a shiny new tire. With me so far? Yeah neither am I.

So I figured I'd find the least damaged tube, patch it up, and use that for awhile. I'm not sure what my end game was at this point. Eventually tubes (and even tires) wear out, so I guess my thought was that if I somehow coaxed another, oh I don't know, 1000 miles out of this horrible configuration, then I'd have vindicated myself somehow and could claim I'd have needed new tubes and tires anyway. But to my dismay, I'd used all of my patching equipment for the busted tire.

"Curses!" I exclaimed, causing my cat to jerk awake, look at me with contempt, and finally don a miniature fedora and suitcase and leave the house, slamming the door behind her. Now I was in a pickle, because a patch kit costs about 8 dollars at the good bike store (which is far away), but to get there I'd have to go buy a tube from the much closer, crappier bike store that doesn't sell decent patch kits. I was stuck!

But then true inspiration occurred. What if I put glue on the back side of the patch I put inside the tire, and put the damaged part of the tube inside the tire at that exact spot? Fantastic! So I spent, honest to God, three hours setting that up, then inflated the tire and rushed to the good bike store. By the time I got there, the tire was basically flat again. Apparently the tire didn't seal up right against the patch.

So now I've got the tube glued to the inside of the tire. I can't get it out without ripping off the original patch and starting from square one. Except I'm at worse than square one because now I have a ruined tire, ruined tube, AND I'm 10 miles from home. When the bike store guy saw the corpse of my tube dangling from inside the tire, he said "Dude, what are you DOING?". Suddenly I realized: I'm an idiot. With a sense of deep shame, I bought a new tire, new tubes, and a new patch kit. Grand total: 75 bucks. For those of you keeping score (editor's note: Fuck you) that's 55 bucks more than if I'd just bought the new tire to start with.

The lesson to be learned here is that A) Seriously, I'm retarded and B) you can't mickey mouse repairs on a bike. I'm going to have to radically rethink my packing list in terms of spare parts, because I CANNOT be going through this shit when I'm stranded in the middle of black bear country or something.

Let's just see how many people read this damn thing

Hey you. Yes you. I need your help. I need you to pick out what movies I'll bring with me on this trip.

You see, I already have the music all planned out*, now I need to get the movies taken care of. The only problem is because I'm cheap, my Ipod Touch is only the 8 gig version, which means I have to be choosy about what I bring with me. I can fit 4 movies, so I've compiled the following list and you all are going to vote for which ones to bring. Voting ends at midnight on August 15th, so I'll have long enough to download them illegally off Limewire purchase them lawfully from Apple before I head out.

Vote for THREE movies please. I know I said I can fit 4, but one of them is going to be Planet Terror. This is not up for negotiation.

Without further ado, here's the list.


What Movies Should I bring with me?




* Select Qkumba Zoo's "The Child Inside", set to repeat, listen until the sun explodes.

Mother fucking headwinds, man

I can't find an internet resource to prove it, but apparently it's considered entirely normal for Tucson to turn into a godawful, horrible cauldron of gusty and shrieking windstorms during the spring. At least if I believe KGUN9, the news network that claims to be "on my side".

Biking into a headwind is probably the most debilitating, morale-sapping experience one can go through. I've long since reached the point where on a reasonably flat, smooth road I feel most comfortable being in 20th or 21st gear or so. I don't quite put it in the highest gear, but it's close. When there's a bad headwind though, I start feeling exhausted unless I put it into something like 15th or 16th. And even that's probably too high, because it still takes me an extra 20-30 minutes to get home and I feel like Gary Busey's liver when I'm done.

The most infuriating part though, is that the wind SWITCHES. Basically 1/3 of my route is directly north, and the other 2/3 is directly east. And reverse it coming home, of course. In the morning, when I'm going face first into a 30-40mph wind that's blowing due west, I used to actually tell myself "Oh well at least this'll be helpful when I'm coming home" WRONG. 9 hours later when I'm headed home, the wind has switched. Now it's blowing due east.

Omniscient Wikipedia has some explanations that would be helpful if lived near a large body of water .

Differential heating is the motive force behind land breezes and sea breezes (or, in the case of larger lakes, lake breezes), also known as on- or off-shore winds. Land absorbs and radiates heat faster than water, but water releases heat over a longer period of time. The result is that, in locations where sea and land meet, heat absorbed over the day will be radiated more quickly by the land at night, cooling the air. Over the sea, heat is still being released into the air at night, which rises. This convective motion draws the cool land air in to replace the rising air, resulting in a land breeze in the late night and early morning. During the day, the roles are reversed. Warm air over the land rises, pulling cool air in from the sea to replace it, giving a sea breeze during the afternoon and evening.

But nothing explains this infuriating phenomenon for me. At first I considered that maybe it was all in my head. I'm paraphrasing, but the Essential Touring Cyclist did have a section where they address the fact that for a large survey of people crossing the US (both ways) 70% of people reported headwinds.

It may always SEEM like a headwind, because you still feel air blowing across your face, but the only way this would not be an occurrence is if you are slower than the wind is blowing behind you. If you are travelling at 20 mph, and there is a 15 mph breeze behind you, it won't neccessarily feel like it. It'll feel like there's a 5 mph headwind.

I threw out this theory though because A) It's not just kind of windy here, it's fucking brutally windy and gusts up to 50 mph and B) I have several flags across my route, all of which confirm Mother Nature is bitch slapping me both ways.

I've been keeping a very simple chart of the headwinds since the beginning of March, and the numbers back me up. After 39 days of travel (which equals 156 instances, because I switch directions once each time) I've had the following luck

40 times there was no wind
24 times there was a crosswind
2 times there was a tailwind
90 times there was a headwind

That just seems ridiculous. That's more than all the other situations put together. There's no water nearby. There's mountains on two sides of me, but I don't see why they'd have an effect either. I can't think of a single, solitary reason for this. And don't think I haven't been trying to figure it out. I want to know what I can be angry at. When I blow a tire, I can blame the douchebags who throw beer bottles out of their windows and leave broken glass all over the road. When an unexplained rattling develops, I can blame myself for Mickey Mousing my poor bike into it's current monstrous form. When it's too hot or too cold, I can blame my choice of geographic location to live in.

But who do you blame for a headwind? The obvious candidate is of course, Mother Nature, or whatever force your personal beliefs feel run the show around here. But there's no rational way to get back at her. I can burn tires, spray 70's era coolant into the air, and leave the water running while I brush my teeth all I want, but in the end she doesn't really care. What with global warming, China, and asteroid collisions all on her plate, the actions of one insane, pitiful individual probably amount to less than a tiny blip on her radar.

I've come up with an idea though. GAIA. I'm not talking about the crazy hypothesis that the Earth is somehow alive and sentient, I'm talking about the fictional character from the well known cartoon series Captain Planet.



NOW we're getting somewhere. It's silly to feel anger or frustration towards a series of pressure gradients and geographical features combining to influence wind direction, but it's totally appropriate to feel seething, white hot fury directed towards this bitch. Fuck you, Gaia, and your stupid giant purple vein in your hair. I hope Mati comes into your house in the middle of the night and stabs you in the face with a carpenter's pencil for giving him the stupid power of "Heart", which as far as I can tell didn't help him in a single episode except for the opening credits where he used it to have a small group of monkeys save him from a burning rainforest.

I feel better now.

March Checkup

So there was some stuff I was supposed to have done by the end of March, let's take a look and see how I did.

By the end of March:
- Decide on how to outfit the bike (Components, panniers vs a trailer, blah blah)
- Have relationship with whatever NPO established so I can start collecting
- Performed at least 1 60 mile day trip

I crossed out #1 there, but honestly I have no idea if that's really done or not. I mean they're certainly going to take my (your) money, but I'm not kidding when I say I simply cannot get my point of contact at the Humane Society to talk to me. There was chatter of getting the local news involved possibly, and getting some more exposure for this thing, so maybe I need to try going up the ladder over there or something.

Deciding "how to outfit" the bike happened months ago. I'm using panniers and have the components picked out, and I've selected a carefully tuned, sexy engine to power the whole thing, namely these babies. KA-POW!!! (Probably funnier if you can see me point to my thighs and do a fist pump while I say it)

In terms of actually training though, like doing that 60 mile ride, well... yeah. Look, it's been a ridiculous couple of weeks. I got a promotion at work which necessitated switching my schedule to the unreasonably early hours of 7:45 AM - 4:15 PM for a few weeks, and I've been spending my weekends either flying across the country, going camping on the windswept, haunted summit of Mt Lemmon, or this weekend simply trying to recover from the previous few.

This isn't a problem, however. I still have plenty of time. I've been running simulations through the most powerful computer programs available (Playing Oregon Trail, recording it on video, then watching it in reverse) and as long as I can avoid any bad cases of measles or running out of bacon and coffee, I should be fine.

Speaking of Oregon trail *, have you ever noticed that in the newer editions, where it actually shows a picture of who you're talking to when you're trying to trade, that the Indian dude always tries to screw you? "Sure I've got a spare wagon wheel, that'll be 500 bullets and two Oxen". What the fuck? And half the time I usually trade anyways, out of guilt. It's not his fault, his people traded the state of Colorado for some shiny beads and a couple of Smallpox blankets, so there's obviously some problem with the concept of ownership here.

So although I feel like I can recover, it's tough to give myself a passing grade here. I'm actually getting a tad SLOWER on the bike, and since I haven't had the energy to go shopping for wholesome or even partialsome (holy shit Firefox thinks that's a word!) food, lately I've been eating Cheetos and Pepsi for breakfast, and Double Quarter Pounders from Mickey D's and that's about it. I know, I know, there's a difference between accepting things are going to be a bit less than optimal for awhile and accepting it, and what I did which was turn into the skid and by at least 12 state's guidelines tried to kill myself, but the point is... actually I don't know how to end this sentence gracefully. I ate Cheetos and Pepsi at 8:00 AM every weekday for two weeks. Holy crap. I'm going to end up as a House episode.

Posting was slow here for that time as well, and I'd apologize, but honestly like 3 people read this and there isn't really any way to gussy up "I'm still biking a lot for something that'll happen in 4 months" and make it interesting.

Final Grade : D+ (I'm still cruising around about 100 miles per week, which has gotta be doing SOMETHING, and I'm so full of excuses for the weak performance that I believe at least one of them is decent enough to merit just barely passing)






*Congratulations on actually reading one of my asterisks! As a reward, check this out: If you find yourself feeling nostalgic to play Oregon Trail for the 5 minutes it was actually fun before you got bored of shooting bears, click here.

Crap

So yeah there's been a bit less on the training front lately. Sue me.