Cross Training

To increase my stamina for the 200 fly, I decided to take up cycling.

So now, instead of sleeping in on Saturday mornings, I get up at 6:00 am, kiss my partner D. goodbye, and head out for a 4-hour training ride with AIDS Life Cycle (ALC).

The series of rides I’ve been doing is called the Fall Crawl. It’s for slow people who don’t really know what they’re getting themselves in for. (They also have a Fall Haul, for faster people, who do.)

All the rides follow some version of the same basic route. They start in the San Francisco Presidio, cross the Golden Gate Bridge, make their way to Sausalito, wind around to Tiburon and then loop back to the starting point. Each week, the route gets 4 miles longer, and noticeably hillier.

My first ride, a couple of weeks ago, was 30 miles long. It was advertised as “mostly flat.” This meant there was only one monster hill, the Sausalito hill, which climbs for about a mile and a quarter up out of Sausalito to the Golden Gate Bridge.

I cruised down this hill at the beginning, and then spent the rest of the ride trying to appreciate the scenery: shorebirds along the path where it wound through wetlands; shifting changing views of San Francisco and Mt. Tamalpais that peeked through the trees at various points along the route, the back muscles of the riders in front of me. Enjoying the scenery was far more pleasant than the alternative: worrying about riding back up the Sausalito hill. At the end. After I’d already ridden 25 miles.

There is a ferry from Sausalito to San Francisco, with a large bike rack to accommodate cyclists who have better sense than to try riding up the Sausalito hill. The ferry has a small bar that serves alcohol. My secret plan going into my first Fall Crawl ride was to declare myself too tired to climb the Sausalito hill and to take the ferry back to San Francisco. I told my dyke friend Judy, who was riding with me, about my plan. She said, “It might be better to think that you can make it up the hill, instead of thinking you can’t.” Judy did the ALC ride last year. She’s been trying to get me to go on weekend rides with her ever since. Normally, though, Judy wouldn’t be doing the Fall Crawl rides. Or the Fall Haul rides, for that matter. They’re too short for her. And she doesn't like to go that slowly.

Toward the end, Judy had to peel off from the ride before we got back to the Sausalito hill. She wasn’t tired. Unlike some people, she didn’t need to hurry home and take a 3-hour nap. She simply had to climb the hill more quickly than I could, because she had a presentation to give that afternoon and didn’t want to be late. When she took off, she left me in the capable hands of the ALC ride leaders, whose motto is: No-one gets left behind on our rides.

“Don’t worry,” Logan, one of the ride leaders, said. “We’ll talk you up the hill.”

The Sausalito hill is really a series of five hills. The ride leaders tell you this ahead of time because they think it will make you feel better to know that there’s a short stretch of flat road between inclines. Talking you up the hill means that one of the ride leaders rides behind you and shares encouraging information, like, “the top of this hill is just around that curve. Then you get a break.”

They also ask you how you’re doing and make you answer them, so they know you’re not about to pass out. You’re not supposed to be panting too heavily to answer them. If you are, they tell you you’re working too hard and need to slow down, even if you’re barely moving.

“How’re you doing, Camo?” Dan, the ride leader who had assigned himself to me, asked me near the top of hill 3. Hill 3 is the worst of the 5. Hill 1 is steeper, but mercifully short; hill 3 is both too steep and too long. On hill 1, it’s over before you realize what’s happening. On hill 3, you know what’s happening. It’s called oxygen deprivation.

By the time I was halfway up hill 3, I had already downshifted to my lowest gear. At the point at which Dan checked in with me, my forward motion would have been detectable only by very sensitive instruments. I was breathing heavily.

“O…,” I panted. “kay,” I panted.

“You’re almost there,” Dan said, his statement comforting not so much for its information content as because hearing Dan’s voice gave me something to focus on other than my fantasy of pulling over, collapsing in a puddle on the side of the road and whimpering.

When you get to the top of the hill 5, you find yourself at the north end of the Golden Gate Bridge. You’d think that riding over the Golden Gate Bridge would be a treat. And there are treat-like moments. But not many. It takes about 5 minutes to cross the bridge. Of this, you get between 15 and 30 seconds to enjoy the view. It’s not that there’s nothing to see. It’s spectacular: the city, Alcatraz Island, sailboats on the bay, cargo ships steaming under the bridge, the deep blue of the Pacific Ocean stretching to the horizon. Most of the time, however, you’re too busy gripping your brake handles, gritting your teeth and performing intricate swerving maneuvers to avoid crashing into tourists. Tourists like to ride bikes over the Golden Gate Bridge. They come in two forms: those riding directly in front of you, who stop suddenly, without warning; and those riding toward you in the opposite direction, who wobble and veer onto your side of the bike path, also without warning. On special occasions, you get to experience both at once.

That wasn’t my biggest problem with the bridge, though. At the top of the Sausalito hill, there’s a right turn onto the bike path. It’s important that you not miss this turn. Normally a newbie like me would have a ride leader on hand to say, “Turn here.” But somewhere on the way up hill 5, Dan, figuring that I was doing reasonably well and that I’d probably be okay on my own, dropped back to turn his attention to another newbie who was having a harder time than I was.

So when I got to the turnoff to the bike path, I went straight instead of turning right and found myself on the main roadway, with cars whizzing past me at 40 miles an hour.

There is a 4-foot-high fence separating the roadway from the bike path. The bottom foot or so is solid metal. Above that are several horizontal braided steel cables, about 5 inches apart, anchored every few feet by vertical posts. The whole thing is topped by a 3-inch-diameter cylindrical metal railing. I noted, briefly, that the entire fence, even the cables, was painted the same rust-red color as the bridge. “How lovely,” I thought. “Such attention to detail.” Then I focused on my predicament.

I had two choices. I could walk my bike backwards, against traffic, on what was essentially a freeway with no shoulder. Or I could climb the fence. With my bike. I chose the fence. I was fully aware that this was a crazy thing to do. But the cars looked very big, and fast, and heavy, and mean.

It’s not easy to lift your bike over a 4-foot-high fence, particularly after riding up the Sausalito hill. It’s even more difficult, once you’ve lifted your bike to the other side of the fence, to keep it from falling while you climb the fence yourself. Climbing the fence is tricky: it involves performing a modified tightrope act on the braided metal cables, which sway when you put your weight on them, threatening to toss you back onto the roadway. But fear helps.

Safely back on the bike path, I made my way to the nearby parking lot, where I ran into Dan. “I wondered where you went,” he said. He thought I had probably finished the ride on my own. I told him what I’d actually done. “That wasn’t supposed to happen,” he said.

For those considering cycling as a form of exercise, here are some lessons I’d like to share:

1. Lärabars taste better than Cliff bars.
2. Even if you’re not a young, fit 20-something, it is possible to reach down, grab a water bottle out of its holder, take a drink and replace the bottle, without crashing, but it’s best to practice in an abandoned parking lot first. Alternatively, spring for a CamelBak.
3. If you want to enjoy the view from the Golden Gate Bridge, walk across it.
4. Being a sissy is not necessarily incompatible with being athletic, but engaging in strenuous athletic activity doesn’t necessarily make you stop thinking of yourself as a sissy.
5. If given a choice between riding on a bike path and riding on a shoulderless freeway, go with the bike path.