Crystal Ride

I rode in the Air Force Crystal Ride last Sunday, a 50km amateur bike race around Arlington. It was my first organised cycling event. The ride actually offered three options – 25, 50 or 100km. My friend C.S., who roped me into participating in the first place, and I chose the medium option.

The route was a series of laps, four in our case, that started on Crystal Drive in Crystal City (right behind my office, as it happened), headed North through the no man's land of Old Jeff Davis Highway (Arlingtonians know what I'm talking about), past the Pentagon and up to the Air Force memorial on Columbia Pike. The course was flat with the notable exception of the long climb up to the Memorial from the Pentagon parking lot.

The morning started out with pouring rain, and it was still coming down pretty hard when I parked my car a mile or so away from the starting line about 6:30 a.m., and C.S. texted me that he wasn't going to ride in this weather, but would show up just in case it improved. It did improve, as it happened, and by a few minutes before the 7:30 a.m. starting time, the rain had stopped and the clouds were beginning to part. It would prove to be a gorgeous morning for a bike ride.

The ride was, all in all, uneventful. I pushed pretty hard on the first two laps, with C.S., who is a far more experienced rider and a veteran of several centuries, both metric and imperial, loafing alongside. Scrambling up the final hill was no problem on the first lap, though considerably more challenging on the second. By the third, though I was still going pretty strong on the flat sections, I had to give up all pretense of being able to keep up, shifted the bike down to the lowest possible gear of my wimp-approved triple crank, and crawled up the hill, passed in the process by several of the spandex-clad poseurs that I was able to fend off until then. By then, C.S. lost me completely and I finished out the last lap and a half in solitude. Final time: 2:09:45, for an average speed of a hair over 14 mph. Now my right knee hurts, though given the lack of any riding practice this winter, and the generally ill-fitting nature of my bike, the rest of me is surprisingly intact.

Don't these people have jobs?

Owing to the mercifully quiet week at work, my now short commute, and an all-too-rare occurrence of J. actually making dinner, I went cycling after work yesterday. I'm no Lance Armstrong, obviously, but I felt like I pushed it pretty hard -- I am certainly feeling it in my thighs this morning, and I passed more than I was passed. In two hours, after all the traffic lights and transitions between trails were accounted for, I was able to get in around 18 miles (home to just past the East Falls Church Metro and back). I got back around 7:20, just in time for a quick shower and J.'s delicious ochazuke (Japanese salmon and green tea soup). Not a time-maximizing workout. So how do dedicated cyclists put in enough miles in a week to get a consistent workout? If cycling is your primary form of exercise, I reckon you would have to go out at least three times a week, for at least three hours at a time (20-25 miles), preferably longer as your body adjusts to the requirements of your typical ride and begins to maximize its own efficiency. Where do they find the time? I suppose they probably don't cook dinner from fresh ingredients every night, don't read books, and do all their chores on weekends. Come to think of it, that's true of the vast majority of people out there -- at least a handful of them is cycling instead of veging out in front of the television.

Bodies

Attended the Bodies exhibit over the weekend. J. has been wanting to see it for some time. I was mildly curious but didn't have any specific expectations. It proved to be very disappointing. First of all, the admission price is a complete highway robbery -- $26/person. I know everything is getting expensive, and major art museums are charging upwards of $20, but this is, in essence, a traveling exhibit on the subject of medicine, and not a very large one at that. But that wasn't the biggest problem. Not to put too fine a point on it, I was bored to tears. There are very few things that I have no interest in, but medicine and biology in general are right at the top of that short list, and the entire exhibit was basically one long anatomy lesson. The most controversial aspect of the show -- the fact that all specimens were real human tissue, preserved using novel techniques -- had no impact on me one way or the other. To me, they looked plastic. More than once I had to stop and remind myself that I was looking at what used to be a real human being. The exhibit was not without its redeeming qualities, however, the best of which was a display that showed a healthy lung next to that of a smoker. If everyone saw that display, local governments wouldn't have to ban smoking in bars by fiat. At least J. enjoyed the show quite a bit, being the moderate medical geek that she is.

The show was followed by another disappointment -- lunch at Pizzeria Paradiso in Georgetown (the exhibit is housed in the old Newseum building in Rosslyn). I've eaten at both locations numerous times, and the pizza has always been excellent, except yesterday. For something different, we ordered a basic Margarita and added eggplant and pine nuts to it. Well, as usual the eggplant was the problem -- precisely the unfortunate sort of thing that creates eggplant haters in this world. Evidently, they sliced up some eggplant and just threw in on the pizza raw. It was bland, undercooked and tasted like cardboard. The cheese on the pizza was another problem -- there was too much of it, and it was already rubbery by the time the pizza showed up at our table. I hope that it was just an off day that can be attributed to a large Sunday afternoon crowds, rather than permanently slipping standards at one of my favorite restaurants.

On the positive side -- finally installed and tried out the new clipless (SPD) pedals on my bike on Saturday. Fantastic. My big fear initially was being unable to unclip quickly when I needed to stop, but that fear proved unfounded -- it actually took me longer to learn how to clip in than to unclip, but even that was not a problem after a few laps around the parking lot of my building. And the pedals came perfectly adjusted right out of the box, I didn't have to tweak the tension at all. I rode to Bethesda and back, a hair under 20 miles round-trip, and now I'm craving more.