How Hard this Ride Really Was for Me | 01/10/2011

For anyone who'll take the time to go down to the bottom of this blog and read this, I think what follows will help you to gain a better understanding of what I went thru to make this ride across the country:

• It is very important to understand that from October of 2009 until March of 2010, 6 months, I suffered from a severe problem with kidney stones. I'd never had problems with them before, but on vacation at the beach in October I was overcome with pain and nausea and Robbie took me for treatment; they found a 16 millimeter stone, about the size of a marble, lodged in a duct near my kidney. They said I would never pass it, so they broke it up with sound waves into 9 smaller ones. This was a form of surgery, and I passed a lot of blood and was in severe pain. After that I spent the next 4 months attempting to pass 3 and 4 millimeter kidney stones, mostly while at work. One day you are in intense pain, the next they stay still and there is no pain. They typically were the size of be-be's, but one was larger than a large green garden pea. They don't come out round and slick, but jagged, and the math to add up to 16 millimeters does not come out right, because they are not perfectly round, more like gravel in a driveway. After having passed 8 of them naturally, and with pain only women know from bearing children, my urologist insisted on doing surgery on me on my birthday, February 14, at 6am to get the last one out. He went up inside of me, you can imagine his starting point, and spent 3 hours digging and lazering the hard rock stone out. The outpatient procedure turned into an overnight stay, with a catheter. Extremely painful, I was on morphine that evening. When the catheter came out, it was unbelievably painful. Then an 18 inch stent, piece of rubber hose, was left in my urinary tract for over a month to keep the swollen surgery area open. I trained over 1,500 miles with that thing inside me. The day the doctor took it out, I went to the doctor's office by myself, he pulled it out with some type of device that looked like a long hose with metal ends, I felt like crying, I walked down to the car, took some narcotics, and went back to the office and worked another 5 hours. So, during my training I took a lot of Lortab and other pain medication which made me constipated, which lead me to my next problem.
• Hemorrhoids! You won't see that word in my official blog, but when you take a lot of pain medication it will lead to this irritation and swelling in the rectal area, there I said it, and that is a bad combination when accompanied by a bicycle seat. This condition is like sitting down with a thumb-tack up your rear-end, excuse my frankness, but that's it. I actually took 10 days off before the beginning of the ride, but the problem would not go away, so I started the ride in California with the problem, and it plagued me throughout the entire ride, almost to the point of tears. Enough said about that, but that was the single hardest part of doing the ride.
• The weather in Charlotte had been the coldest and wettest we'd had in 20 years or more. I had to train in 20 and 30 degree weather most of the winter and into the spring. The upside was when we got above 5,000 feet, and rode in the snow a few days, I actually adapted better than most. However, after having to go to the hospital on the first day at the end of the Palm Springs ride for my hemorrhoid problem, I got dehydrated on the third day and had to go to the hospital again that night in Blythe, CA. It had been 104 degrees in the California desert that day, and I had not drunk enough. I had just not been training in hot weather, there was another guy, Russ from Greensboro, NC, who'd gone to the hospital the night before for the same thing, I guess both of us had been training in cooler North Carolina weather.
• About 10 days before the tour started, I developed a hair-line fracture in my right outer foot. That created a lot of self doubt about even starting the ride, and bothered me anytime I stood during the ride.

I could go on and on about how hard the trip was, but the few things above outline what made it tough for me. For all of us, we shared the following problems:

• You don't realize going into the ride what it is like to do rides in excess of 100 miles day after day. Most cyclists can manage thru one century ride, but when you do the second and a third, you get the message that this is going to be something different than you have ever done before. And, miles over 100 are much tougher than imagined. For anyone who has ever done a marathon, a 20 mile training run is about the same effort as a 100 mile century on a bicycle, adding 20 to 30 miles to the bike ride is like the last 6 miles of a marathon, unbelievable pain, self doubt, real suffering.
• Saddle sores, sunburn, back-aches, butt soreness, neck-pain, foot pain, heat exhaustion, dehydration, wind in your face all day, very poor roads, rain, sleet, snow, 28 degree weather, 104 degree weather, bad food, bad hotels, carrying your luggage and bicycle to your room after riding 100 miles or more, loneliness. We all dealt with these challenges throughout the ride. We rode together as a group of elite cyclists, not necessarily for our speed, but for our determination on the bicycle. I've never ridden with a group of tougher cyclists, 15 heroes of mine.
• We all missed our wives and families back home. My wife was in the process of losing her job, tough emotionally after 23 years, bad timing for me to be gone. My roommate's father was dying of prostate cancer, and did pass away within a month of our return to the east coast. I missed mine and Robbie's 32nd wedding anniversary, mothers' day, and lost my wedding ring while on the trip. A frequent topic of conversation in the evenings was how much we missed our loved ones back home.
Most folks don't realize the typical cross-country ride is done in 2 months instead of 25 days, so the group I rode with accomplished something seldom done, 116 miles per day, with only two rest days; and was exactly the challenge I was looking for. No regrets, no excuses, I was humbled by a degree of difficulty few will ever experience.

Scott 01/10/2011