July Rides

[ny biker]

Emily, I did not realize that it gets so hot in Washington state.

Re: riding day after day, I think another aspect of it is pace. If you ride a moderate pace that you can sustain without feeling tired at the end, I would think you'd be better able to feel good riding again the next day. I say "I would think" because I haven't actually tested this theory. But I do know that when I ride on my own or with faster riders, I generally start out fast and then slow way down toward the end because my legs get achy and tired. When I ride with friends who do lots of touring, we usually ride a more steady pace that seems slow to me. But at the end of either type of ride, my average speed is not very different, but I feel better after the steady pace rides.

Anyway, I rode about 35 miles yesterday with a few friends. I designed the route, and it was supposed to be 49 miles in all, but one friend didn't feel well after about 28 miles so we took a short cut back to the start. She said she took a salt tablet, and the only other time she's ever taken these particular tablets she also felt sick. But her main problem was a fast heart beat, which I don't see on the list of symptoms when I do a search on "hypernatremia." She also thought there was caffeine in the salt tablets, so maybe that caused the problem. Anyway, it was also hot and humid, so we stopped for a long time in the shade and took our time finishing the ride, and afterwards we gave her ice packs that a couple of us had in coolers in our cars, and she drank lots of water and ate some mixed nuts, and we sat in the shade while waiting for a family member that she called to drive her home. Her heart rate returned to normal, but she still felt weak and fuzzy-headed until about 5 hours later, which was also about the time she started to pee a lot. So I don't know exactly what was in those tablets, but we all agreed she should throw the rest of the them away.

I was actually happy to cut the ride short, since I had just returned from 8 days vacation in California and I was very tired from jet lag. My legs felt pretty weak when we first started the ride, and we were maintaining a pretty good pace so I was feeling tired by the time we were halfway through our planned route. It would have been one of those start fast/end slow days for me even if my friend had been feeling fine. And it felt hotter than the weather forecast had indicated, maybe because it had been hot in California but not nearly as humid.

Today I took advantage of Trek's annual TdF sale and bought new water bottle cages for my bike. There's nothing wrong with the old ones, but they are black, and I think white ones will look better with the plum handlebar tape that I recently got for my new handlebars. I'm planning to donate the old handlebars to the nonprofit bike shop that works with local teenagers, so I'll probably donate the black bottle cages to them, too.