Sal and his cycling teammates talk about the “Pain Cave” a lot. It’s that place you go where you are enveloped by a complete and raw brand of pain. You reach it after feeling the seering inside of you and then ignoring it. You reach it when every voice inside of you has screamed for you to stop and you have silenced them all. The quiet of the pain cave is eerie and horrific.
It’s still but not calming. It’s excruciating and peaceful all at once. It’s simultaneously transcendent and brutally immediate. The agony is almost tangible.
It is the best and the worst feeling.
So, that's where I was for a much too short a time yesterday during the race. But I should start from the beginning. The group decided that since it was going to be the most daylight we'll have all year that the men would do 5 laps and the women would do 4. I'm sitting there thinking, "One lap almost killed me last time, how am I going to do 4?" But then they suggest that the first lap be neutral because there were enough new people that we didn't want anyone getting lost. So I think, "Okay, one lap will just be an easy warm up and then I can do the other three. No problem."
To put it bluntly, I was wrong. The neutral lap started off pretty easily, with the experienced racers showing the newbies how to ride a paceline. But once they got the paceline (sorta) down, things started to speed up just a little. Then a little more. Let's just say that our supposedly neutral lap averaged 18.5mph on an 9 mile course with 2500ft of climbing. That's pretty fast. I was starting to get left behind on the hills. So much for neutral.
As soon as we crossed the line to start lap #2, the experienced ladies just took off. I don't know how they can accelerate like that on hills, but all that mattered is that they could and I couldn't. I was completely and utterly shot off the back by the second hill. Which left me to do another individual time trial to try to catch back on. Someone else got dropped too, but she wasn't time trialling like I wanted to, so I passed her and did my best to keep the pack in sight. That's where I found my pain cave. Nothing hurts like chasing a group that's always just barely in sight. I couldn't gain any ground, but for about half a lap I didn't lose any ground either.
I did finally lose them when we hit the hilliest part of the course again. By then I had done some serious spelunking in my pain cave and was forced to back down because I knew the situation was hopeless and I really wanted to get in at least 3 laps. When I had almost finished lap #2 the other one that had been popped off on the hills caught me and we rode together for the third lap. I didn't have the energy or motivation to go for lap 4, especially because that would just force the other women to wait for us after they had finished.
So, it's time to do some even more serious goal revision. And some serious recovery. My legs are trashed.
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