For the past couple of years (at least, that’s as long as I can remember it going on), I’ve experienced a recurring pain in my outer two left toes. I’ve tried various shoes, pedals, insoles, bike fits, adjustments to bike fits, stretching/rolling of my leg, massage, yoga, adjustments via chiropractor, and, despite all of those things, the problem has slowly become more frequent, severe, and faster onsetting than in the past. So, with another bout of pain that put me off my bike during the 2nd climb at natz, I decided I’d try to seek medical help.

After asking around some friends, I was directed to OrthoMemphis. I saw a foot specialist who, looked at some xrays and said that there was nothing structurally wrong with my foot or ankle. He scheduled an appointment for a nerve conduction study & EMG, which I went to today.

Well, first I rode the scooter over to a local motorcycle shop (Performance Plus) for some scooter oil… I’ve put close to 800 miles on it since I bought it from FullFace Kenny

Once I utilized the “master mechanic” skill needed to remove a cover and cap then funnel in a full bottle of oil, I then paced around the house until it was time to head up to the EMG clinic.

I had a “this is what’s wrong with America” moment in the waiting room while I watched a kid lay across 4 chairs listening to/watching music videos at full volume on his phone while everyone else crammed themselves into the 4 remaining chairs on the other side of the waiting room.

Luckily, I didn’t have to wait for long. Back in the exam room, I donned a pair of one-size-fits-most paper shorts and crossed my fingers in hopes of finding some sort of diagnosis.

After being shocked and poked with a needle in a multitude of places from back to foot, it was determined that all of my nerves are working properly. The doctor did, however, mention that my symptoms sounded as if my sciatic nerve was being irritated from sitting on it. He suggested getting a highly padded gel saddle to make up for the lack of padding that I’ve got under my backside. I didn’t feel like explaining about how terrible highly padded saddles can be, so I just smiled and took it as a complement to my fitness.

So, now the possible diagnoses include either that, or some sort of vascular problem that’s causing a shutdown of bloodflow to my lower leg. It’d be great to at least figure out the cause before I head off to Colorado again for Breck Epic so I can at least try and avoid some of the pain during the race. Between this, the continuing summer heat/humidity, and my occasional driver-induced anxiety attack…

I decided to console myself with sushi lunch at Sakura.

I’m not sure if all of you realize it, but Swiftwick socks are, quite possibly, the best cycling socks ever invented. They have some compression to them, so they stay in place, they dry quickly, and they’re very durable. I wear the Performance Fives in the summer (they have a wide variety of styles and cuff lengths- just remember, the “four” length is the shortest acceptable cuff for cycling use. It’s the rules).
Side note- also, as part of “The Rules,” you should always wear the same length sock in order to cultivate a sharp summer tan line. Since Swiftwicks stay in place so well, they’re the best chance you have for creating lines to match the ones on your thighs and arms.

Anyway, I wear white socks on the road and black socks on the trail. However, in typical “you could mess up a crowbar” fashion, I got chain grease stains on my white socks. Not pro at all.

Washing- even with a normal laundry pre-treater, didn’t budge the grease. I got an idea while I was washing bikes, though. I used ProGold Degreaser+Wash as a pretreater before I washed them, and, just like the chain on my bike…

Magic.

In other road-related news, I had an underwhelming road ride fail yesterday. I set out around 8:15 in the morning with the ambition of riding 5 hours in a heat advisory by breaking the ride up into two loops with a break in the middle to cool off and refill my bottles with ice water. Unfortunately, from the first hour on, I basically became less and less able to produce any sort of power.
I did sprint very briefly when a driver right-hooked me as she turned into a parking lot for a closed down mall (she was using it to cut through to get to the nearby interstate on-ramp). If I’d not locked up my brakes, we would have hit each other. Unlike my previous post-rouge roubaix-wreck close calls that sent me cowering in the bushes in a heap of tears, this time something snapped. I sprinted after her, across the parking lot, with every intention of causing damage to her car and her person, should I catch her. She realized that she was in trouble and floored it- wailing her car over the multitude of speed bumps across the lot and turning out wildly into traffic on the other side. I was left panting on the other side of the lot like one of the angry dogs that comes screaming out of a junky house trailer  yard with all intentions of catching and destroying both you and your bike.

I digress.

The heat destroyed me yesterday. With good reason-

A heat index of 119 is nothing to eff with. There’s nothing you can do to train outdoors as usual in that sort of condition- no amount of acclimatization, hydration, or toughness can prevent you from overheating when it’s like that because the humidity prevents sweat from evaporating off of your body, thus negating your body’s “go to” method of cooling during physical activity. So, since that sort of weather pattern is a summertime staple, I’ll be setting the trainer & fan up in the living room soon. My strategy from last summer is to do the lower intensity volume on the road then hop on the trainer as soon as I get home and polish off some intervals. It’s not the most fun way to train, but the subtropical climate is balanced out by being able to train outside for a majority of winter- something that people further north do less of because of similarly extreme winter weather. I’ll take extreme heat any day over that stuff.

ADDENDUM:

(NSFW language)

In better training news, on Tuesday I rode my singlespeed for the first time in a while. It’s not hard to fall in love with that bike again after taking a bit of a hiatus to race the geared bike for everything so far this season. The Niner Air 9 CYA frame is killer stiff. After riding the slightly toned-down RDO frame for a while, it’s like getting back into your track day-only car when your daily driver is already a Corvette. I’m excited to one-gear it up & down some mountains in the near future.

Ok, since hopefully a lot of the people reading this are non-cyclists and have no idea who I am or what I do, I’d like to start with a little introduction of myself. I’m a professional cyclist. It’s my job to get out and train on my bike in order to do well at races and therefore sell things for my sponsors. I train about as much and as hard as any pro football player, but I get “paid” with equipment, race entry fees, travel expenses, and, occasionally, about as much money as what a pro football player makes in one hour. 99.9% of cyclists that you encounter are doing this for fun- just like you play golf, video games, lay out by the pool, read, drink alcohol… whatever. It’s a very enjoyable hobby and means of staying healthy.

First, I want to acknowledge that some people who are reading this will remain “unreachable.” This person generally falls into one of two categories- one will immediately hit the “comment” button with some sort of “I hate you, get out of here, you deserve to die” message. This person  likely goes through life expending lots of energy hating lots of things and people, including the terrible person on a road bike who he/she almost hit because he/she needed to pass NOW, and the cyclist is just “in the way” of their car.  The other sort of “unreachable” person views the road as a “motors only” zone, cyclists as idiots with death-wishes, and doesn’t believe that it’s his/her responsibility, as a driver, to watch out for slower moving vehicles (yes, a bike is a vehicle) on the roadway. This person will defend those views with the same fervor that the members of Westboro Baptist church defend their own views on who has a right to get married. If that applies to you, I’m guessing you could save your time and energy by just not reading the rest of this letter.

Now, for the 99% of you drivers out there who, based on my assumption, are normal human beings experiencing a range of normal human emotions when you, in your car, encounter a person riding a bicycle on the road. I just need your attention for a few minutes.

I’d like to start by addressing the issue of the cyclist that everyone (including law-abiding, non-jerk cyclists) dislikes. I’m talking about the guy (or girl) that’s disobeying traffic laws, running stop signs, speeding through school zones, riding the white line to get in front of traffic at stoplights, etc. Also included in this category are the groups of cyclists that erratically morph all over the roadway- often crossing the yellow line into oncoming traffic and/or taking up more than one lane on the road, and running redlights. I’m not justifying this behavior in any way, I’m just gonna say that drivers also do dumb things and break traffic laws. There’s not much that you or I can do about it, so how about we just let dumb drivers and dumb cyclists cancel each other out in this instance. Deal?
Side note- Not included in the “dumb” group are the cyclists (or groups of cyclists) that take up one single lane of the road. While it may make it harder for you, in your car, to pass (more on this in a second), it’s a self-preservation thing. If I ride in the gutter, I’m inviting you to attempt to pass me very closely when there’s oncoming traffic (a.k.a. “Buzzing” me). Getting buzzed is dangerous and freaking terrifying. It’s why there’s a law in Tennessee stating that you must move over to the left lane of the interstate for a stopped emergency vehicle. Cars coming close to your body are dangerous.

While we’re on the topic of passing, I’d like to bring up the fact that Tennessee (along with a lot of other states) has a “3-Foot Law.” It just means that you need to put 3 feet between your passenger side mirror and my body when passing. You know what, though? Only leaving 3 feet is kinda like having only the minimum amount of flair.

If you could, when you pass, pretend like I’m the size and shape of a tractor. The big difference between me and a tractor, of course, is that if you brush up against the tractor with your car, your car gets scratched and dented. If you brush me, I could die. Just think about maybe letting off the gas and getting all the way over in the other lane. That’d be amazing, and would make everyone’s lives less stressful and a whole lot safer.

Now, I realize that this brings us to the sorest of subjects between cars and road cyclists- on a curvy/hilly/busy road, sometimes you have to wait for what seems like forever to pass. This is when I really need you, as drivers, to bear with me. I’m not going to start spouting off about “I’M A CYCLIST AND I HAVE  RIGHT TO RIDE HERE BLAH BLAH…” I’m gonna go out on a limb and assume that most of you know that it’s legal to ride a bike on any roadway that isn’t marked otherwise. I’m just asking you to think of waiting to pass me by comparing the situation to other, non-car-related life situations.

For example- you’re at the grocery store, waiting in line. The lady in front of you pulls out a checkbook when it’s time to pay. The cashier doesn’t even KNOW how to deal with this because, let’s face it, who the heck still uses checks?!? It ends up taking FOREVER to make the transaction, and, all the while, other shoppers are piling in behind you and wondering why on earth the line is moving so slowly. Do you, A) Start yelling at her that she needs to get a debit card like everyone else and quit wasting your precious time, B)Pull out a gun and threaten her for being such an idiot and holding up the line, or C) Roll your eyes and wonder why anyone would use checks, but otherwise wait patiently until she gets out of the way.

Maybe you hate that lady for doing something that she KNOWS is causing everyone an inconvenience. Does it mean that you’re going to try and intimidate or threaten her for doing so? Probably not. So, let’s relate this back to the cyclist thing. There you are, stuck behind a cyclist, going 17 mph in a 40mph zone, and there are too many curves in the road to see ahead to know if it’s safe to pass. Are you going to threaten the cyclist with a deadly weapon? (yes, your car counts as a deadly weapon) Are you going to act in a way that makes the cyclist think that his/her life is at risk, just because you are getting impatient? I’d hope not.

That’s really my point. I’m not going to ask for the pipe dream of drivers and cyclists riding off into the sunset together on the back of a rainbow-unicorn-pegasus. I’m just asking that when you come across a person that irks you because they feel the need to ride a bike on the road, just don’t be a jerk. Be a decent human being who has respect for the life, hobby, and, on occasion, the livelihood of the human being that’s causing you inconvenience and getting on your last nerve.

There’s a lot of argument all over internet message forums and facebook pages about whether or not you need to train on a road bike (or at least ride your mountain bike on the road) in order to get faster. I think that the answer is very regional, but, physiologically speaking, there’s no argument that you need to incorporate sustained, high-intensity efforts into your routine in order to be able to sustain high intensity efforts during racing. If you live in an area where your terrain and trails don’t lend themselves to that, then the answer is “road,” because no amount of “going hard” on a trail where you have to coast and negotiate your way through turns and trees (thus, interjecting “rest” into your hard efforts) will equal the effects of hard, steady road pedaling.

Of course, the argument against riding on the road is that it doesn’t improve your skill. Yes, you’re right. It doesn’t. I wasn’t trying to imply that the only sort of training a mountain biker should do is on the road, I’m just saying that if you want to be fast, you have to do steady, interval-type training. The most commonly referenced argument against this is what Gerry Pflug has to say about his training “program.” After you read that, I want you to realize that A)Gerry Pflug has an insane number of miles in his legs, and he’s likely a bit of a genetic monster to start, and B) If you look at those “2 hour rides” he talks about, I’m willing to bet that they include some sustained efforts that highly resemble steady road interval training. Of course, there are also people who live in areas where there are many options for long, sustained climbs and singletrack. Those are the people who post their gorgeous mountain overlook photos all over Facebook and Twitter (I’m looking at you, Sonya Looney). Their intervals happen while climbing 1000ft up a mountain forest road surrounded by aspen trees and brown bears (Ahem… Karen Jarchow).

Memphis isn’t one of those areas. I’m not complaining, I’m just saying that, if you want to be fast, and you live somewhere that’s this urban and sub-tropical, you’re going to have to find your pain cave… or, as I like to call it, my office:

That’s a farm road that’s only about a 15 minute ride from my house. It’s perfectly flat, and is the site of some of the best wind fights you can possibly get into (it also parallels a nice trail system that can be a good spot to warm up before exiting to the road). As part of the Agricenter, there’s some occasional tractor and pickup truck traffic (and some angry commuters in the morning), but it’s generally a place where I can go and bury myself in a sea of lactic acid without any interruptions. It’s my interval training happy place- where I go when I want to get faster.

Want to get interactive? If you’re social media-ing, tweet a photo of your office/pain cave back to @BrickhouseMTB, or tag @Brickhouseracing on Instagram. No pretty mountains allowed.