Winning the uphill battle into Colorado

Friday we left Eads for another short, quick ride through the high plains with little to see and stop by, the exception being tiny Arlington, which comprised of two occupied houses, a Post Office in a barn, and a traveler's outhouse which is frequented by a lot of cyclists going along the TransAm. route. It was a nice outhouse, complete with lights, flowers, reading material, and a guest book that went back a few years. I felt I was adding to history by signing my name and our team info. The lady who lives across the road came out and talked to us, apparently she had resided in that house for the greater part of her life and had helped build the outhouse. I pointed out amazedly a tumbleweed blowing across the road and she showed us an entire yard full of them, as well as a cactus or two. I had anticipated seeing both of those during this leg of the journey and I was overjoyed to finally see the two plants that, in my mind, define the western part of this country. We up and left after my teammates got yelled at for playing a rousing game of "throw the stick at the stick." I wasted no time going the last 20 miles having been told by the lady that the mountains were "just around the bend." I didn't see anything and only strained myself speeding and squinting trying to see something far beyond the horizon. Sugar City was once the home of the National Sugar Company and once a lively town that in its heyday had brothels across the street and next door to the church we stayed at. The factory burned down 30 or more years ago, leaving behind a stone fence and gate and unfortunately lacks the excitement and immorality of its former self. It's now a quiet little burg with an air-conditioned church that I quickly took a nap in. I woke up to see Rory, the Irishman from Wednesday, who joined us for our spaghetti dinner which was provided by some parishoners and was also much appreciated. I drank too much iced tea and had trouble falling asleep that night. Before that, one of the ladies invited us to use her showers and while waiting I saw broadcast television for the first time since standing outside of the Today Show more than a month ago. Bob Saget is now a game show host and the quality of television had not improved much.

Saturday I woke up feeling less than rested, but enjoyed a breakfast of biscuits and gravy that again one of the parishoners had provided. It was the most satisfying, hearty, and filling breakfasts I'll have all trip. Rory and some other cyclists he stayed with the next town over joined us for breakfast and we ended up seeing them in Pueblo. This would be the last time we would see Rory and we wished him the best on his next set of adventuring. The ride was quick and the terrain changed from flat to speckled hills rising out of the Arkansas River valley. As we got into Pueblo I first had a glimpse of the mountains, having not noticed the low and only slightly darker-than-the-sky-around-them rises pop out of the distance until turning my head to the south and west. And as they grew, I remembered back to my childhood when I would imagine that the clouds in the distance somewhat resembled mountains. Within the hours, I knew I would see them up close. Someone flatted behind us, so Sehee, Sandy, and I stopped roadside to wait for them. I tried to take a picture of a praire dog but they were both too scared and quick to come out of their mounds. I threw rocks down their holes and didn't feel bad about it; according to the lady in Arlington, they destroy the soil which tears up the thin grass which is the literal basis of the ecosystem. I got into Pueblo, got lost, regained my bearngs, waited for the van, and rather than assuage my hunger, replaced my rear tire which I discovered in the morning had warped near the valve. By the afternoon it had not only warped but a tear was propagating through the tread; the inner threads were coming out. I had a bone to pick with the Schwalbe corporation for making a tire that lasted me only 700 miles, so I bought a more durable Continental Gatorskin which, to stay in budget, means I can't eat for the next five days. That done, I biked through the town's historic downtown district to get to the library and was impressed so much that I figured we should make the town a rest stop. At the library I finally ate and blogged for two hours and only made it up through Eads, I was that far behind blogging. It's the second Sunday after Pueblo and I'm still not finished. Sheesh.

I carried my full messenger bag back from the library the 20 or so blocks to the episcopal church we stayed at. Pueblo being in a river valley, the ride was uphill and good practice for the days ahead. Also it made me miss my fixed gear even more. Some of the guys on the team bought a guitar and I thought the whole situation was non-sensical given that we had just gotten rid of stuff and still had a packed van, but I kept my mouth shut. As a compromise, the ride leaders made them give up stuff to send home. Zach and Alicia were kind enough to make us a dinner of make-your-own burritos which were delicious and the least they could do for letting us tag along. There were supposed to be fireworks in the evening and I wanted to go, but ended up falling asleep post-dinner and cursed myself for not staying awake. I figure there would be more fireworks to come.

Sunday I didn't have to unpack breakfast with Sandy as per my day's assigned chore, one of the parishoners provided us with juice and fresh fruit and I reveled in having cheerios with whipped cream. Our ride out of Pueblo was complicated by some street closures due to a criterium that was taking place in downtown Pueblo. A few of us felt that Pueblo being a big town and hosting a bike race the same weekend we arrive should be a rest day, but we would get one tommorrow. The ride took us up and out though the city zoo and the sleeping stone and terra-cotta roofed neighborhoods to the west, further towards the majesty of those ever-increasing rises. It started out innocently enough with a lot of rolling terrain and deep washes where once a mighty flow cut through the rock but only now is reduced to a trickle. The shrubs and cattle increased in proportion to the decline of humans, save for the recreational traffic and tiny villages that if you blink, you miss them. I had taken my time and been cautious enough not to overexert myself but managed to do so over the highest, steepest rise yet that would nearly convince me of the difficulty of the day. I stopped too suddenly halfway up and nearly blacked out and probably did momentarily. I walked to the top or at least where it leveled out enough so I could build the momentum to clip in to my pedals without falling over. Jon was riding with me and was worried about my state, and I just continued in silence, telling him I had to save my breath. And then I was surrounded on four sides by steep walls of douglas fir and cedar and whatever other evergreens grow on the side of mountains around 7000 feet. I was plunging right into altitude and was feeling the effects of a misguided breakfast and struggled up something that farther away looked so benign and inviting but up close tells you to slow down a lot. Relief came half-way up the day's peak altitude and I sat down, drunk on mountain air, lightheaded, and containing an appetite just enough to enjoy a peanut butter snack, but not a sandwich. I consumed a lot of water and knew I had to and as such was willing, which was a good sign that I hadn't been completely consumed. And Drew and Zach scrambled up a rock face as I left to find a rhythm that would find me alive at the top of the climb, and it worked. It became manageable, I enjoyed the sights and crested the top of 9200 feet and had a "WOW! Gee Whiz!" kinda moment as the snow-capped sight of the Sangre Christo Range unfolded in front of me and then the road dropped dramatically and winded down at a steady pace, and around a bend, a large mound to the right and an unfolding collection of buildings coming closer to the front. And in those moments, I felt the most elated out of any of the days in that oxygen-starved sense of the feeling. The downhill lead me through the tourist-supported facade of a closed-down silver mine town and brought me right into another sunday-afternoon-in-the-mountains town where we would be staying the next two nights. I stopped at a cafe with Mark, Allison, and Mike and treated myself to a BBQ pork sandwich and milkshake, I needed something filling, not necessarily economical. I settled into the Westcliffe Baptist church outside of town and read Keith's Discover magazines to pass the time. We're on our own for dinners, so I purused the local supermarket for the most nutrionally dense foods for under five dollars and my search came up with a loaf of 99 cent wheat bread, single-serving deli meat and a half-gallon of chocolate milk. Despite my earlier misadventure with half-gallons of milk, I both suffered and enjoyed 64 oz. of the stuff. And then the sun-set time of night rolled around and I wandered into the park with its expansive view of the mountains to the west stretching north and south and to the east, the distance range I saw from up close doing the same. And there I was, in the saddle of a wide, green valley, on a park swing still clutching my jug of milk while Alex read J.D. Salinger out loud. And then the combination of darkness and a day of climbing wrestled with my stomach, itself fighting my taste for milk.

Monday I woke up under a table and decided to go running for the first time in a while. I had promised myself I would run in the mountains, at altitude, just for the experience. I got yelled at for not closing the door quietly and went into the morning, down a dirt road by the park with the sun peaking up in the east, illuminating the mountains in a way that made sense and kept me chugging along. It wasn't a long run and it wasn't a flat run and all the memories of running for years came back to me and all those long ascents up hills that pale in comparision to the landscape I was now looking at and thinking it would be cool to climb. I stopped too quickly and found myself on the ground, looking skyward. I stood up, hunched over and seeing black. I walked back to church and after eating my remaining slices of bread, fell asleep for a few hours. It was an overall satisfying experience. At lunch, wandering the supermarket aisles, mouth agape at all the food I take for granted, I bought enough to make turkey and cheese sandwiches for my afternoon and evening meal. It was back in Kansas when I determined what my budget was that I began recording personal food purchases and their caloric merit, and my meal was consumed by this process. For dinner I would end up buying a gallon of kiwi-strawberry punch, which at 99 cents, had 1760 calories of sugary goodness. Jon told me that was sick in his half-serious way, but I would get approximately 1600% of my daily values of vitamin C, whatever that means. Before our evening team meeting, outside, with a dazzling sunset and series of foreboding cloud formations to distract us and make me forget what the meeting was about, we took liberties to the church library and watched Iron Will, the Disney pic about a boy's struggle against the odds and a dog-sled race, the stuff that helps inspire us on our journey. I hadn't seen that film since fifth grade. That's pretty much how my rest day was spent.

Tuesday morning we left our rest stop for a long stretch of mountain travel, which fortunately was downhill for the first few moments. I vowed to finish my gallon of juice by breakfast, but would end up dangling it off of my handlebars for the first few miles of the day. I hit a pothole at a good pace and it knocked one of my water bottles filled with precious amounts of Gatorade, which spilled onto the road. I would later suffer a lot of bottle malfunctions where the cap would fly off and the liquid inside spill out. I avoided bombing down a particularly steep stretch of road and a rock or something flew into my jersey. At the gas station at the bottom of the grade I felt a biting, itching sensation and opened up my top to unleash a bee, which had stung me six times on the shoulder. Luckily the bites did not swell up like the time a bee flew into my face in high school and caused my left cheek to swell up. We had insect sting relief and a headset wrench to loosen my stiff steerer. And off I went, up U.S. 50, up along the rapids of the Arkansas river, surrounded by high canyon walls and faces of cut-away rock. And somehow, they managed to put a rail line on the other side of the river. The road made some impressive bends on its gradual uphill travesal, the kind that, again, would remind you of car commercials. Before a water stop I was tempted to ride a child's bicycle sitting at the side of the road with a "free" sign in front of it, but it had no pedals or a seat. A lot of folks have been finding souvenirs at the side of the road, and yet I have managed to not pick up a thing up to this point. We spent a few hours at our lunch stop in Salida for various reasons. It's a neat little town, like all the mountain towns we've been in, with its boutiques and historic downtown districts. For me, it was the library, the computers, the stacks of books and magazines about cycling which I read long after the van left. I made my way to the town park, which is situated right in front of the Arkansas and a perfect place for Kayakers to float on top of the cataracts in the river or for a tired cyclist to take a dip. Tufts of white were blowing from the cottowoods along the bank and some of my teammates went to climb the hill embalzoned with a gigantic "S." I went to the bike store with Sehee to look at the bicycle museum there, and all of a sudden a fascination with mountain biking came over me because this part of the world is the place to do it. I then went back to the park to regroup and get people to join me to our destination five miles away, but instead we met a cyclist who graduated from Bowling Green, which we had passed by a month ago, with his father and brother, who it seems has had everything bad happen to him - dehydration, sunburn, black outs, etc, all things to look forward to in the desert. I was hungry and left to yet another mountain town, except this next one was smaller and luckily finding the church was not too difficult. I got to the Christian church of Poncha Springs and sat down to a viewing of Castaway, where Tom Hanks loses 50 pounds and learns to survive in the wilderness. I'd like to think that I haven't lost that much weight but have learned much about survival in that reduced-means sort of way. The young pastor and wife made us hamburgers and they must have been marinated in something, they were tasty. I had about five. They also invited us to their house next door to take showers for the first time since the truck stop in Eads. And through their living room window, casting light onto a stuffed wolf, another stunning mountain sunset putting to end the day and casting light on the next stage of the Rockies.