Misplacing Sadness

Yesterday morning I volunteered to drive my cousin upstate, a spur of the moment thing. To get my head in a place where I could keep my car on the road, I physically swallowed down about a gallon of fresh grief.

You see, earlier on Sunday, I got a call from my mother. My uncle, who was in the hospital from the previous week fighting off an infection, had taken a turn for the worse, and the hospital was asking for his family to come as soon as they could. Just 20 minutes later, my mother called again. My uncle had passed after being diagnosed in July.

I pushed this down to make the two-hour drive north, and found that I was numb for the remainder of the day, with just flashes of sadness.

Uncle Ed had been really living up to those clichéd “Retired and Loving It!” t-shirts you see on so many septuagenarians these days. He had a time share in Florida, he went white water rafting, and he played tennis with the kind of alacrity that would wear down Federer. (That's Ed in 2003 in India celebrating after one of his three sons were married in a Sikh wedding ceremony. Yes, we all wore pink turbins, and no, you can't see a picture of me in one.)

Before Sunday, the last I saw Uncle Ed was in June, just a few days after I returned from Tahoe. Just a month later, he went into the hospital for chest pains and his tests found that his heart was fine, but his blood tests found something else. It was a leukemia that went by the acronym AML and it’s a kind not easy to beat, especially if you’re older.

But Uncle Ed was one of the toughest guys I knew. He was in the Navy; he was a career NYPD Detective. But more than anything else: He helped raise six kids.

He was just slightly larger than life, a five-foot-ten colossus. An everyman hero. A gentle bear of a man. A generous man, a gregarious man, a man devoted to his church and family, with an army of friends.

And there seemed to be hope. Just a few weeks ago, Ed was found to be in remission, and we all hoped it would hold long enough to consider a bone marrow transplant. Then Ed would once again be the one with the firmest handshake at the family party, giving you the kind of hug that came close to cracking ribs. Back to his old self, back to being “Big Ed.”

But we didn’t understand how virulent AML really was, and perhaps we didn’t want to know. The combination of the disease and the chemotherapy to treat the disease and the antibiotics to fight the infection and the infection combined to wash away the ruddiness in his cheeks and sap his strength.

And now the world is a less kind and wonderful place without him with us. Today, I’ve found that sadness that I pushed down the day before.

I’ve ridden more than 1,000 miles on that backache-inducing Canondale, and I’ll ride a million more with your help if I can help just one family to keep loved ones like Uncle Ed around to give bear hugs and bristle-mustached kisses on the cheeks of their nieces and nephews.

Drinking No Fear

There’s something to be said for training regularly.

In the last few weeks, I have fallen off the wagon going to the gym in the morning and I have been paying the price on the weekends. One morning you’re tired, another you have an early meeting, etc., etc., and then a week’s gone by with no gym time.

Another pitfall is to fall in love with gadgets. I hooked up a new computer thing that doesn’t need wires and can keep track of a bicycle’s revolutions per minute, which a normal person would call RPMs, but for some reason people with bicycles have decided that RPMs is far too direct a word, and therefore use “cadence”. Go figure.

So, I have this new gadget that tells me my cadence. A bunch of the more serious types that I have met consider this a more true way to measure training than miles per hour (they haven’t thought of another word for MPH yet). A few weeks back while resting at the Runcible Spoon in Nyack, a guy told me that going at 80 RPM for an hour a day will get you in great shade and shed some pounds to boot. Well, that was all I needed to hear.

The trouble is, I haven’t been on the bike all that much, barring one hour last Thursday where I could only keep it up to 60 RPM (a great improvement from the 40 RPM I could muster the week before). But a far cry from 80 RPM.

But that hour made me feel confident that I could muster a 60-mile ride this past weekend without the fuss of full body cramps that I was afflicted with on the previous ride of a similar length (see “Rally of Pain”). That confidence proved misplaced.

Around midnight on Friday I decided to do the 60-mile ride to Nyack from Weehawken and started texting a few biking cronies from TNT to get some company. No takers, but Janice was going for a ride in Basking Ridge of about the same distance, so I agreed to go with her. I remembered to wolf down some pasta before hitting the hay.

When I arrived at the address she provided, I found out that this was an organized ride called BATS (Bike Around The hillS of Basking Ridge, or something like that). Now, they had 10-, 20- and 50-mile rides, any of which would likely been fine and left me tired, but without any damage. So I chose the 62-mile ride, of course, because I am an idiot.

This ride was far superior to the Ramapo Rally, the proper amount of turns, the right amount of hills and the weather was neither too hot nor too humid. But the organizers had oddly placed rest stops. There were two rest stops in the first 20 miles, which we skipped over and not another until some where past 40 miles, right after a general store, where we had refueled ourselves. And there were no rest stops afterwards.

But I had my ass bracket, giving me two more water bottles than I typically carried, and I thought that would suffice. No such luck. Somewhere in the 50s (milewise, not temperature), I ran out of liquid. And by this point the day started to heat up a bit, making matters worse. It was at this point that a long and creeping hill came up before me, good old Liberty Corner. I knew every crack and rut of that asphalt artery and exactly how far it was until one reached its crest. My cadre of fellow bikers had long since disappeared up the hill. I crawled up at about 4 mph (any slower and your bike will tip over), as my arms had already begun cramping a few miles before and my legs were just about to join my other appendages in a chorus of pain. But I kept my speed down, hoping to stave off the involuntary muscle seizures.

It was around this time that I lamented that I had turned down the generous offer of a can of energy drink from a rider named Gerry, which was short for “Jersey”, or at least that’s how you pronounced it. Jersey from Jersey was not from the area, and had tagged along with our group, along with a few others because they had a particularly strong aversion to reading the cue sheet provided to them.

About half way up Liberty Corner, my right thigh began to twinge, the tell-tale sign that a cramp was on its way. But I couldn’t go any slower and speeding up would guarantee a cramp, so I labored up, hoping that the top of the hill would precede my legs giving out. And I lucked out.

Just over the crest of the hill, I pulled over to stretch a bit and rest. I had about 7 miles to go, which is not far if you are feeling fine, and I wasn’t. Then my cell phone rang. It was Janice. The group was just down the road, but I had very little left and trying to keep apace didn’t seem a good idea. Just then, Jersey from Jersey and Dawn came up, and this time I took the can that Jersey extended to me.

Now, this was one of the typical “ENERGY!!!!” drinks that you’ll find in any convenience store, aimed at the long-distance trucker who is trying to cut down on crystal meth. The can was jet black with red letters that read “NO FEAR”. Either it meant that you abandon all reason by drinking this stuff or you should be that way naturally to consider this as something to be consumed. If it were in a cardboard box in powder form, I would have assumed it were rat poison.

And the taste of “NO FEAR”, in my estimation, resembled something that would kill vermin. It was a mélange of Robitussin, Gatorade, and prune juice with a hint of carbonation that made this translucent pinkish-purple liquid fizz and froth on top and I thought resembled radioactive bull urine.

If the drink’s appearance didn’t scare you off, the ingredients would. L-arginine, guarnine, creatine, taurine, and a few other things ending in –ine. And there were some of those “natural” herbs and other substances that the FDA has yet to really take a hard look at and hasn’t gotten to it yet.

But I had sipped the last drop in every bottle I had, so, with no other viable alternative, I sucked down “NO FEAR” and slipped atop my bike to limp the rest of the way home.

I don’t know if it’s the placebo effect, or whether it was one of the myriad of chemicals in that over-the-counter superstimulant, but the next few miles slipped by quickly and my mood improved. But it was transitory, and with less than a mile to go, my lethargy returned, and the ride ended with a whimper, not a bang.

Then the hearing on what caused yet another weak performance of yours truly began. I ride too fast at the beginning (very true, I like to go fast), and that wears me out. I should drink another drink besides Gatorade, like CytoMax or something starting in Endo- to clear out the lactic acid that causes the cramps, but I should test it first, because it might cause vomiting. Or I haven’t trained enough, or I ate the wrong thing, or not enough, or my stars were crossed, or I ticked off G-d…there was a lot of advice and opinions splashing around.

I just sat there, drank my water and gnawed on my sub and wondered how my drive home was going to be with these pair of legs that clearly no longer had much interest in what I wanted them to do.