Chad's spot for various thoughts, musings, poetry, ideas and whatnot

Wednesday, March 02, 2005

The Critter

I may have mentioned this before but there are things that no one every tells you when you start cycling. They tell you how great your legs will look and how much better you'll feel. Read the right magazines and they'll mention that some cyclists develop this "need" to suffer on the bike and if you're one of those people then you won't be content to just go for a leisurely bike ride most of the time. They tell you that the sport is full of style and occasional snobbery so you can be ready for that.

What they don't tell you about is the weight-loss/wardrobe crisis and the critter.
The first would be obvious if you thought about it but you don't. You're enamored with the shiny bikes and the lyrca/spandex superhero clothes and the romance of sport and Lance's comeback story. After you get into riding all of the sudden you lose a bunch of weight, 40 lbs in my case, and all of the sudden your clothes don't fit and people start looking at you with the question in their eyes. They wonder if you either have developed some sort fo eating disorder or if you have cancer (I actually had a close friend tell me that the church we attended all wondered if I had come down with cancer when I started losing weight as I was riding).

The bigger problem is "the critter". At some point I think the International Cycling Union comes and finds you while you're sleeping and they implant some kind of alien critter inside of your body. The critter does nothing but eat. The critter lives inside you until they take it out early in the wintertime so they can harvest some sort of product or enzyme or something. Every year I've been riding I think this happens.

Why do I hold to this impossible theory? Well for the last three days I can't eat enough. I mean it's not just that I'm hungry, it's that I'm ill the hour before lunch and the hour before dinner because I'm lightheaded and starving. And it's not from not eating enough. This morning for example I had two big bowls of honey nut cheerios. That's a lot of calories. Less than four hours later and I'm absolutely starving, my blood sugar's all out of wack and I can barely wait to eat. For lunch I'll have two PB&J sandwiches made from the big slices of high fiber bread and by 2 pm I'll be ready to gnaw on the woodwork in the lab. I'll do my daily 2+ hours on the bike and come home and inhale an entire bag big bag of Baked Ruffles with dip to tide me over until dinner which I will sit through after I've demolished my huge portion looking at my wife's plate wondering if she plans to finish all of what she has. Then I'll have bedtime snack and wake up hungry in the middle of the night.

Oh, I know, you're crying crocadile tears but you have no idea what it's like going through the entire day thinking about food. Having given up all sweets and desserts for Lent hasn't helped either. No running to the store to get that "Hot Tamales" fix. No roll of Necco nickels while I'm getting ready to ride. The other day I was ready to kill somone for an Otis Spunkmeyer Chocolate Chocolate Chip muffin. I was standing Wally World doing everything I could to restrain myself from grabbing a package, ripping it open in the store and devouring all three like Alien on a Space Marine. I feel like a nicotine addict who just ran out of my patches in a room full of screaming three year olds while 30 out of tune violins play grunge music an octive too high. When I do eat I get immediate gas as my body tears through the food rummaging for calories like a 4 year assaulting a Christmas package that he's looked at for two weeks dying to know what's inside.

I'd say it was a terrible way to live if it wasn't for the feeling of being on the bike. The rides are heavenly, even when I suffer. Maybe more so when I suffer. I love the feeling of just absolutely groveling on the bike because you're trying to squeeze that extra mile per hour out going up the hill. Of being on my time trial bike going all out and seeing the speedometer say 30 mph and knowing that I am fast; really, really fast and that I can endure the pain. The feeling immediately after the ride before my body figures out what I've actually done to it of being cleansed and of being pure and of being whole. That feeling is worth all of the craving for food the critter causes because I think the critter must be what stimulates the endorphin release or something, because the two are always related. Rides aren't all that fun earlier in the training season but I'm not hungry all the time but once the hunger comes so does the feeling.

Damn Critter.

Do you think I can talk 'em into giving me another?

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