Feeling the Heat

Thursday’s club ride drew a very small crowd. Only Bill (my France riding companion) and I showed up in Wallace. So we decided to do a route with a little more climbing and skip the coffee break and hopefully finish before it got too hot.

Now despite my almost constantly saying what a weak rider I am, the truth is that I am a pretty fit cyclist. Notice that I do not say I am a great bike handler or descender or that I have perfect pace line riding skills or that I can knock out double centuries by the dozen. But I am more than reasonably fit, at least for cardio fitness. Look at what Garmin thinks:

But I do have a real problem with hot weather. No one really likes riding in the heat of course, but most people do it better than I do, and for longer. Loyal readers may remember that I wrote about the time in France where I scared Stoker and our guide John by getting horribly dizzy and losing my vision because my blood pressure dropped so much.

This kind of thing has happened to me 5 times that I recall, always when the weather is hot. Yesterday was the latest occurrence.

The first hour of riding went fine. We were on our regular Thursday Burson-Olive Orchard-Baldwin route, and our intent was to skip the break at Common Grounds and do the Watertower Climb, then head back to Wallace on Campo Seco Road.

Just before the climb up the face of Hogan Dam, my neck started to hurt and I found myself going much slower. In the 580 miles I rode over two weeks in France, my neck NEVER hurt. My feet yes, my butt yes, my hands yes, but not my neck.

Because, as I said, this has happened to me before I knew what the neck pain and slower pace meant. I am in the early stages of heat exhaustion. And it didn’t even really seem that hot!

I had been drinking plenty of fluid, but I can sweat it out faster than my GI tract will replenish it without getting nauseous. So I was experiencing a reduction in plasma volume with a reduction in my blood pressure. More on that later.

I told Bill to do his planned ride without me. I assured him that I knew what was happening and that I could ride back to the car on my own, slowly of course. He was concerned and wanted to go back with me but I told him I knew how to deal with it. I told him I’d text if I needed help.

At the horse staging area on Paloma Road I stopped for a minute, poured some water over my head and laid down on a picnic table in the shade. I wasn’t feeling too great but I figured I could make it down Campo Seco without dying.

Then of course, when I am least able to cope with it, I got a flat tire. This is rare with tubeless tires, but if the sealant dries up even a small hole can do you in. I fixed it with a tube and started to ride again, and the day was getting hotter.

Over the last 5 miles I was really feeling awful. I was going so incredibly slowly, and I could hardly hold my neck up. I kept standing to pedal a few strokes and try to get more comfortable.

Here is a slight irony: later when I uploaded the ride to Strava, I got a participation trophy:

Some sprint: my PR is a pretty fast 22 seconds, but yesterday it took me 1 minute 9 seconds to ride the 300 meters of the segment. But I have been over the segment more than any other Strava rider during the last 3 months, so I get a gold star or blue ribbon just for showing up.

I rolled into the Wallace church parking lot, got off my bike and was hit by a wave of dizziness so severe that I had to lay down on the asphalt in the shade and put my feet above my head. After a few minutes of this I sat up, then laid right back down, my body telling me “Not yet, Rich”. Finally I was able to get up and put my bike in the Element. I got in and started the engine and turned up the AC to maximum. But now that I was upright my vision narrowed and everything was shimmering and bright in the center but dark and cloudy around the edges. I had to wait about 5 minutes in the AC before I thought I could see well enough to drive home.

Here is what my home blood pressure monitor showed some 40 minutes after I stopped riding. I wonder how much lower it was in Wallace?

I also stepped onto the scale and learned that I had lost 5 lbs. of fluid, about 3% of my body weight. And this despite drinking a bottle of water on the way home. I try to keep such fluid losses down to 2% or less, and sometimes when I fail things go badly. Like they did yesterday.

Since I knew what was happening I was never really worried about whether there was anything seriously wrong, and a day later I feel fine. In the future I just have to realize that even if I am plenty fit to do a ride, heat trumps fitness, at least for me.