Luxurious Negative Blogging.

Happy Sunday -- aka happy laying in bed day due to a small setback with my back injury. Ouch. No worries; I'm visiting the Pain Gang (http://www.vargopt.com) early tomorrow morning. (Dr. Name on the Door do I get a free session for this shout out???....) I'm sure Mrs. Dr. Texas will give me an earful about my riding bikes. She prefers that I play basketball again, but I'm adictted to my bike so what can I say? Also, I have this small thing called 545 miles starting on June 6 (btw, the ALC staff left TODAY to start setting up for the event; can you believe its that close to the start date???). Regardless, I'm riding the miles to San Diego next weekend. As Caits and I have discussed, I will more than likely have to ride one or more days in pain come June, so I might as well get used to it. And, actually when my back flares up, slumping forward is my natural position; its just the getting off the bike and walking away that become a serious problem.

Anyway, we rode 65.55 miles yesterday -- from Santa Monica, to Palos Verdes, circling around Palos Verdes (taking a small non-sanctioned detour/getting lost) and back. We only stopped 3 times -- once at mile 40 for a lunch break, mile 50 for 3 minutes to chat with one of our bffs, Corey, and We made a new bestfried, Amy, who is awesome and I ate red velveet cheesecake and chicken madeira to celebrate. It was awesome!! Caitlin's riding abilities have really taken a turn and transformed in the last 2 weeks. She's so confident and in shape; its awesome! I'm so proud of her!! She hasn't admitted it yet, but I think she's on the verge of enjoying herself. We've already made plans to ride to the beach after ALC is over.

The highlight of the day was Caitlin's quote while we were riding through Redondo/Hermosa Beach. The city has put in a full-sized bike lane. Seriously, a lane marked for bikes as wide as a car. It makes riding much safer and much more enjoyable (until cars neglect to look at the writing on the pavement, tail bikers and then honk inpatiently....that's another story). Enter Caitlin and her words of wisdom: "The whole lane is for bikes? This is luxurious!" hahahahaha. I pointed out that certainly her world has been flipped upside down if now the adjective "luxurious" is used to describe wide bike lanes rather than clothing, shoes or coats.

The lowlight of the day occurred on the Bridge of Judging at about mile 59.5. It was so appalling that, while I normally would not call out people by name, I am furious and thus have pledged to blog negatively about this certain condescending man/bike shop guy that decided to almost ruin our riding high of the day.

So, we took a little well-intentioned detour on the way home (instead of trying to follow all of the twists and turns of the route map we took the strand (beach path) back to the starting point; as we had already gotten lost once from not being "able" to accurately follow directions, we decided to avoid getting lost again). As we're riding along minding our own business Old Ugly Mean Man sails by and shouts at us: "Come on girls. Put your head down and just keep pedaling." Annoying but whatever. Caitlin and I are easily annoyed and often vocal about it..... We precede to stop at the Bridge of Judging so that we can take pictures of the beautiful day and document our ride to share with all of our fans. Old Mean Man was waiting for us and/or following us or something and proceeded to impart all of us "riding wisdom" to 2 girls who "clearly" needed his help. He went on and on about how what we were wearing was wrong, how our grip was wrong, how he road more miles than us and so on and so on. At first, it was just an old mean man being annoying and invading our day, but then, Old Mean Man decided to be super condescending and ended by saying, "Well, you at least look like you're trying hard." Now, at first glance it may not read like a condescending statement, but you should have seen his face, the way he looked us up and down and the tone of voice. Condescending. And then, he said, "She [Caitlin] looks likes she's hanging in there but you [Autumn] look dead tired." Oh, excuse me for not looking well rested after riding more miles than I ever had before. Excuse us for riding to end AIDS and not doing it "perfectly." Excuse me for not being your definition of a "pro."

I will admit that I said some very mean things as we rode away. And I will admit that I was very thankful that I had a blog that I could take to. (Caitlin and I often, during our long rides, talk about how we're going to blog this or that or what should be noted about a ride. It helps get up a hill if you compose a blogpost in your head about how it is one of the worst 5 miles of rode within LA County (Palos Verdes Rd) and how the training ride leader responsible for the route map (Scott) so conveniently did not mark it as a "hill.") After I had yelled into the wind with a vengeance about the Old Mean Man who thought he needed to impose himself on us, I announced to Cait and the bike path in Marina del Ray that I was going to "blog negatively" about this man and his bike shop.

He had the nerve to give us his card so we could contact him because we clearly needed his professional help to ride our bikes, and I was going to actually call him out by name in my negative blogpost, but I think the card is somewhere in my car and I don't really have enough energy (or the ability to stand up straight) to go get it. So I will just say this: "his" bike shop has 2 locations and something to do with TriAthlete Zombies.....I may have linked the website here.... http://www.triathletezombies.com ...... and I really don't like him or this shop or this website. Seriously, he was mean to us. And it was embarrassing and frustrating. Maybe I will also take to Yelp. Also, how has a man that works at a Bike Shop never heard of AIDS/LifeCycle???? Not legitimate.

The bright spot of this encounter was that we then discussed how no one involved with ALC would ever dream of being so harsh or condescending to us. Even in the beginning when we clearly didn't know what we were doing, and even now when I hold up the ride and come in last out of La Tuna, ALCers are always positive, always supportive and always happy to have Newbies around to share it with. ALC training ride leaders always tell us we're doing awesome. Everyone is so positive, almost to the point of naseau now and again, but after our encounter with the Old Mean Man, we will never again take for granted our friends and colleagues at ALC who have been so awesome through all of this!

So this is my luxurious negative blog. Not quite as luxurious as a wide open bike lane, but close.

~~Autumn

PS If you have not had the opportunity to joing our cause yet, Caitlin still has $300 to raise before meeting her minimum requirement. We would love to officially have all of our fans as part of the team of donors. Click on Cait's link in the upper right to help her meet her goal! Thanks!