On The Road
by: Bill Oetinger 4/1/2006
Bonk happens
If you’ve ever thrown the I Ching, you have probably read a prophecy that includes the old bromide, “Perseverance furthers.” Well, yeah, okay...we all believe that. Good words to live by. Some of the time, in the real world, perseverance does further. But sometimes...sometimes no amount of perseverance will get you over the hump.
If you’re a firm believer in the power of positive thinking, then you probably shouldn’t read this column. It’s about bonking; about “hitting the wall,” meeting “the man with the hammer,” or “the witch with green teeth.” Pick your own metaphor. You know what I mean.
This is not a scientific study of the matter; not an expert examination of nutrition gone wrong. I am not a certified Doctor of Bonkology. More of a crash test dummy used in someone else’s research on the subject. If you want to read more about the inner workings of your body while it’s falling apart, or while you are working hard to keep it from falling apart, there are plenty of books and websites that will throw facts and figures at you until your eyes glaze over and your mind hazes off into a blurry stupor of information overload. An information bonk.
No, this column is simply about the fact of the bonk. That it happens. Sometimes. To me. To you. To pretty much anyone who has pushed the envelope hard enough.
I want to start off with a story about a guy I used to know. His name is Fenn Pervier. I haven’t seen Fenn for awhile, but he used to come on a lot of our club rides, and he was active in the world of double centuries at the same time I was. In 1998, Fenn set the goal for himself of doing all the doubles on the California calendar that year. (There were 11 of them in ’98.) Cleaning the table on the doubles circuit is something only one or two riders do a year. Not only are the doubles themselves hard, but the associated time and travel and expenses are really punishing if you have any pretense of a real life aside from the sport. It’s a major accomplishment, at least within the quirky little niche of ultra-marathon cycling.
Fenn made it through the first ten doubles in good shape. He was at that time a strong cyclist capable of leaving most other riders behind, going uphill or down. Then he went to Hemet, the final event. The Hemet Double is generally considered to be only moderately difficult, but for some reason I cannot now recall, it had been rescheduled from its normal April date to August. If you know Hemet, you know this means heat and lots of it. If you don’t know where Hemet is, think Palm Springs. Palm Springs in August...
In retrospect, Fenn may have made a couple of strategic errors at the outset: he decided not to use his Camelbak--on a day that eventually hit 102°--and he went out really fast...did the first hundred in under five hours. In the end, he paid the price with severe leg cramps. With less than 30 miles to go, the cramps made him stop, and even after long rests and too-late rehydrating, he still couldn’t throw a leg over the bike without painfully knotting up. And so he quit. After setting out to reach this lofty, season-long goal; after ten doubles and 7/8ths of the eleventh one, you would think a strong rider could find a way to finish those last 25 or 30 miles...no longer than an afternoon training ride, right?
But as someone who has DNF’d on three doubles within 25 miles of the finish, I can tell you that when the tank is empty, the motor just won’t go.
Bonking can happen to anyone, regardless of their abilities and credentials. I’m not really talking here about those famous scenes in the major bike races we see on TV, where the alpha wolf throws down a major attack and all the other poor dogs get dropped, one by one, and Phil Liggett exclaims, “Oh my goodness me, he’s cracked! He’s popped!” In those cases, the poor dogs may be losing precious seconds or minutes to the winner, but cracked or popped or whatever, they’re still probably climbing the mountain at a speed most of us can only dream about. Where we want to look for our real bonks in those races is at the back of the field, where some beefy, big-legged sprinter is dying like a dog in the gutter, climbing in the broom wagon or finishing outside the time limit. And you know what? Even he was probably still going up the hill faster than we would. (At the recent Tour of California, we followed the broom wagon up the big Sierra Road climb. The wagon was just behind the last, lonely, off-the-back rider, who was in fact excluded on time at the end of the stage. And yet we couldn’t catch even this limping loser.)
Pros seldom bonk the way you or I do. Well maybe occasionally. Ivan Basso on the Stelvio (but he was sick). Tom Simpson on Ventoux (but he was on speed). Usually their worst is better than our best.
But there have been some really grisly bonks on TV. Consider the Ironman Triathlon. Two of the most famous bonks ever occurred during the heyday of that event, when ABC was promoting it as the darling of the active boomer generation. The first of those was Julie Moss, in 1982 a 23-year old just finding her way in the new sport. Here’s how they tell it at the official Ironman website:
“ABC Sports has called it one of the most defining moments in sport. Thousands of Ironman competitors, to this day, cite it as the reason they wanted to try out this sport we call triathlon. It was a few minutes of television aired in 1982, but, oh, what a few minutes it was. When it played on Wide World of Sports, people started calling their friends and telling them to turn on their televisions … they had to watch this!
“This was a 23-year-old college student who was doing the race, in part, as research for her exercise physiology thesis. This was Julie Moss desperately trying to get to the finish line, looking like a punch-drunk boxer as she staggered … then fell … then got up and staggered some more … then fell … then got up … then fell … and eventually began to crawl towards the finish line.”
Moss was leading the marathon--the final leg of most triathlons--and was very near the finish when the wheels came off her wagon. It truly was a horrible thing to see, and yet we all watched in complete fascination. It was reality TV long before the term was invented. (In fact, it was the compelling, “I-don’t-want-to-watch-but-I-can’t-stop-watching” nature of that epic moment that is responsible for spawning the whole, miserable, voyeristic culture of reality TV survival shows that are such a plague on the airwaves today. But that’s a rant for another day.)
I do find it ironic and paradoxical that watching someone suffer such a gruesome collapse--to be exposed as so frail and so fried in such a merciless public spotlight--would inspire so many to want to do the same thing. “Hey, I want to do that! I want to fall apart like a marionette with my strings cut...I want to soil my shorts and barf all over myself and fall on my face and crawl down the middle of the street on my hands and knees while thousands of crazed maniacs scream at me! Yeah, that sounds like fun...bring it on!”
For me, an even more amazing bonk happened in the 1995 Ironman. Paula Newby-Fraser had won the women’s division six times, if I remember correctly. She was an icon in the sport. Nothing seemed beyond her. She was leading the marathon leg by a comfortable margin in ’95 when this superwoman inexplicably fell apart. She ran slower and slower. I recall she was weaving around like a drunk and bumped into a course worker and nearly fell down, or maybe she did fall down. But she kept plugging along, only more and more slowly as the miles went by. Then she was walking. Then staggering. Then, finally, within a quarter-mile of the finish line, she collapsed on the ground.
She was soooo close to the finish, and Karen Smyers in second place was still so far back. She had plenty of time to gather herself, get up, and walk those final yards to the finish. No one wanted to help her up, as that would have meant her disqualification. So folks kept giving her pep talks and trying verbally to do what they all wanted to do physically: pick her up and point her toward the finish line. But she just lay there, beaten and broken. And in a little voice you could barely hear, she said, “I think I’m going to die...” It was chilling...spooky.
To their everlasting credit, both Paula Newby-Fraser and Julie Moss eventually made it across the finish lines in their respective races. Moss did it on her hands and knees for second place, passed just in the final yards. Newby-Fraser I think finished third. Smyers passed her while she was still on the ground and another woman passed her in the last five yards as she staggered toward the line.
Sitting at home watching Newby-Fraser’s meltdown, and hearing that quivering “I’m going to die” line, I was saying, “Oh girl, I have so been there and done that!” By 1995, I had done enough long, hard rides to have become quite well acquainted with the bonk. I had met the man with the hammer and he had laid me out cold a few times.
In fact, I too had wondered if I were dying on a couple of occasions. Both were at the Central Coast Double, and that presumptive near-death experience happened two years in a row in the Bradley rest stop...the last rest stop before the finish. To be sure, I was already well launched on the slippery slope to oblivion by the time I reached Bradley. In both cases I had started to fade around mile 130. I had struggled along for 40 or 50 more miles in the cyclist’s equivalent of the Julie Moss crawl...just barely turning the pedals over; stopping every few miles to distribute my lunch among the roadside weeds; watching other riders sail by.
Finally, at the Bradley school rest stop, I could do no more. I lay face down on the cold tile floor in the school rest room, feeling my heart clattering away like an old diesel truck in need of a tune-up; like a crazed conga drummer at a Tito Puente jam session... And I thought: oh, this is not good! I could be dying right here and now in this lousy, hopeless, backwater no-place called Bradley. I was too delirious to be truly frightened, but some deep-down monitor within my system was saying: “You poor, pathetic dweeb...you brought a 175-mile long extension cord to a 200-mile ride, and you are well and truly screwed, and if you persist in this madness, we are not going be responsible for what happens!”
So I sagged out. Unlike Moss and Newby-Fraser, I did not get back up and carry on. At least not directly. But the bonks pissed me off, so I kept banging my head against the same wall, and on my third try at Central Coast, I finished. I felt marginally better that year, although it still kicked my ass. When I got to the Bradley rest stop, I hardly got off the bike. I didn’t want to risk falling into that black hole again. I still lost some of my lunch on the Hare Canyon climb, and it still took a ridiculous amount of time, but I got it done. I like to think that made up for the meltdowns.
I have done other doubles that were harder--on paper--than Central Coast. Some of them I finished with flying colors, with something approaching panache and flair, feeling good and riding hard. Cyclists will sometimes debate which double is the hardest, but I always say the hardest one is the one that’s hardest for you, on any given day, regardless of what the elevation profile looks like or whether it’s too hot or too cold.
Common sense says we ought to be able to master the nutrition and hydration problems that lead to bonks. That’s where all those books and websites with endless information about body fueling come into play. Not to mention the advice of all of our friends, from the arcane and cryptic to the simple: “eat what you always eat and drink what you always drink.” Like most dietary advice, one can find this sure-fire formula over here, and that equally compelling formula over there, and the two will pretty much cancel each other out. I have tried just about everything in the quest to get on top of the bonk. In the end, I have days where it all comes right and I have a comfortable, efficient ride, and then I have days where it doesn’t seem to matter what I do...I still end up sinking in the quicksand of collapse. Some days you bite the bear and some days the bear bites you. Go figure.
I wish I had a handle on it, so that all the rides would be comfortable and successful. But if I didn’t have the grim rides for counterpoint, how could I appreciate the good ones?
There are times when some of us tend to be a bit blasé about our accomplishments on the bike. In a melding of modesty and bravado, we may make light of the efforts we have made to reach our goals: “Awww, it was nothing...it was easy!” Sometimes, when the stars are in alignment and when everything conspires in our favor, it does seem, if not exactly easy, at least nothing too remarkable. But then strong athletes like Fenn and Julie and Paula can and do fall apart, after all they have invested in the effort: the years of training; the digging-deep desire; the pain and the punishment. Sometimes they struggle past the bonk and finish. But sometimes they fail to finish, even when it seems as if the finish is within reach, and that just a little more effort will get the job done. But sometimes that last little effort is not in them...
That strong riders still fail--in spite of it all their skills and all their training and all their desire--tells me how tough these challenges really are, and how much credit and honor are due to those who do get the job done. And perhaps even more credit should go to those who triumph--or fail--on the bad, hard, bonking days than to those who finish easily and swiftly on the good days. I salute all of you who have tried hard, and especially those who have hit the wall and kept on pushing, even if the finish line stayed just over the horizon. If you have attempted something a little harder, a little longer, a little higher than anything you have attempted before--whether you made it past the bonk or not--your light has shined a little brighter for the trying.
Bill can be reached at srccride@sonic.net