Bicycle prison

This afternoon on my way home from work I felt like exploring the city a bit. I thought it would be interesting to take 15th Ave. south to see for how far it remains bike friendly.

When I moved to Phoenix less than three years ago, 15th Ave. was a mirror of 12th St.: alternating stretches of well marked bike lanes with stretches of crammed-in double lanes compressed between the curbs, which counter-intuitively seems to act as a cue to motorists for them to speed up and drive aggressively. (Theory: when there exists another lane for going the same direction, motorists subconsciously feel threatened that they may be passed, and as a result they speed up to maintain their honor and dignity.)

However, sometime within the last year or so the city has repainted the four-lane suicide stretches and converted them into spacious two-lane bits of road with comfy, rather clean (by Phoenix standards) bike lanes, and so 15th Ave. is now a very good north-south route between Butler Dr. and Thomas Rd. Maybe even further south, too, but I don't know because I haven't recently been that far south west of Central Ave. And so this afternoon on my way home from work I felt like exploring 15th Ave. south of Thomas to find out.

But I couldn't, and so I didn't.

I couldn't go exploring after work because these days I'm in bicycle prison.

My bicycle prison sentence started a few weeks ago, sometime in early July. It was a similar sort of day; during the afternoon on my way home after work I decided to go exploring. That time my mission was to search for new possible training climbs north of Lincoln Dr. east of 36th St., A.K.A. the 36th St. Climb, one of the steepest patches of asphalt we have here in Central-ish Phoenix. Google Maps shows the region as having all sorts of promising windy roads around those foothills with some zigging and zagging sharply and thus giving the telltale sign of switchback steepness. But a lot those roads are private roads and gated off, and it takes a real asshole to climb up and down them for intervals, unlike, say, Cholla Ln. west of 64th St., which is a private road but not gated off, and so we cyclists conveniently forget to see the "private road -- no trespassing" sign each time we gasp our way to the top. (Theory: the real assholes are people who buy mountain-side property in the middle of a four-million capita metropolitan area and then expect the flaming-torch-and-pitchfork-wielding-masses not to come a-stormin' their privacy gates.)

But I digress from my digression. My point is that I had a mission that afternoon a few weeks ago, and it was to find new training climbs north of Lincoln Dr. Normally this kind of mission is no big deal; it's an extra hour tacked onto my half-hour commute, and it's not mandatory that I crank hard up the climbs, but I probably will because steep climbs are an easy, brainless way to get in a good workout. As shallow foreshadowing I note here that I'm carrying half a gallon of water on my bike within my two oversized water bottles, so what could possibly go wrong?

I set out and time trial it along the canal path to its end, past where the pavement stops and the hardpack trail starts. I detour my detour and climb 36th St. as a sort of warm up, as sort of a measuring stick by which to compare whatever other climbs I find. Only when it's 46°C outside the idea of a warm-up is silly. (46°C, converted to Fahrenheit, is really really hot.) By the time I make it to the top of 36th St., which I'm assured is a make-out spot for teenagers, and circle around for the white-knuckle descent from thin smog to thick smog, I have that bad feeling of knowing I'm done -- done possessing any capacity to crank hard. My body is meekly transitioning to shutdown mode, the mode in which I can pedal all I want but I can't make myself work. It's like I can't breathe and my sweat glands can't possibly keep up. And also I have to employ water rationing because my water is mostly gone. I take a small sip to moisten my mouth but instead I burn my tongue and lips because 46°C water, when converted to Fahrenheit, is really kind of disgustingly hot and totally not refreshing.

But I press on through the heat and confirm that there aren't any other great training climbs in the area. At least any other good climbs are well hidden, but then again, I wasn't really paying attention to any road that didn't lead to home. But besides, motoring traffic on Lincoln Dr. during rush hour kind of sucks anyway, so I'm not sure about the area. I'll stick with my Camelback climbs for now.

That afternoon, within the span of one and a half hours I drank a full gallon of water -- I stopped at an ice cream shop (of all places!) to refill -- and still I arrived home dehydrated. Some people say the body can't absorb more than a quart of fluid per hour. (Theory: maybe that's true when you're full of shit.)

And so it's when I arrived home that afternoon that I realized that I had been sentenced to bicycle prison: the time of the year during which cranking hard during midday or late afternoon is a no-go. I'm currently serving what I think will amount to be a two-month sentence. Some days they let me out in the yard in the wee early hours of the morning or during the evening after the sun has set, and that's when I can get my exercise. But during the day I sit inside and gaze longingly at my bike map and daydream of the places I'll go after I break through these bars and get out of this bad place.