Here's another one of those convergent threads I mentioned earlier.
My time as a civvie was not kind to my body. Stuck mostly behind a desk, and with little motivation (or inclination) to go to a gym, I put on a lot of weight.
I do mean a lot of weight. A good 100 lbs more than my college fighting weight of 195 lbs.
My return to the Army meant that I could no longer afford to carry all that extra mass. The Army of 2008/2009 has developed quite the fitness fetish, and while I am quite capable of doing the job, there are still a lot of evil eyes directed my way, even though I dropped close to 60 lbs during the work-up training for my Afghan tour.
My biggest problem is that I hate - I mean despise - "hampstering". I'll happily go out and do PT for hours on end out of doors, but lock me in the gym with a treadmill or stair climber or stationary bike, and after 10 minutes I'm ready to gnaw a limb off.
A secondary problem is that I'm still a bit large to be an effective runner. Once upon a time I was pretty quick, but that was a long time ago, and while I've made plenty of progress, I'm still not quite the gazelle yet.
My solution was cycling - specifically, mountain biking. I picked up a Giant hardtail a little while ago, and I ride it every chance I get - and hard, too. Whenever I get the opportunity to beast myself on the bike, my fitness level improves markedly.
A further convergent thread is that two of the soldiers in my regiment came down with Multiple Sclerosis, and myself and my wife got involved with fundraising for the MS Society. Each year we do the MS Bike Tour, which is a 180 km bike ride from Grand Bend to London and back, in order to raise money for fighting MS.
The Bike Tour is a lot of fun, but even with mountain bikes converted to road use (by fitting slicks) we're still a little slow. Every year, we get hammered by the riders who havee actual road bikes. Adding fuel to the fire is that my wife tried out a friend's triathalon bike on one of our training rides and she absolutely loved it.
OK, I can see the writing on this wall... so I (with the assistance of Rob and the gang at Bicycle World in Windsor) I got her a Devinci Silverstone road bike for Christmas. I'm now the best husband ever, she's over the moon - and now I am the slow one in the family.
There is, of course, only one solution to the latter problem - I need a road bike too. The issue with that is my last road bike was a 1980's-era Sears Free Spirit "ten-speed" ridden sometime in the late 80's.
I have had my eye on a Cervelo S1 (their aluminum-frame bike) as my huzzah-I-survived-my-tour gift to myself, but before I drop that much coin on a road bike, I had to be sure of a few things:
Clearly what I needed to do was "try before I buy". Plus there was the very real need to put in daily PT - HARD daily PT - so that when I returned back to theatre from HLTA my fitness level had improved instead of backsliding.
Was there a way to rent a decent bike aand get some riding in while on Tenerife? A Google search turned up Tenerife Training, a bike rental company run by an Aussie expat by the name of Dr Leslie. He would happily rent me a bike, and he would do guided tours as well. Emails were swapped, and I agreed to rent a bike.
The first bike provided was this one, a 58cm Leader. Aluminum frame, carbon fork, Campy gruppo. Dr. Leslie provided a selection of pedals and cleats and I soon decided on Crank Bros Eggbeaters (a simple and elegant design) He also provided a helmet, shoes, a lock, a spare tube, and a small toolkit. The bike mounted a pump and a pair of drink bottles.
My first ride revealed three things right away:
That last point cannot possibly be overstated - every place on the north side of the island is on a hill. A steep hill. There simply is no such thing as a "flat" section anywhere. The only place I have been that is anywhere similar is Duncan, BC - but Tenerife keeps going up!
Windsor is the exact opposite; the topo map of Essex County is innocent of contour lines, as there are no elevation changes to map. If you climb the man-made hill in Malden Park, you are standing on the highest point for 100 km. Not so Tenerife! My first ride out exploring left me exhausted, and immediately kiboshed the idea of participating in any sort of tour ride - being so pitifully unaccustomed to the hills, I'd be dropped like a hot rock, or force the tour group to adopt my speed (not a good way to make new friends).
So instead, I mapped out a 2.2km route centered more-or-less around our apartment. That way, I'd never be too far away from home should I suffer mechanical or heart failure, and by adding laps and measuring speed, I could track performance.
This route featured a 123 ft hill, so the net effect was intervals: climb the hill, ride back down. Lather, rinse, repeat.
The first day I squeaked out five laps and it dammned near killed me. By the last day, I had knocked a couple of minutes off my lap time and I was up to 14 laps. Furthermore, my average heart rate had dropped by roughly 10 beats/min, even though I was going faster.
By the end of our vacation, I had covered 250 km, burned 8000 calories, and climbed over 14000 ft!
I had also discovered that the 58cm bike was a little bit too big for me, and that I really did not like the Campy gruppo, particularly the front transmission that refused to shift properly no matter how much I played with the cable tension - it would shift up or down, but never both. That was capped with the upshift paddle snapping off during a lap.
When I called Dr Leslie to get it fixed, he indicated he'd be swapping out the bike entire rather than fixing the bike I had in my posession. Given that was the case, I asked to try a slightly smaller bike, and this is what he brought out:
This is, perhaps, the ugliest bike in Europe - a 56cm Mrazek. Aluminum frame, carbon fork, Shimano Ultegra gruppo, and not a triangle to be found on the bike.
Notwithstanding the unusual asthetic of the bike, it did fit better, although the laid-back seat tube angle had me moving the seat all the way forward to get it in the right spot for my stumpy legs. That cantilievered seat tube also gave the frame a little bit of "spring" to help smoothen out the bumps a little bit compared to the Leader.
The Shimano gruppo was also much better. I much prefer the Shimano "tap the brake lever to lift" mechanism over the flimsy Campy separate paddle. Oddly though, the Mrazek's brake levers were reversed, with the right hand controlling the front brake - perhaps this is an Aussie thing? And while the front transmission was a triple, the front derailleur could only be adjusted to shift two rings - top two, bottom two, or exactly astride the centre ring.
Bottom line though was that I determined that I can and will beast myself on a road bike, that I exceeded my fitness goals for the period, and I learned a lot about the care and feeding of road bikes. Cervelo, here I come!
As far as Tenerife-Training's service goes, I'm mostly happy. I was delivered everything I was promised, and when I called with a problem, Dr Leslie was right over to take care of it. My only "complaint" as such is that both bikes needed some maintainance work, particularly on the front transmissions. I was able to work around it and it was a source of annoyance, not real heartache - but at 30 Euros a day, the bikes could have been delivered in better shape. Even so, I'd use his service again - I'm nitpicking.
But even with all the road cycling going on, I still had a hankering to get some mountain biking in. And unlike the road cycling (which was my daily PT regimen) I wanted an adventure for both me and my wife.
My experiences trying to find a rideable road route around Puerto De La Cruz pretty well convinced me that we needed a local guide, and that's when we stumbled across MTB-Active, right across the street from the Puerto bus station:
We stopped in to talk to them, and the next thing we knew, we had signed up for the "Canadiedes" tour into the Mt Teide National Park. We wanted to visit Mt Teide anyway... why not go with a guide? A 700m climb was briefly mentioned... but other than that, show up at the shop first thing in the AM to catch the bus to the mountain.
We showed up at the appointed time on the appointed day, and got our bikes:
These were Bionicon full-suspension bikes. Dual-leg front forks. Hydraulic brakes. SRAM transmissions. And one of the coolest features I've ever seen on a mountain bike: the front and rear shocks were connected with hoses, and by pressing a button on the handlebars (it's in the orange block on the bars) you could change the bike geometry to either upright XC (the front forks compress and the rear shock extends) or laid-back downhill (the forks extend and the rear shock compresses). The bikes were super-clean and impeccably maintained too.
What we didn't get was a whole lot of instruction prior to the tour - just a time to show up. By a complete fluke, the morning was a little cold and both myself and my wife brought sweaters, and I brought a messenger bag to carry them in. I also (when I didn't see bottle cages on the bikes) asked about water just before the bus left, was informed that it wasn't provided, and had to run down to the bus station cafeteria to grab some bottles, just making it back in time.
(I have since discovered that the requirement for warm clothing, water, and a pack to carry it in is clearly stated - in German - on their website, but nobody warned us when we signed up for the tour and it was a near thing that we had it)
We met Toby, our guide, and the group of six riders crossed the street to the bus station were our bikes were loaded. Toby paid the fare, and off we went.
When we got to the drop-off point, there was some minor drama when it was discovered that one of the wheel nuts from the front wheel of one of the bikes (removed to fit in the bus luggage bins) had gone missing, and there were no spares in Toby's tool pack. Some creative thinking saw Toby use his seat clamp nut to attach the wheel, and we were off.
And this is just what it was we had signed up for where became apparent - a 700 metre (2600 ft) climb up the mountain, following a fire road, up grades ranging from 6% to about 11%. Holy crap! Remember what I said about the only direction on Tenerife being up? Remember what I said abount the derth of hills in Windsor?
It soon became painfully obvious that me and and my wife were just not in the same fitness league as the rest of the group. We both were quite capable of climbing the mountain, but nowhere near as fast as the rest. This was apparently cause for real concern by the rest of the group, but not in the way we thought - we expected them to be annoyed at our slow pace, but the group (and Toby) was more concerned that we were upset because they kept leaving us behind! Once we sorted out that we were completely OK with the group going on ahead and us maintaining a slower pace, there was a visible relaxing of tension and the mood lightened considerably.
All that was left then was the long slog up the mountain. At first, we were in pine forests reminescient of Petawawa, but we soon climbed above the treeline - and the clouds - into a barren landscape of volcanic ash and the occasional cactus or scrub brush. Mt Tiede loomed overhead, and in the distance we could make out two of the other Canary Islands
At long last, we summited back on the main highway - easily the most difficult PT I had done in years.
And now the real fun began. For having climbed 2600 ft up the mountain, we now rode 7800 ft back down... And I do decents far better than ascents...
First, a 1000 ft descent (over 4 km) on a paved road down to a restaurant for lunch - where I hit 58 km/h.
Then, 3000-odd feet over rutted and rocky fire roads - where I hit 49 km/h.
Then the rest of the way back into town on paved roads that were switchback after switchback. Ever play a rally racing computer game and think that there's no way public roads could ever be built that way? Oh yes they can - and they are on the way down the mountain into Puerto de la Cruz. I was pushing so hard and braking so hard that I actually faded the brakes on my bike and had to stop or 10 minutes so they would cool down and work again.
This is quite possibly the most fun I've had on a bike, ever. The suspension on the Bionicon was incredible, soaking up rocks the size of my head at speed like they weren't even there. The only thing limiting my speed down the mountain was the guide - and he wasn't exactly pokey. When we got back, I was completely ready to go back and do it again.
This tour was the highlight of our vacation - a great, great day. If you go to Tenerife, you owe it to yourself to try this out.