On Pain

I am in the Data Centre the Carrier Hotel in downtown. There are buildings like this one in every city of any size all over North America. Your phone calls, web browsing, emails, all that good stuff pass through buildings just like the one I'm in. In fact, if you are in Canada it is highly probable that your next phone call will pass through wires not two meters away from me right now, yes even local calls in Vancouver have decent odds of being routed all the way to Toronto and then bounced back to Vancouver.

Here is a dirty little secret, the very building I am in also houses the data centre for a major Canadian mobile phone company. This is bad because if this building, even just the floor the mobile carrier operates on were to say flood, or burn - all to frequent events for major data centres - the mobile phone company would literally be unable to continue as a business, their cell phones would become paper weights.

Anyway I mention all this not to show off, there are plenty of people, most much smarter than me who work here all the time. I bring this up because it is now just after midnight on Wednesday morning. I babbled on about a data centre because I missed a Tuesday night ride, I figured I better explain why.

The good news for me, the reason this post is not my usual irritated tone, is that I did manage to squeeze in a little trip around the city prior to coming back to work. I rode, well I won't try and cheat, 84.88km in just under 3 hours. I burned, well a lot of calories and I raced the cars. (They usually beat me, but not by so much that all that many motorists would laugh.) Typically the light would turn green and I would be half way to the next light before the first cars would even catch up. In short the ride was a very intense interval session, burn hard to the next red light, recover for 15 or 30 seconds and then burn hard again to the next red. While my average speed was only a little shy of 29km/h, my sustained speed, that is the speed I was booking when I was not slowing down for the next light, was somewhere between 35 and 40 km/h.

I do not have the route, my GPS is with my ride at home; but, I can describe some of the interesting bits (I'll post the route some other time.) I took the Lakeshore trail west, and passed... well everyone from Stadium road right to Park Lawn. At one point there were two guys in kits from a very unpopular bike club, now I should insert here that most of the time when I passed someone it was a pleasant thing, just a "on your left" and "thank you" but for these guys I hammered, hard. I think, too hard, they did not even try to catch up. Oh well! (This club has a reputation, well earned, that everyone not in the club knows exactly what the bottom side of the noses of the club membership looks like... they need some tissue!)

I hammered on, I personally like to find a distinctive looking car and see how long it takes for the car to properly drop me if we both obey the traffic laws, well alright, no motorist in Toronto obeys the speed limit but that just makes the challenge harder for me. I made it from below Bloor up Royal York to The West Way (where I turned off) in range of a red minivan, total distance, about 4 or 5km.

Eglinton Avenue is a disaster, I lost a lot of time, bouncing through potholes and fighting a miserable head wind. I went south on Tomken, passing cars, at speed, as I went - which would sound a lot more impressive I admit if the cars in questions were driving at the posted limit, they were not even close.

Dundas from Tomken to the West Mall was a great place for intervals, hammer at 45~55km/h and then stop. Repeat every few hundred meters. I think I spent more time out of the saddle accelerating than I spent in the saddle maintaining speed. Oh before I forget, the West Mall is being resurfaced and is one lane in each direction, and Evens Avenue is so badly in need of resurfacing from West Mall to Islington it is rather sad.

I went back up Royal York, at The Queens Way a Taxi driver asked me if I was Andy Schleck or Alberto Contador. I told him I thought Contador was a dick. The taxi driver told me he had not heard the latest on the tour, I told him that Contador was ahead by 8 seconds. That driver was cooler than every other taxi driver in Toronto combined! I wish more cabbies followed the TDF, I'll bet they would be a lot more considerate to cyclists.

I climbed Christie street but it was nothing impressive, I was starting to hurt, on the other hand the trip down that hill, at Russell Hill Road was awesome. I was clocking over 50km/h - it's a 40 zone, and that's 40 for very good reason. Taking a turn at speed is a total adrenaline rush and a half.

In short, the ride was painful, but all in a good way. I should do it again sometime, but maybe try to go a little faster.