Sat in a radio studio of a local community radio station. I'd just explained what I'd been through on a race. The interviewer, he starts a sentence, then stutters. I know that look, I know where he's going with this.
"You don't look like a cyclist." Is what he eventually comes out with.
"You mean I'm fat"
"I was trying to be polite"
My BMI is over 30. I am fat. A lot of that is muscle, working in a brewery has left me with a surprising (to others at least) amount of strength, tho it's starting to reduce a bit now. The problem is, lugging 100+kg of fat dyke up hills is a hard. *really* hard. I think I may find that had I started audaxing in the UK, I would have had a much much much higher DNF rate, and probably wouldn't have enjoyed it as much. Sure the Dutch mountains suck, but being fat doesn't massively make them harder. Nearly every time I interact with a medical professional, they tell me to get more exercise, very rarely do they ask what exercise I am already getting first. It's becoming a bit of a joke now. Even at the lightest I've been in recent years, my BMI was 31.8. That was in my first year of audaxing, when I lost 15kg in about 10 months.
Usually within the first 10 km or so I am riding on my own, I may cross paths with a few others at controls, but with a few exceptions, I'm riding alone. With even fewer exceptions, I'm the last rider to finish each time too. I think there is a certain element of being able to be comfortable with riding alone, really alone, in many respects audaxing is solo riding in loose formation, tho for some of us, it's a lot more solo than others.
Having the knowledge, skills, tools, and confidence to fix stuff at the side of the road is under appreciated. I've taken my brakes apart under a tree at the side of the road in the dark in Germany. Knowing that if I screw up, I'm going to be rather fucked, but that if I don't, I'm also going to be pretty fucked. Having seen the bikes people bring into the shop, with the faults they have, having riden past riders getting picked up due to mechanicals, I'm starting to realise that actually very few people are confident to fettle much on their bike beyond fixing flats.
Finally, something I've learned the hardway, and something we perhaps don't mention to newbies enough: eating. Exerting for long periods of time, at high output levels is a challenge for the gut, and it's something we typically leave out of our training plans. You go for the training ride, then come home and have dinner. You don't tend to do it the other way round. I'm trying to work out how to fix this, my digestive system just seems to shut down when I start to really push, making it hard to put out any power. Fortunately I do have several ten's of thousands of kcal of energy stores to draw upon, but it's not a comfortable experience.
J