Mmmmmm… Pudding!

I’m dying here!

Okay. I’m being melodramatic. I’m not dying, and never was, despite the fact that it sometimes felt like I was over the last few days. I caught COVID on a visit to Philadelphia last week, almost certainly when I took my mask off to eat indoors in a restaurant – something that I have done very rarely since 2019.

I had managed to completely avoid the plague for all these years through a combination of obsessive germaphobia, a willingness to abjur eating indoors with strangers, and mask-wearing. I have become something of an expert on masks, a connoisseur of KN-95s, Air Queens, and 3-ply paper masks. Each has its own application and, it turns out, there is a large counterfeit market out there. Who knew?

The upshot is that I felt like last-man-standing, one of the last people I knew who had dodged the ‘Rona. Even when my spouse got hit last year I somehow managed to stay clear of the ugly, spikey virus. I confess that I started to feel smug, as if I had been blessed by superior genetics with a preternatural immune system. I was a Nietzschean Übermensch for the epidemiological end times, I told myself.

But pride cometh before the fall, and that arrogance, combined with the overwhelming cultural mood that the Coronavirus pandemic was over, which has been reinforced ad-nauseum in the media and by political leaders right up to White House, brought me down. The pandemic isn’t over, the virus hasn’t gone away; we’ve just gotten bored with it, so we have collectively chosen to go on as if nothing happened. I dropped my mask in Philly to dine in a restaurant. Before you ask: The meal was wonderful. No, it wasn’t worth it.

Apart from the utterly beastly experience of being sick with COVID which, it turns out, really is that bad, what bothers me the most is that my friend who lives in the boonies of Western Massachusetts, is now last-man-standing. I must either accept that he is my genetic superior, or concede that superior genetics have nothing to do with whether your number comes up in the viral lottery.

Clearly, superior genetics have nothing to do with whether your number comes up in the viral lottery.

So, I have been sitting here, wrapped in a moist warm gauze of congestion, fever, and brainfog, watching the Tour de France whizz by in colors of yellow, green, and red polka-dots, periodically sticking a thermometer in my mouth, wondering when this is going to end. I was going to write something profound about the Tour last week – and I might yet – but the Rona had other plans.

What bothers me the most is the fact that I have not thrown my leg over a bike in more than a week at this point. I had big plans that, last week, I was going to tick my weekly mileage up closer to 200 miles and, this week, I was going to go over. This kind of thing – progressively increasing mileage – is something some cyclists take pride in; it’s a metric of improvement, a competition against yourself that you can only win, and preparation for ever greater, more heroic centuries, gran fondos, and brevets to come. For me, cycling is a narrative act, and I was writing an epic.

But it all came to a screeching halt. In the competition against myself, I lost. More importantly, I just miss being on my bike. I mean, apart from everything else, riding a bike is fun, and I have felt that I have been missing out on fun. And that really sucks.

Yes, it has only been a week, and I am now on the mend – at least enough to be able to form a conscious thought. It isn’t like I’m really dying, and I really should stop whining about it. But, for a cyclist, there is a difference between choosing not to ride and not be able to ride. The former is a gesture of positive agency, and the latter is victimization. As much as I feel improved from the time a couple of days ago, when my fever threatened to break the thermometer and I was coughing out baseball-sized chunks of mucous (I exaggerate, but not much), I still don’t feel well-enough to ride. And I have a nagging, irrational terror that I may never feel well-enough again.

I know. It’s irrational. That’s what I said.

What isn’t irrational, or at least no so irrational, is the typical athlete’s fear of “detraining.” It’s even an ugly word that speaks of stagnation and failure. I was just attaining a level fitness that would allow me to contemplate riding with the fastboys from time to time, and now? How long can I stay off the bike before I turn into a large pudding? Two weeks? One week? Is it already too late?

I seem to remember Greg Lemond – one of my early cycling heroes – saying that a cyclist loses three weeks of fitness for every week off the bike. I might have read it in Greg Lemond’s Complete Book of Cycling, but I flipped through those pages and I couldn’t find the reference. It is equally likely that I heard from my old ride partner Henry (an AG provincial time trial champion, no less!), and he might have made it up. I hope so, but that would be uncharacteristic of Henry.

On the other hand, I searched for information on detraining the last time I was training for a marathon and had to interrupt my plan because, you know, shit happens. Canadian Runner magazine informed me then that no serious detraining happens before one or two weeks, and it takes even longer to lose muscle tone. That is comforting. Except that it has already been more than a week, and I still don’t feel 100 percent.

And after that brief moment of mental peace and comfort, I find myself spiraling again: What happens if I don’t start back soon? Can I harm myself if I start back too soon?! There is steady rain in the forecast for most of the next week! What to do, what to DO?! My head spins and I feel myself settling into the bowl of detraining to the sound of Bill Cosby’s creepy voice saying “mmmmmm-pudding!”

I’m dying here!