The day of our first Tour de Rock training ride — the kind of day in early March that gives meaning to the phrase “it was a damp cold” — I rode into the Saanich police parking lot, took one look at the hard-bodied cops, who basically keep fit for a living, and wondered what I’d gotten myself into.
I thought, if this were the Hunger Games, I’d definitely be the first to perish and it would not be a graceful death. A strategy flashed in my brain: “Maybe if I just whip out my note pad, they’ll think I’m writing a story and then I can just slowly back away as they cycle off.”
To my relief, it was a fairly flat and steady 25 kilometre ride to Mattick’s Farm and back. But the rides got more challenging with every passing week, from racing each other around a four-kilometre loop at Camosun’s Interurban campus, to pedalling up the punishing, switchback roads to the Saanich Observatory (then back down and up again), to riding 75 K out to Land’s End in North Saanich and back.
While I’ve always kept physically active, I’ve never been a boot camp or cross fit junkie (those are secrets cults anyway, right?), have never run a marathon and have certainly never sought out the pleasure of straddling a road bike that locks your feet into the pedals with the death grip of a clingy ex-boyfriend. I thought “why put yourself through that torture? The human body is not meant to be pushed that hard.”
That mentality has quickly changed over the last 10 weeks as suddenly I’m surrounded by uber-fit cops who are asking “please can we do that lap once more?” or “was that really only 75 K?” This is what I have to keep up with.
Just to give you an example, Victoria police Det. Const. Lori Lumley. In 1995, she became the first female cop assigned full time to the Ottawa police’s Emergency Response Team. She also runs half-marathons and is an avid rower. Oh, and she does all this while juggling the extracurricular schedules of her two sets of teenage twins. Any lame excuse I could dig up for missing practice (er, Breaking Bad marathon on Netflix?) would not pass muster with her.
Const. Jen Young, a former homicide investigator, is on VicPD’s beat and bike squad, so she’s literally on a bike all day ... and she rides up the Malahat on the weekend just for fun.
Many of the male cops have quads that would make Arnold Schwarzenegger envious.
But once I decided to commit to the rigorous training, I was hooked. Friends now know not to ask me what I’m up to Tuesday or Thursday nights or first thing Sunday morning. They know that will drum up my crazed cycling-addict look and I might start talking about the all the places spandex bunches.
One of the hardest nights was Prospect Lake Road, which our trainers so eloquently described as “undulating” but which felt more like the sharp up-and-down points of Rob Ford taking a lie detector test. We’re told to “work the downhill” to get “up the uphill” but, like quitting crack, it ain’t that easy. You’re constantly working the gears, speeding down as fast as you can and then noticing that hill that didn’t look so steep from the valley is laughing at you when you lose steam about half way up.
It’s just when you think you’ve hit a wall that the trainers ride up next to you, yelling: “Common, you can do it, push, push, push”, which counter-balances the voice in your head that’s saying “Screw this, I wanna go home and mow down a pizza.” Their message is unwavering: You can always push harder.
We’ll eventually be paired up with our junior riders — the kids battling cancer, the brave little ones we’re raising money for — so we have a face and a name and a smile to fuel our inspiration.
