In addition to finding out all sorts of new things - pickles taste great on a hot day, for instance; or yes, you can poop 18 times in a single night following a mountain bike race - I found out that the choice of gloves is really important on a long ride.
I'd struggled off and on with hand pains on the road, particularly in a few 200km randonees. But a quick shift of hand position, and the pain would be alleviated. It was rough, but not horrible, it's the kind of routine suffering everybody deals with.
On the mountain bike - because I rode like an unskilled mooo-ron back then - there was no way to relieve the hand pain. I was giving it the death grip, riding around with painful hands, and soon the pins and needles arrived. Then the serious numbness set in. I tried to relieve it with different sets of gloves: I started with Descentes, that left my hands raw; switched to some Pearl Izumis that did nothing to help the problem; then switched to some Performance Elites, which were the best of the bunch but which still didn't stop the problem, they just slowed down the degeneration of the skin on my hands and the numbness. in my deathgrip.
By the time I was 50 miles into the day, my hand was incredibly numb, and the numbness in my left pinky and ring finger wound up taking 8 or 10 months to go away. My palms looked like fresh ground hamburger.
I vowed to find some better gloves.
After a lot of searching around, I happened on Spenco gloves. A bunch of guys in one of the mountain bike forums were swearing up and down that these gloves solved major hand pain problems for them. So I decided to give them a shot.
They worked. They are anatomically designed with three pads to provide relief to the nerves and the blood vein that run down the middle of your hand. The pads are really stout and thick on the higher end models; they offer quite a bit of padding. Some of them are minimally padded but even those work very well compared to other gloves I've tried. The quality is good; they're durable, and comfortable. They are also crash tough, and do a good job of holding together and protecting my hands in crashes.
You'd think that the big pads - 1.5 inches wide by maybe a quarter inch thick - would be so prominent as to be painful. You'd be wrong. They've proven superb on all sorts of long rides, including a couple 4 hour mountain bike rides, where even the usual amount of pain, the sort I'm willing to put up with, did not set in. Hand pain is a bit of an issue in mountain biking, more than on the road. You need to keep closer track of what the front end is doing because it bounces around all the time. For many of us - many = the unskilled jackasses who death grip the bars - this leads to a death grip that in turn makes the hands very sore. It helps a lot to have gloves that are resistant to our own stupid habits. Spencos are those gloves.
So Baker's Dozen is coming up next week. I'm going to get started packing for it next Monday or so. I have maybe 20 sets of gloves. The only ones I'm bringing are 4 sets of Spencos. That should tell you something.
TOT 26: 55 Minute Lap at Rosaryville
I climbed pretty badly with sore legs but frequently found myself spun out, riding on flats and downhill between the trees at a pace that kept me about halfway between "somewhat scared" and "thoroughly terrorized" for most of the ride. Boys and girls, meet my old friend, Flow.
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