Every sport has its own lingo and road cycling is no different.

Bonking is one of those terms. It sounds nasty, and it is. (www.active.com)

Runners talk about “hitting the wall”,  when you can run no more. Bonking is the equivalent in cycling.

And you might be surprised how it creeps up on you.

Near the end of a 80-kilometer hilly race, I bonked. It was 32 degrees Celsius and 90% humidity. I was tired after three hours of pushing hard and was starting to feel my hamstrings tighten. I asked one of the seasoned cyclists with me if  I should keep going as the end was in sight or get off the bike.

She stopped with me and waited for me to stretch. All seemed ok so we went down the road, but it started again.

I swung off my bike and my legs literally collapsed underneath me. They started cramping and I was incapable of standing up. I was like a troll hunched over with my legs refusing to straighten. And did it hurt!

A support van with two great guys literally dragged me and my bike into the van and drove me home with the advice to soak in a cold bathtub of ice to stop the leg cramps. Doesn’t that sound like fun? I could not bring myself to do that so I put ice packs on my leg and the cramping soon subsided.

So now I too have bonked. And I hope it never happens again.

  Teamwork

“The best teamwork comes from men who are working independently toward one goal in unison. ” 

James Cash Penney

Just about everybody has ridden a bike at some point in their childhood. So when I started road biking I thought I pretty much knew how to do the deed. Wrong. There is a lot more involved than you think. And the best way to learn is to join a bike club.

Check out http://www.ontariocycling.org to find a club in your neighbourhood, I knew how to make the wheels go round  but managing the tempo of a double pace line, clipping in your feet and riding for three hours in blistering heat can make you humble.

When I heard people talk about the challenge of climbing hills, I did not get it.  I could not see why any one would want to climb a 6% grade hill for 20 minutes. Heck, I thought a 6% grade was easy.

Wrong.

What I learned is that technique and the cadence of your stroke could make the difference between keeping up or coming home exhausted, miles behind everyone else. I was reticent to clip my feet into the pedals because everyone had warned me to expect to fall at least a few times getting used to the clips. They were right. I crashed and scrapped my legs and arms several times. But that was incentive to learn and adapt. It can be done – and I was learning fast because the freedom of moving down the road at 45 kph and enjoying the easy social chatter while speeding through the country for hours on end was enough to overlook something as silly and short term as a few scraped knees. I credit my friends and Collingwood Cycling Club (www.ccnbikes.com) for helping me learn – and you can too.