Shasta Explorer - Humor - Blackberry surprise

I like the transition from spring into summer. I love when the days become long and the weather gets hot. When I was competing that transition also meant my long training rides went from three or four hours to six hours or more. But for some reason I was always a little slow to remember that those additional miles required additional calories...

Add my enthusiasm for seeing something new and you have a recipe for a good bonk. I did that more often than I care to admit, limping home in a catatonic state, cursing myself for being so stupid. Yet every summer I would repeat the same mistake...

Anybody who knows me knows that when I do bonk it is pretty serious. Like old, rusty farm equipment I grind to an unceremonious halt and there is nothing anybody can do about it. Just getting the pedals to make one more revolution takes my full concentration.

During one such ill-prepared and over-amped mega-ride, I ran out of gas a little outside of Sheridan while on my way home. For those who don't know the area around my hometown, that is still about 30 miles and 1300 feet of climbing from my house. It is a beautiful place to ride when you are feeling good but it becomes a rather desolate purgatory when you are in the slack-jawed coma of a bonk.

There are no houses and no stores around there and the only place you can go is up... I knew that last 30 miles of my day, which would normally take a couple hours at most, was now going to be an all-afternoon suffer-fest. If I was lucky most of it would be blotted from memory due to lack of glucose to record it... It was just me and an endless ribbon of tarmac separated by fields of dry grass. I was already looking forward to the point when sweet delusion would eventually spare me some of my suffering.

As I plodding along, wondering about the caloric value of dry grass, I crossed a little bridge over a dried-up creek. Out of the corner of my eye I spotted a blackberry thicket. It took a second to register that black-berries equal food, but when the idea sunk in I turned around and went back to make sure my mind wasn't playing tricks on me.

Sure enough, there at the bottom of the bridge was a tangle of the most wonderful, lush berries I had ever seen. Of course many were not yet ripe, but that didn't matter to me... I stumbled off my bike and for reasons that are still unknown, dragged it down the embankment with me to the berry patch.

Wading into the thorny vines I sat down and proceeded to gorge myself for a good 30 minutes or so. I ate everything I could reach and soon began to develop hope that I may yet survive this ordeal after all. Then I remembered there was also an old orange orchard halfway up the big climb. If I could consume enough calories to make it there I could tank up again and probably make it home!

After I had completely cleaned out the thicket I got my bike and drug it back up the embankment to the road. As I crested the top, the only car I had seen in hours drove by. As they passed me the driver slammed on the brakes and before I knew it an elderly couple was running towards me screaming. The passenger, a woman of about 70, was yelling "Oh my God are you okay!? Are you all right? Don't move, we'll get help!"

I was still slack jawed from my bonk, but I had enough sense to know that something clearly wasn't right with this picture. An elderly man, presumably her husband was also running at me with a look of horror on his face...

For a second I thought they must be referring to someone I had failed to notice, so I turned around to see who they had come to rescue. It was just me though and as they got closer she became even more horrified. She covered her mouth and cried "Oh my God what happened to you!"

I paused for a second and then calmly told her the truth...

I have no idea...

I had assumed I looked bad when I bonked, and suspected I felt even worse than I looked, but nobody had ever reacted like this before...

When she reached me she told me to lie down and she would try to stop the bleeding. Now I was starting to wonder if maybe she was bonking... She grabbed my arm and to my amazement it was covered in red. I looked at my other arm and it too was red. Then I looked down at my jersey and by golly it was the same.

The guy asked me again what happened to me, and I replied a little sheepishly, I, uh, got hungry so I ate some blackberries...

What they saw out of the corner of their eye was a guy dragging a bike out of a ditch, with his face, arms and shirt covered in red. It must have looked like I took a header off the only bridge in miles...

The guy started laughing and his wife, after checking me out to confirm I wasn't really bleeding to death, threw up her hands in disgust.

I really would have let them rescue me, especially if they had food, but after realizing I was only a danger to myself they got back in their car and drove away. I on the other hand continued to plod on to the orange orchard...