This image is part of a five-year campaign for AIDS awareness by the White House, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the CDC. It wasn’t made in the 1980s, or the 1990s, or even the early 2000s. The campaign with this particular statistic was launched in April 2009.

In recent days, I’ve been thinking that in addition to using this blog for posts on my process and progress—training and fundraising—it may be a good place to muse about answers to the question of why I do this Big Thing almost every year. Some of the reasons I participate in an endurance ride that raises money for HIV/AIDS services appear in brief form in the fundraising letters and emails I sent out asking people to support me doing the Braking the Cycle ride. But in truth, within the limited confines of a fundraising letter, it’s impossible to really explore and list the many reasons I find myself returning to this process, this cause, this physical challenge. I may not even fully be able to fully articulate all of them here, but it seems as good a place as any to try.

These posts about my reasons to ride and support this cause aren’t going to be pre-planned, which is to say that they will appear as they occur to me, and not in any particular order of emphasis or importance. Here is the first:

Reason 1: Last year marked the 30th “anniversary” of AIDS/HIV. This is not an anniversary I want to continue to mark. June 1981 was when the first formal report of the disease that came to be known as AIDS was issued. The first New York Times piece about AIDS was written by Lawrence K. Altman in early July 1981; the article title was “RARE CANCER SEEN IN 41 HOMOSEXUALS.” (Last May, Altman also wrote a thoughtful, interesting follow-up on where we are with the disease 30 years later.) At the time of Altman’s first article, the mystery disease that was killing mostly gay men was informally called “the gay cancer” by some. The science community and the press didn’t have a real name for it—acquired immune deficiency syndrome—for another year. It took three years before the HIV virus was identified as the infectious agent that led to AIDS. And until the advancements in antiretroviral drug treatments in the mid- and late 1990s, an HIV+ diagnosis was, by and large, considered to be a painful death sentence.

It’s now late July 2012. AIDS/HIV is 31 years old. As of the end of 2010, worldwide, nearly 30 million individuals have died from AIDS-related causes; of those, 1.8 million died in 2010. A related figure that’s both the good and the bad news: Another 34 million people around the globe are now living with HIV/AIDS (a figure that’s up from 8 million in 1990). Nearly 1.2 million of those 34 million people live in the U.S., and of those, 1 in 5 (that’s nearly 240,000) are unaware of their HIV+ status.

The image I included here features a statistic that sounds like it should date back to decades ago: that every 9.5 minutes, another person in the U.S. becomes infected HIV. It doesn’t; it’s from three years ago.

I ride because I want to see the day when I post the following on my blog or in my journal or in an email: This year marks the 30th anniversary of the end of AIDS/HIV.

It’s late in the season, the nagging voice in the back of my head tells me. Yes yes. Only two and a half months left to train for my ride in late September. The heatwave has broken temporarily.

Saturday, July 21, wasn’t too hot. It wasn’t too cold. It was all very Goldilocks.

And yet. After a long, intense week that had me awake until after 1am every night, and usually between 2 and 4am for most of them, my body rebelled. I woke up yesterday at 5:30am, in plenty of time to get on the road to Nyack and put in a good 70 cycling miles or so. No good reason or excuse not to ride.

Our dog Sadie rearranged her chin on my foot. I couldn’t move.

Sadie, keeping the bed pillow warm for me.

“I’ll sleep another hour,” I told myself. I texted my training partner in crime, Terry, to say I’d be heading out late and that he should leave without me if he needed to. I was out again in less than a minute, that dreamless sleep of the half-dead. I fell asleep with the phone in my hand, so when Terry vibrated back at 6:30, it woke me.

“I am bailing, too, how funny! Enjoy the day,” he wrote. “I’m not bailing yet,” I thought to myself. “It’s still early.” And I promptly fell asleep again.

My friend Kerri, who is training for a half-marathon (I know; I can’t imagine doing it, either), often runs on the same West Side path along the Hudson that I take to bike out of Manhattan. She sent a text at 8am to say she was starting late, so she probably wouldn’t see me on the road today. Kerri was on her way out the door, but in my Brooklyn bed, Jen was snoring her light cat purr, and Sadie got up, stretched, and spun in three circles before flopping back down into the crook of my knee. In my head, I was mentally dressing myself, slurping down coffee and a smoothie, and rushing out the door to zip zip zip the eight miles to catch Kerri.

“I’m in a blue tank,” Kerri wrote. “Bet you bike faster than I run!”

“I am in my jammies,” I wrote back. And I rolled over and zonked out again.

I didn’t go riding today. These things happen. Jen and I talked over coffee and crumpets, the latter part of a food birthday gift package from Jen’s brother and sister-in-law. It’s the first time in weeks that I’ve has something other than a fruit smoothie for breakfast on Saturday. It is also the first time in ages that I’ve had a real, leisurely weekend morning with my spouse.

Later in the day, we took a long walk to Brooklyn Heights to the dog run, and I checked in with my friend who lives nearby to see if she wanted to meet us there with her nine-month-old baby. No hills yesterday except the Hillside Dog Run.

My usual inclination when I don’t feel like riding is to push myself. I go anyway. Discipline was so hard for me to learn, some part of me feels like I have to practice it all the time lest I lapse into my old, feast-or-famine ways. But I guess adapting and listening to what your body and spirit need is as much part of training and discipline as anything. For my usual 70-mile training tide, I went today, Sunday. I hadn’t planned to ride this Sunday for sure. But I did. My body didn’t know it was Sunday. The hills didn’t care either.

Maybe some weekends, discipline is knowing and accepting your limits and adapting. If you can’t today, you adapt and do tomorrow what you didn’t or couldn’t do yesterday.

On Saturday, this is what I did instead of training, which is, some days, it seems, just what a body needs.

Me, unable to resist the baby cuteness.

Jen, serving as the practice patient for a future dental technician.

“Fur, especially on the ears, is very, very soft.”

Baby sandwich!

I re-read my previous post this morning. I found myself feeling vaguely unsatisfied by it.

I am not new to relying on words.  Words are my medium. They are my bread and butter. They are also the primary way that I create art, and they are my comfort zone. Sometimes, I even feel as though I’m better in word form than in person.

That said, I’m also more accustomed to using words for story-telling purposes. Even when it’s informational material, I know how to shape it to give it a linear logic and form. Good stories have clear beginnings, middles, and ends.

Blogging is relatively new to me. I happily participate in collaborative music blogs with friends, but those rely on music and images, not words—and arguably, by virtue of the collective mixes we make together, those work toward achieving a narrative shape, too.

But I’ve been resistant to blogging for other purposes, probably because I’m such a control freak, willing to have a complicated, meandering artistic or editorial process on the way from Point A to Point B, but less comfortable with the idea of sharing it with others lest they see my inevitable, numerous screw-ups and false starts along the way.

What does all this have to do with cycling and training rides? Nothing and everything. I am coming to think blogging is a lot like training. I may be working toward a definite goal, with corresponding time constraints, but the experience of writing it, and reading it, is episodic. In the moment, goals and progress can feel murky. Training rides are like that, too. They’re an ongoing journey, not a destination. The Blue Streak and I may end up at home each time, but even after I am sitting on the couch—drinking iced watermelon juice and thinking of how soft I’ve gotten in my old age because I am loving loving loving the air conditioning this summer after my weekend rides—there’s another piece of the training to work at harder or longer. Adding weekly mileage one week. More hills the next. Speed the next.

That’s the thing about this endurance-ride training journey. There’s always always always another hill.

To be continued…

The episodic cycling training narrative structure: Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

I’ve never seen The Hills Have Eyes. But last Saturday, I wished the hills did have eyes, because my friend Terry and I kicked some hilly, cycling ass. It’s a particular boost to the psyche because the last climbing segment we did wasn’t planned.

Poster for The Hills Have Eyes (1977), directed by Wes Craven

It has been a strange cycling season so far. More erratic and grueling than any I have experienced before.

I’ve never been a chipper, chatty girl in the morning. I’m silent and fuzzy-headed and sluggish. Getting up and out on the road early—decidely not what my body and mind are naturally inclined to do. It’s been harder this year to rise early. And more necessary than ever. On our most frequent weekend ride up to Nyack and back—about a 70-mile run round trip from my place in Brooklyn—any time after about 11am on a sunny day is brutally hot, and the roads don’t have much shade. So my friends and I have been trying to meet up earlier to beat the heat. Just the business of getting my ass up and out of bed at 5:30 or 6 each Saturday has felt like its own special hurdle. It’s been a grind.

It’s been so scorching, even leaving early doesn’t let us avoid the heat entirely. The 105-degree heat a few weeks ago knocked me out; I even cut my ride short, stopping in Piermont instead of Nyack. I felt exhausted. Slow. Heavy.

And then all week before this past Saturday’s ride, I was plagued each morning with a tightness in my chest and an irritating, sporadic cough that never quite subsided all day. I thought it was some low-grade version of the cold/flu nastiness floating around my office at first. By Wednesday, I was still feeling crappy, and someone suggested to me that it might be mild asthma. Which I have never had, but it runs in my family and scares the crap out of me. Decades of my grandmother’s wheezing and choking come to mind with the mere mention of the word.

So I was approaching last Saturday’s ride with some apprehension. When I woke up though, after I shook off the initial lethargy and rode out, to my surprise, I felt okay. Better than I have in weeks. My chest—almost normal again. I met up with Terry at the Palisades Park entrance, and we were at The Runcible Spoon in Nyack by 10. You know it’s been a steamy summer when the temp on River Road in Jersey is pushing 90, and you feel like it’s positively cool and breezy compared to every other day during the past two weeks.

We both felt so good at Mile 34, often the halfway marker, I floated the idea of pushing it. Rockland Lake State Park is only another three miles or so away. But at least half of it is all uphill, which is why it’s not always part of the regular weekend run. The last mile down to the lake is a glorious downhill reward, but that also means you have to climb back up that same stretch going back. Because the thought of that nasty hill back right after making the climb to the lake makes me cringe, I usually like to do a loop around the lake before turning around.

All this to say: What looks like a tiny five- to six-mile supplement, which would take maybe 15 to 20 minutes if it were flat, ends up being 40 minutes of alternating cycling heaven and cycling hell.

At various points en route, I was bumping up against how excruciatingly slow I felt, crawling up each hill. It feels endless. Like a bad idea someone else must have duped you into. It wasn’t until I was back in the Palisades heading south,  feeling that giddiness that comes when I know I’m only 14 miles from home, nearly all of them pretty pancake flat that I remembered: when I got up that morning, I didn’t know if I’d even make it the first 15 miles to New Jersey. I reminded myself of that on and off the rest of the way home.

I had had delusions of cycling grandeur for Sunday. I haven’t done back-to-back weekend rides yet this season, and it’s already late July. Eeek. Two years ago, by this point in the season, I had done several back-to-backs and a century ride. The spontaneous Rockland trip was a good idea, and it was wise to take advantage of the slight let-up in the weather. It also was the reason I slept like a fairy-tale character Sunday morning and didn’t ride at all. I sat on my ass, lazed, and went to the movies, where I sat on my ass some more, surrounded by icy central air.

Endurance through more days commuting by bike to work,  and, hopefully, some back-to-backs: next week.

I finally officially signed up for Braking the Cycle 2012 this week. This will be my fifth AIDS bike ride, my fourth since 2008.

I don’t always look this serious when I cycle.

This year’s Braking the Cycle will benefit the services of Housing Works, a grassroots AIDS organization that has been devoted to building a healing community for people living with and affected by HIV/AIDS since its founding in 1990. Its services for homeless, formerly homeless, and low-income New Yorkers living with HIV and AIDS include housing, primary care, dental care, mental health services, case management, transgender health services, job training, wellness programs, and more.

I ride my bike because cycling makes me feel free and grounded at the same time. What is freedom if it’s not zooming down the road at nearly 40 miles an hour on The Blue Streak, the bike I bought in June 2008? And what could be more earth-bound than listening to the grind and click of its chain and its gears as I drag myself up a steep hill, the excruciatingly slow rhythm of the tires peeling over the asphalt with each pedal rotation?

I ride my bike to raise money for AIDS/HIV services because HIV is still here. I remember a world without AIDS, but that was over 30 years ago. People still live with HIV, and people still die from it. I ride because I’m blessed with good health, and I can ride. I’ll stop riding for organizations that serve those who battle with and against HIV when the fight is over.

When I bought my first road bike in 2008—the first bike of my own I’d had since the age of 10—I had never ridden more than 85 miles in a day, and I had never done back-to-back endurance rides. I purchased an odometer after I’d been riding my new bike about a month. At the time I mostly wanted to get a better sense of how fast I was going and how many miles I’d ridden on a given training day. The odometer also tracks the total number of miles you’ve ridden. As of this writing, it’s at 8,154 miles. That’s roughly the distance between New York City and Mumbai in India. I’ve never been to India, but it’s mind-boggling and reassuring to think that if there were enough land between here and there, I could bike there.

By the time September rolls around, the odometer will be somewhere around 9,000 miles. In the months between now and then, I will be training—riding 60, 70, 80 miles on Saturdays and Sundays every weekend, riding to and from work, riding riding riding.  It was over 100 degrees when I rode two Saturdays ago. I rode anyway.

I’ll also be fundraising all summer long. Here’s where you can donate to support my efforts: Mika’s Braking the Cycle 2012 Donation page.

This blog is where I’ll be posting periodically all summer to chart my progress.