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Source: Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary [1975 edition]

Hurt Tank /hert tank/ [ME to soak in a hurten pot]. To soak in a hurt tank. 1. Bereft of hope whilst cycling. Forsaken or damned, "catch 22". Sad or lonely whilst barely hanging on to the end of a heartless peleton. To feel or suffer great bodily and mental pain or distress during a DBD training ride. To be wounded with no sympathy from others. 2. To suffer want or need without anyone else caring while on a DBD training ride. 3. Mental and emotional torment without hope or chance of respite while riding a bicycle in a group. 4. Great discontent while in the act of laboring a bicycle amongst a group of malcontents and criminals. 5. Being in poor condition and a drain on the other cyclists. 6. To feel scorned by one's peers whilst riding a bicycle.
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Origin:
1740s France; ME peine punishment, torture, pain . Based on the scourage of Jean-Paul Marat [see photo above] (May 24, 1743 – July 13, 1793). Marat was a Swiss-born French physician, philosopher, political theorist, cyclist and scientist best known as a radical journalist, politician, and endurance cyclist from the French Revolution. He would take part in long sick enduro-rides on his steel single speed bicycle with a group of dubious characters that called themselves the DBD. After DBD training rides, Marat often sought the comfort of a cold bath to ease violent itchings due to a hideous skin disease long said to have been contracted years earlier, when he was forced to hide from his enemies in the Paris sewers. “Where is Marat?” “Oh, he’s soaking in the hurt tank again.” In the earlier part of the 20th century in England, a wounded, yet still able tail rider of a cycling group in a long remote cycling event was said to be “soaking in the hurt tank.”

Synonyms associated with "hurt-tank": 1–3. torture, misery, torment. PAIN, ACHE, AGONY, ANGUISH are terms for sensations causing suffering or torment. PAIN and ACHE usually refer to physical sensations whist on a bicycle (except heartache); AGONY and ANGUISH may be physical or mental involving a man just barely holding on to a unsympathetic group of bikers. PAIN in this context suggests a drawn out suffreing: a pain in one's knees. ACHE applies to a continuous pain, whether acute or dull: headache; muscular aches. AGONY implies a continuous, excruciating, scarcely endurable pain: in agony from a wound. ANGUISH suggests not only extreme and long-continued pain, but also a feeling of despair. 2. pang, twinge. 3. Think Trans-Iowa or Arrowhead 135