Cycling Spotlight: “I Must Do This … Alone”

Introduction

There are so many reasons why cycling is the coolest sport ever. You get to go fast, you cover vast swaths of terrain every ride, you get to eat whatever you want because you’re burning so many calories, and there’s all this cool equipment besides. But one of the best things about it is that you can keep doing it well into middle age. I went to a Coors Classic bike race reunion a couple decades ago and saw all my childhood heroes (Andy Hampsten, Davis Phinney, Ron Keifel, Alexi Grewal, pretty much every great American pro from the ‘80s), and they were in their fifties, and all still looked great and were still riding. Can you imagine an NFL reunion of fifty-somethings? Especially if they’d all kept playing football?

The low-impact nature of cycling isn’t the only thing that makes it a good choice as we age. Cycling is also logistically simple. Other sports, like Ultimate and soccer, require two entire teams to coordinate their schedules and play on a designated field. Golf requires reserving a tee time, paying a bunch of money, and wearing dorky clothing (while getting relatively little exercise). Tennis is only two people, but again you need to secure the court. With cycling, you obviously just need your bike and some public roads or trails. Thus, this sport can accommodate the most unpredictable of schedules. Perhaps only running is logistically simpler, though ageing runners usually have bad knees, tendonitis, lockjaw, and depression. (Yes, I made all that up and I have no fact checker.)

What I didn’t realize until the last few years, though, is that not all cyclists ever learn the art of riding solo. My brothers seldom ride alone, and my older daughter (a former racer) almost never does. As an assistant high school mountain biking coach, I occasionally encounter graduates from the program who, I’m disappointed to learn, stopped riding once the team element came to an end.

This post is about the particular joys and challenges of riding solo.

I must do this … alone 

Often as I head out for a ride, I’ll tell my family members, “I’m going out there. Don’t try to stop me.” This is a family shibboleth, and they’re supposed to respond, “You fool! You’ll be killed!” (I guess it’s been long enough since my worst ever cycling accident that this isn’t too sore a subject.) To this I reply, “I must do this … alone.” My brother and I have been saying this last part since about 1988, quoting some junior I coached back then who was, I believe, quoting “Buck Rogers.” Googling this quote now, I find it attributed to “Thor,” “South Park,” “Lord of the Rings,” and “Monsters vs. Aliens.” I guess it’s kind of a classic sentiment, perhaps particularly for Americans, with our love of the individual and the individually heroic.

Solo riding has been part of my routine since about 1984. That was when, as described here, my cycling friends kind of “outgrew” me, because while I was still floundering in races, they were winning, and they became too fast and—they evidently felt—too cool to even hang out with me, much less ride with me. We went our separate ways and I realized I would have to either train alone, make some new friends, or quit the sport. So for about a year, before making new cycling friends, I rode alone most of the time. I had a part-time job on top of school, so a fair bit of this training was after dark as well. It’s remarkable I was able to build much fitness during that off-season; the next year was when I finally broke through and got some results.

Philosophy

I suppose the willingness to ride alone is related to a tolerance for drudgery, or at least for resignation. As I’ve discussed elsewhere in these pages, gaining the fitness to succeed at bike racing requires a lot of sheer repetition, just like with anything difficult. Endless repetition produces the incremental improvements in performance that matter to the diehard. It’s not always that interesting and it’s not always that fun, but that doesn’t stop the committed athlete.

The more recreational cyclist, on the other hand, rides for fun and as a social outlet, and probably has better things to do than ride alone. If he or she can’t get a group organized, or at least one pal, perhaps the ride simply gets postponed. My wife likes to ride with me, but not so much by herself. And when we do ride, she doesn’t want to ride my standard, well-worn routes. She’s curious—what’s up this street? Where does this go? We end up touring the residential streets of the Berkeley hills which I otherwise seldom do. When I ride alone, I stick to a plan and a route and it wouldn’t occur to me to alter it. (Actually, that’s not entirely true; sometimes Lomas Cantadas, a particularly hard climb, beckons, like it’s actually taunting me, and ignites my caprice by being such a pointlessly difficult way to get home. For details click here.)

For those who develop a taste for solo riding, subtle pleasures do accrue. Sure, it’s not as fun as riding with a group or a pal, but it’s a way to get outside your routine, remove all social interaction from your plate, and get both inside and completely outside your head. You can ponder something, or alternatively zone out completely, without any specific demands on your attention (other than navigating and negotiating the terrain, of course). Nowadays, when I haven’t had a solo ride in a while, I begin to crave it.

Anecdote

It was spring of 1986 and most of my training was with my friend Pete, and often our pal Dave who had been on my team in the 1985 Red Zinger Mini Classic. Pete was way stronger which could make things difficult. He’d be hammering at the front and I’d be hanging on for dear life, and then when I would take the lead, looking forward to slacking off a bit, he’d yell, “Don’t let the speed drop below thirty!”

One cold, windy spring day we were riding around the Morgul Bismark course east of Boulder (a route made somewhat famous by the Coors Classic bike race and the movie “American Flyers”) and I just wasn’t feeling it. I couldn’t match Pete’s pace and, he, being an angry young man (actually, more moody than angry I guess), was getting ornery. I in turn was getting fed up, and we finally agreed it was best to part ways. He kept going, and I turned around and started heading home. Well, this was no better because now I was pedaling straight into the wind. (It was well known in those days that you always had a headwind on the Morgul; the theory went that there was a tornado in the middle, blowing counter-clockwise unless you turn around and then it reversed itself.) I plodded my miserable way along, more lugubrious than ever, and at one point I happened to look behind me. (Who knows why; maybe I thought Pete might have changed his mind and would come scoop me up.) In the distance I saw a rider in a red and green uniform; I took him to be one of Boulder’s 7-Eleven juniors coached by Dale Stetina. This guy was coming up fast. And then I realized he looked pretty big. Too big to be a junior.

Well, whoever it was, he came blowing on by, and I dove for his wheel and managed to catch it. He was moving at a great clip and somehow I found the resolve, and the strength, that had been missing throughout my ride thus far. I was absolutely dying on this guy’s wheel but totally stoked to get these miles done faster, with no more headwind, and besides, who was this guy? Somebody important? I hung on all the way into Boulder, when the guy slowed down and sat up, and I rode up alongside him. He gave me a friendly greeting and asked my name. Though shy, I managed to introduce myself. He grinned and put out his hand for a handshake. “Davis,” he intoned. Daaaaaamn! Davis Phinney, the famous pro, who later that year became the first American to win a stage of the Tour de France! Just think: had I continued my original ride, instead of being willing to peel off and ride home alone, I’d have never had a chance to ride with this great champion.

Alone, but not alone

If you’re lucky enough to live in a community where cycling is popular, you’re seldom really alone out there. (In there—meaning at home on a stationary trainer or rollers—is of course a whole other story.) Where I live, in the Berkeley area, there are always all kinds of cyclists out and about. I see the same guys out there all the time whom I recognize though they’re still strangers, and then I see all kinds of random riders I’ve never seen before and may never see again. I always say hello if I’m passing someone or being passed, and offer a head nod or chin lift to a cyclist coming the other way. Some riders are too cool to acknowledge me, or perhaps just too far into their heads. It does seem like a slick club-racer type is more likely to ignore me, to a point … the pros I’d see as a kid in Boulder always smiled and acknowledged me (though perhaps it’s just because I was young?). The riders I encounter whom I like the most are generally the more novice ones who really light up when I nod or wave. They flash a big grin, like they really appreciate the novelty of becoming a part of the cycling community.

I guess ever since suffering through the COVID-19 pandemic, I have developed a keener appreciation for just being among my fellow humans, even if just to share a public space with them, however briefly. I want to see people and feel their presence ... even if I do not actually wish to interact with them beyond a simple greeting. I guess this is what you get when you cross an introvert with a claustrophobic. 

During the high school mountain bike season, I coach the Albany High Cougars a couple times a week. Sometimes the late afternoon ride isn’t possible for me due to work commitments, so I don’t get out until well after five to do a solo road ride. Several times this year I’ve seen the team heading home along Wildcat Canyon Road as I’ve been heading out, and they’ve waved and called out, “Hey, Coach Dana!” I’m stoked that they notice me even though I’m on a road bike and in a different kit. It means they’re paying attention, and moreover I’m setting a good example of riding alone when meeting others isn’t possible. Nota bene, Cougars!

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From the Archives - It IS About the Bike: Part 2

Introduction

Last week I ran the first half of a story I originally published in the Daily Peloton back in 2015. Well, to be more accurate I wrote it for some other magazine honoring the bicycle frame company Serotta, which was going out of business. As you shall see, my literary scruples prevented this from being a useful article to the Serotta people, which is why Daily Peloton got it. Since DP’s servers crashed a couple years back and all their content was lost, I’m serving the story up here.

Speaking of being lost, if you didn’t read the first half of this, go back here and do that now. Or not … you’ll figure out what’s going on eventually.

It Is About the Bike – Part II – January 2015

So, as I was saying last week, having wrecked my beautiful Mercian, I was getting by with an old Cinelli frameset on loan from my friend Nico. For months I’d been waiting in vain for news about getting my bent Mercian repaired. I waited and waited, and pestered and pestered Dave Whittingham, the manager of The Spoke, but to no avail. Eventually Nico wanted his Cinelli back and I still needed a bike. Thus, was time to buy a new frame but I had no money. (I’d spent it all on the Mercian and in fact still owed my dad at least $100 on it.) My brother Geoff, who had earned a fortune washing dishes at  the Flagstaff House restaurant, said he’d loan me the money for a frame if and only if I bought another Miyata. What was I to do?

I bit the bullet and bought a Pro Miyata, 57 cm, light blue with gold panels, for something like $300 (frame and fork). It looked pretty cool, but wasn’t as flashy as that Cinelli and rode just as bad. Of course I was happy to have a bike, but it was still a letdown.

At least it had proper lettering on the head tube, instead of the cheesy badge pictured above. And obviously it didn’t have any damn reflectors.

Nico worked at The Spoke, and I used to hang around with him there, chewing the fat. Not surprisingly, what we talked about was bikes. And what we talked about when we talked about bikes was The Perfect Bike. That it would be a Mercian was a given. The only question was, what color? Those frames came in like 60 different colors and if they didn’t have the color you wanted, you could send them a sample and they’d match it. We decided the ultimate Mercian would be the Colorado model (exclusive to the U.S., with Reynolds 531 tubing, racing geometry, an all-important lack of rack eyelets, and a 531 SL fork), with white pearl paint, red panels and a red head tube. But the red, we agreed, couldn’t be a candy-apple red because that was taken, being the iconic color of Colnagos like the Russian team had in the Coors Classic. So this would have to a slightly different shade: slightly on the plum or burgundy side, or a Moroccan leather red perhaps. We talked endlessly about this.

As time went on, it became increasingly obvious there would be no repair for my poor old Mercian, and eventually this became irrelevant: at fifteen, I’d outgrown my Pro Miyata and was therefore too big for the old Mercian anyway. Fortunately, at the same time I came into some money. An uncle had died three years before and left my brothers and me a grand each. My mom had wisely locked our money up in CDs earning a whopping 16%, and now, the term being up, she agreed to let me buy a new frame with some of my earnings.

So my mom drove me over to The Spoke, and I marched right up to the counter, where Dave Whittingham happened to be standing. I’d have liked to say something amazing and bold, like “I’m here to buy a new frame and I’ve got shit-stacks of money,” but of course I was too shy and polite. In fact, before I could even open my mouth, Dave said something apologetic like, “Look, I know what you’re going to ask, but I just have to tell you: Mercian can’t repair your frame. I’m sorry I got your hopes up.”

Before I could think of how to respond, he went on, “So because I feel bad, and because you’re good kid, I’m going to let you buy any frame I have in stock at wholesale.” As he said these words his glance drifted toward a row of frames hanging from the wall. Maybe he even gestured, ever so slightly, with his chin. And there, hanging right in front, was a pearl white Mercian Colorado with red panels and a red head tube, 60 cm ... just my size.

I couldn’t believe it. There it was, the frameset of my dreams. I asked Dave to take it down off the wall. The red of the panels is hard to describe. It was lustrous, deep, and unique. It was a beautiful frameset. I looked up at Dave. He had an amused expression, much like the one I’d have years later when, in the Red Light district of Amsterdam, I watched hayseeds from Oklahoma ogling the whores in the display windows.

But before making that frameset mine, I paused and reflected. I was in the catbird seat: a kid with many hundreds of dollars to spend, a sweetheart deal, and several bike brands to choose from. For the first time ever, I got to choose my frameset.

“Wait!” you might be thinking. “This Mercian, it was meant to be! You dreamed of this frame! It’s exactly what you’d already identified as the perfect bike! And clearly it had been made to order, just for you ... a leap of faith by this shop manager! Another brand?! That’s insane!”

And you’d have a point. But remember, I was a teenaged kid. All day every day my friends and I compared bike brands, watched bikes going by, drooled over bike magazines and catalogs, and debated the pros and cons of every make and model under the sun. Which was better, the Colnago Super or the Colnago Mexico? Were Olmos as good as Pogliaghis? Were Californian Masis as good as Italian Masis? Was it sacrilege for a high-end Italian Bianchi to be painted anything but Celeste #227, that milky washed-out green color? And was it even worse for a lower-end Japanese Bianchi—a totally new phenomenon in those days—to be painted Celeste #227? Who made better tubing—Reynolds or Columbus? And where did Bob Jacksons fit in this bicycle pantheon?

And keep in mind, this wasn’t just any purchase. What do teenagers blow their money on these days? Mostly hi-tech stuff, right? Playstations and smartphones? Those are guaranteed to be obsolete in a couple of years anyway. Not so with a bike, now that I was basically full-grown. I might have this bike for years and years, for thousands and thousands of miles. It could be the bike of my life. This wasn’t like buying a consumer good; it was more like buying a horse.

My friends and I loved our bikes like they were family. After a great ride, you’d lean your bike against the wall, gaze at it, and actually sigh with pleasure. I’d even go give it a little pat on the saddle. My bike meant more to me then than a modern teenager could possibly understand. A bike was freedom. My parents never worried about me, so I could ride as far as I want. My pals and I did 80 miles at a shot, day after day (having nothing better to do). Our suntans were asymmetrical from slowly climbing north to Estes Park and quickly descending back south. A friend and I capped off the summer by doing a 130-mile trek over the highest pass in North America. Only a bike could make such an adventure possible. Our bikes were our lifestyle, our identity, our everything.

So: what bike to get? The Spoke carried Olmos, but my brother Max was buying one on layaway and I couldn’t appear to be copying him. I’d never cared for Motobecanes (which all my brothers had had) and the Prolight, Motobecane’s flagship, was rumored to be flex-y. The Specialized Allez was high-end, but it wasn’t Euro. Ah, but The Spoke had Serottas. They sold lots of Serottas.

Timidly, I asked to look at one. Timid? Well, yeah. Obviously it was the Mercian that ought to be my destiny, after all. But Dave had said “any frame.” He graciously took me over to a bright metallic violet Serotta Nova in my size, built up with Campy Super Record. (Back in those days, when all good bikes were road bikes, and when the sales floor didn’t have to accommodate today’s menagerie of mountain bikes, commuting bikes, cyclocross bikes, lifestyle bikes, beach cruisers, and fixies, you wouldn’t believe the deep inventory of kickass road bikes shops could carry, especially in Boulder.)

The deck was stacked against the Serotta, of course, but I had to admit it looked great. Nico, who’d either gone to the shop with me or was there working that day, had to agree. So I took it out.

I hammered away on that bike, taking the corners hard, following the course of The Hill Criterium, one of the big Boulder races. I really put the Serotta through its paces, shoving on the pedals with everything I had. And with a strange mixture of delight and consternation, I realized this bike rode amazingly well ... in fact, possibly better than my Mercian had. It just felt so lively, so quick. I was astonished, and was overcome with the turmoil of deciding what to do.

Maybe, I reasoned, I was just comparing this to the Pro Miyata it was replacing. That Miyata was oddly back-heavy, like the rear triangle had solid tubes or something. From day one I hadn’t much liked it. So I rode back to the shop, borrowed Nico’s Mercian, gave it a good hard test ride, then switched back to the Serotta, then back to the Mercian, etc. I didn’t dare say this out loud, but if anything the Serotta rode better. Could it be the pins the Mercian was built with, that my brothers had taunted me about? No, that’s a dumb gag I just made up. That idea never crossed my mind at the time, and I didn’t kid myself that the difference was a matter of workmanship. Probably the Serotta’s Columbus SL tubeset was lighter than the Mercian’s Reynolds 531. Or maybe the Serotta’s geometry was more aggressive. Maybe it was something else about the bike (lighter wheels?), or maybe I just had a deep-seated, perverse impulse to make trouble for myself.

Quietly, I placed the Serotta back in its stand on the sales floor, next to several other Serottas much like it. And there was the Mercian, up on the counter, standing proud, propped on its bottom bracket and fork tips. And suddenly I had this strange feeling: my tension subsided as it dawned on me what a good problem this was to have. I had money, and I was about to have a new frameset, and whichever I picked, it was going to ride like a dream.

My mom was patiently waiting. I had to make up my mind. I hadn’t ordered that Mercian myself, but it had obviously been ordered according to my specifications. To reiterate, its existence was an act of faith. Teenagers are known for their pure id, but now my nascent superego actually asserted itself: I bought the Mercian. Maybe that was the first truly grown-up thing I ever did.

So did I always regret not buying the Serotta? Did I managed to love the new bike? Of course I loved it. In fact, it ended up becoming, of all the steel frames I ever owned, my second favorite. (And what was my very favorite? Well, that’s another story.)

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From the Archives - It IS About the Bike

Introduction

Seven or eight years ago, the iconic American bicycle frame company Serotta went out of business, and there was some journalistic buzz about its legacy. A friend suggested I write a tribute based on my own love of these bikes. The problem is, I’d owned only one Serotta, and very briefly at that. I’d bought it used, and it had been a broken frame repaired by a guy who was just learning how to braze steel framesets. His novice status was emphasized when his repair failed on literally my first or second ride. So my time with the Serotta wasn’t exactly a love affair … not even a fling, really.

Could I have written about Serottas from some other perspective? Like, the reputation the brand had among my racer friends and me? Well, we did affectionately call them “Scrotums” but that wouldn’t really do for a retrospective piece. So I wrote the sprawling story that follows, which is far from the concise, zippy, fawning paean that was called for. I knew my essay was a doomed effort, almost an f-you to the editor, who didn’t even bother to formally reject it. He just ignored it, perhaps rightly so. (In the event, this eulogy would have been a misstep anyway, as Serotta is back in business.)

Not knowing what else to do with my story, I sent it to the Daily Peloton who ran it in two installments. Oddly enough, their new(-ish?) editor assumed—based on my name—that I was female. That was a bit embarrassing … look:

(I describe the lifelong indignity of having a girl’s name here.)

Anyway, since Daily Peloton’s servers crashed a few years ago and all my articles there were lost, I’m gradually reposting them on albertnet. Read on for my not-really-about-a-Serotta article.

It Is About the Bike – January 2015

It was the bicycle equivalent of sensible shoes: a Miyata 310, the second bike I ever owned. I first saw it in a catalog, upstaged by the Team Miyata and Pro Miyata that were obviously out of my league. The 912, Miyata’s entry-level race bike, was almost within my reach, which gave me pangs. But I was resigned right off to the 310, which I only dared hope I’d get for my 12th birthday. I still remember the catalog description: “Offers the looks and the handling ease of the 912, with a price to fit most budgets.” It cost $265, in 1981. Since my choices were effectively limited to the one bike my mom would pay for, it was really she who chose it. And it was just the beginning.

When I outgrew that bike I sold it, ponied up my life savings, borrowed $250 more from my dad, and bought my first real racing bike. This was my friend Nico’s Mercian. It was practically new. He’d just gotten picked up by a team that gave its riders bikes. Imagine! Mere teenagers getting free bikes! Never mind that these were used bikes (also Mercians) that the senior team had ridden the year before and handed down to the juniors; the cachet of a free bike surely overcame that. Of course, Nico’s old Mercian being the only pro-quality road bike I had the chance to get cheap, I didn’t exactly choose it, either ... no more than I had that Miyata.

The Mercian—my Mercian—was a beautiful bike, possibly the most beautiful I’ve ever owned. (That’s saying a lot: I’ve had over 20 road bikes.) The color was officially called “champagne pearl,” but it was more like—what? Ginger ale? Not exactly. It was the color of a young gazelle, but sparkly. The lettering was pure white, whiter than snow, whiter than the cleavage of a Shakespeare heroine. I loved that bike. Here’s the best photo I have of it. See the guy with the Shaversport jersey and no number? That’s Nico, in the Red Zinger Mini Classic race leader jersey, on the Mercian before I owned it. I’m two guys to his right (#62) on the blue Miyata 310 with the clamped-on water bottle cage.

I’d had the Mercian for only a couple of months when, one night out with Nico, enjoying the warm and the dark and the freedom of riding bikes, we swung into a parking lot that ended up being a lot smaller than expected. I rammed that poor bike right into a curb. I flipped over the bars and landed on grass and was unfortunately totally unhurt. I say “unfortunately” because when I saw that I’d bent my frame—so that the paint on the top tube cracked, and the downtube crinkled—I wished I was dead.

Did my brothers comfort me? Of course not. There were three of them: the twins, Geoff and Bryan (three years older than I) and Max (a year and a half older). They taunted me about my wrecked bike: “Those MUR-shans”—my brothers mispronounced it just to piss me off—“are made with pins, which puts a strain on the tubes and weakens them. The right way to hold the tubes in place is with a jig, but at the MUR-shan factory they use pins because they’re lazy. Any other frame would have handled that crash just fine.” I got so sick of hearing this explanation ... they wouldn’t shut up about it.

Looking back, I can see why my brothers gave me a hard time: it’s because I had a cooler bike than they did. Never mind that I paid for it myself. I’d earned the money through one odd job after another: working for Eco-Cycle (the curbside recycling pickup program); cleaning Laundromats; standing in front of a grocery store handing out flyers for Fiske Planetarium; blanketing the neighborhoods with flyers for Save Home Heat, a solar energy company; installing pipe insulation; timing sailboat races at the Boulder Reservoir; and helping my friend’s mom deliver newspapers. This mattered nothing to my brothers. I had the cool handmade English racing bike that they didn’t, and this was an act of insubordination.

(Would my brothers agree, today, with that last paragraph? Who cares! This is my story ... if they don’t like it they can write their own.)

Finally, to shut them up, I wrote a letter to Frank Berto, the head gearhead at Bicycling magazine. (Among bike nerds, he was something of a celebrity.) I described my size and weight, the speed of the crash, the fact that I hit the curb head-on, and so forth, and asked if the pins caused the frame failure. My brothers swiped the letter and played keep-away with it, reading snatches as they went. Of course they preferred paraphrasing what I’d written: “As I hit the curb, my slight but highly-muscled build holding the bike in a perfectly perpendicularly fashion, a grimace spreading over my face,” etc. It wasn’t enough to mock my bike. They had to mock my prose as well, by resorting to the cheap trick of pointing out absurd descriptions and grammatical errors that didn’t actually exist in my letter.

Well, they could laugh all they wanted because I knew that letter would eventually ensure my vindication. Perhaps they fantasized that I’d get some cheap form letter apologizing that due to the high volume of letters received, not all could be published, etc.

Instead, I got a letter back from Frank Berto himself! I can’t remember exactly how he put it, but his letter conveyed that of course my brothers were full of shit, and that pins are perfectly fine, and that any bike with a light tubeset like that would have bent just like mine did. As an extra bonus, the secretary at “Bicycling” added a little note saying, “Our editor was very impressed that someone your age could write so well. He said, ‘Sign that boy up!’”

Well, I really rubbed my brothers’ noses in it, which felt great. But antagonizing my brothers may have been a poor strategy long-term, as I’ll get to in a bit. The immediate problem was: I had no bike to ride. Dave Whittingham, the manager of The Spoke—the bike shop that imported Mercians into the U.S.—told me Mercian might be able to fix my frame for a couple hundred bucks. Thus began an interminable cycle of my asking him about it every time I went into the shop, which was a lot, and him responding with a hangdog look and an apology. I still can’t figure out why he kept stringing me along with false hope.

Short term, I borrowed another frame from Nico. This was a rose-colored Cinelli. I can’t remember where he got it or why he had it. Looking back, it was probably the coolest, most iconic frameset I ever possessed. It was very old school—and in fact, just plain old. The head tube logo wasn’t the winged “c” they use now, but an elaborate coat-of-arms deal. The lettering was ornate and blocky and vaguely Roman, like something engraved on the tympanum of a coliseum.

The frame was heavy: probably made of primitive Columbus straight-gauge tubing, from the days before butted tubes. This frame may have even dated from the early days when Cino Cinelli himself was in charge and his company produced only 350 frames a year. I had worshipped these bikes for years … in fact, two or three years before, I’d worn a Cinelli cycling cap 24x7. Check it out:

Alas, all the old-world class and pedigree in the world couldn’t make that Cinelli ride as well as my old Mercian. I hate to say it, but the Cinelli was sluggish.

After a few months Nico wanted his frame back and there was still no progress on the fool’s errand of getting the Mercian repaired. It was time to buy a new frame. So my brother Geoff, who had earned a fortune washing dishes at the Flagstaff House restaurant, said he’d loan me the money for a frame if and only if I bought another Miyata. What was I to do, having sassed him with the Frank Berto letter, thus putting myself at his mercy? Tune in next week for the tragicomic denouement of this tale.

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From the Archives - Portrait of the Young Cyclist: Part 5

Vlog

This post is available as a vlog. Put it on the big screen and gather the whole family! Or, fire it up on your phone, add earbuds, and pretend it’s a podcast! Or go old-school and scroll down for the text version! Or do all of these sequentially! Mix-n-match!

Introduction

This post completes the tale, from my archives, of how I became a bike racer. In Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3, I described how my early infatuation with the sport led to actually participating; the disastrous results of that doomed effort; and how even learning how to train failed to vault me to glory, with all my friends easily passing me by. Part 4 recounted significant progress but, alas, more failure. In this post, the series finale, I describe how cycling mediocrity came to undermine my closest friendships.

Portrait of the Cyclist as a Young Man – Part Five: The Final Insult (written in February 2003)

I took out another USCF license after the 1983 Red Zinger Mini Classic and got thrashed soundly in some more races. One was a stage race in Steamboat Springs, which I did with my mini-Zinger friend Aaron Pickett-Heaps. Aaron, fresh off of his second place overall finish in the Mini Zinger, beat my old friend J— in the Steamboat Springs road race. Aaron was pretty casual about this afterwards, apparently considering his placing to be a natural result of his strength and finesse. Here’s a photo of Aaron and me from that race.

To certain UCSF racers, like my friends N— and J—, who made no effort to hide their contempt for the Mini Zinger, Aaron’s attitude seemed audacious. It apparently didn’t occur to him to fall on his knees and kiss the ring, to plead with the patrons of the USCF Intermediate peloton to accept his result as a complete fluke. J— had a decidedly haughty reaction. He practically chewed me out for my association with this Aaron guy, this impostor, this upstart who thinks he’s fast just because of one top-five finish, this bozo who stubbornly refuses to admit that his result meant nothing. It was like J— was daring me to disagree with him.

I didn’t really know how to respond. After all, they were both my friends. I was tempted to just face the music and stick up for Aaron, and then it dawned on me that probably neither of them actually cared what side I was on. After all, who was I? Just a nobody who hadn’t placed high in the race and barely deserved to weigh in. So I kept my mouth shut, despising myself slightly for my disloyalty and cowardice.

I did a few more races without distinguishing myself, then went bike touring in Canada with my mom and my brother Bryan. Right after getting back—it might have actually been the very next day—I raced Mount Evans and got completely destroyed. It was a bad race even by my own humble standards, and at the time it felt, emotionally, like my poor showing had erased all the progress I’d made since 1981.

I hung out with a group of racers from my category after the finish, with everybody but me telling his war story (because I had no other story than “I went straight out the back as soon as the road tilted uphill”). I felt like an outsider, even though several in the group were my friends. Some guy I didn’t know said, “Hey, I don’t want this energy bar … do any of you?” I enthusiastically said, “Yeah!” He just stared at me with utter disgust, like it should have been obvious that his offer didn’t extend to me. He had said “any of you,” but this didn’t include me because, being totally slow and awkward and obviously uncool, I didn’t actually exist. It apparently pained him that I was blind to this reality.

Fortunately, N— and J— practically tripped over each other going to bat for me, which was really cool since they had such high profiles in the peloton. (I think J— had won the race.) Of course they risked nothing by doing this, since their social status was well assured in this group. Still, it meant a lot to me.

Okay, I had a little fun with that last paragraph. It was pure fiction. In reality, both J— and N— just sat there in the awkward silence as this dickhead stared at me contemptuously and I died of embarrassment. I guess I was such a pariah that even these two thought it best just to hang me out to dry. The least they could have done was accept the energy bar and then share it with me. Who knows, perhaps they kind of enjoyed the spectacle. Maybe this was my punishment for eking out meaningless non-USCF ersatz glory in the detestable little Mini Zinger event.

So my third year of racing failed to provide any real success, only more athletic disappointments and this new phenomenon of my friends becoming too good for me. You might wonder why, given all this, I stuck with this cruel sport. I’ve pondered this at length, and I think it simply had to do with cycling giving me rich experiences that were valuable to me irrespective of my race results. For example, I was learning all kinds of new rides, and completing them faster, and hitting higher speeds than ever before. The range of my training rides was ever-growing; for example, Aaron and I did a 130-mile ride over Trail Ridge Road, the highest pass in North America (details here). Sure, my competitors could humiliate me at the races, but they couldn’t ruin the sport for me.

Meanwhile, I knew I could expect to improve dramatically if I ever managed to hit puberty. “Just wait until your hormones come in,” my mom told me. True enough, most of my competitors already had leg and arm hair, visible musculature, and low voices. I was stick thin; my skin was as smooth as a Barbie doll’s; and my voice was like Mickey Mouse’s. It seemed like a pretty good deal to keep at this, knowing that Mother Nature still had something in store for me, a magic bullet I’d one day get, which my competitors had already used.

As for the social aspect, I had a few good reasons to cut my friends some slack. We were of junior high age, after all, when kids are like desperate free-floating atoms hoping to glom on to the right molecule, lest they get dragged into some distasteful compound. You take a talented, charismatic guy like N—: he was a respectable element like carbon. Diamonds are made out of this stuff! He felt he could be part of something cool, like steel. Perhaps he saw me as a much less substantial and more common element like hydrogen … and if carbon mixes with that, you get stinky methane. So I doubted my friends really begrudged me my athletic shortcomings per se. Rather, because I wasn’t fast and thus lacked the social confidence that would have gone with that, I was a social liability. N— and J— were still fairly new to this USCF cohort and you could never be too careful.

Now, acknowledging this was one thing, but I wasn’t going to suck up to them. Bike racing was supposed to be a rebel’s sport anyway, right? All the ball players shunned us; why mimic their snobbery in our own little pond? Instead of falling in line and subordinating myself to my friends—who had once been my social equals, after all—I went my own way.

I’ll share two recollections that illustrate this. First, in the spring I got a new helmet. My old helmet was destroyed when it was run over by my mom’s car. (How it came to be placed right behind the wheel was never explained; at the time I was sure one of my brothers was involved.) My mom was good and pissed off but, being a mom, dutifully drove me to the bike shop for a replacement. Alas, they were all out of the Bell Biker, which was the old standby, worn by virtually everybody in those days (the outliers being the occasional Skid Lid or Bell Prime). All the shop had was the new Bell Tourlite, which was supposed to be fancy but was actually the nerdiest-looking helmet Bell ever made. It had sharp-edged, narrow, stylized vents and a dopey looking visor that extended about an inch and a half and was made of tinted clear plastic.

Plus its name had “Tour” in it, and everybody knew tourists were major dorks. The helmet cost $55 (which was more than the Biker and a fortune in those days), and I knew even at the time that if I made enough of a fuss and/or argued the financial perspective my mom would take me elsewhere and get a Bell Biker.

But somehow, after pondering the knowledge that this Tourlite would offend my friends’ aesthetic and social sensibilities, I decided to go for it. I got it home, read the package insert, and learned that I could remove the visor, which made it a lot less nerdy looking. My brothers, riding me incessantly about my ugly new helmet, begged me to ditch the visor, for the good of the family name. I thought over how this would be a step in the right direction, socially, and … I left it on! Take that, “cool” friends! I dare you to be seen in public with me! I double-dog dare ya!

The first time I wore that helmet, I was riding down the Broadway bike path and saw J— riding up the other way. He stopped dead, and called out. I stopped, and he asked what was with the new helmet. He was horrified. I might as well have had a cartoon penis tattooed on my forehead. I could have pleaded innocence, and talked about how it was all the shop had and that my parents made me get it, but I simply said it was my new helmet. He asked why I didn’t get another Biker, and I just shrugged.

(I did eventually remove the visor, or maybe it broke. You can see the horrible helmet sans visor in the first photo of this post. Look at the raised ridges at the very front: that was so you could ratchet the visor up and down.)

The other example of my mild rebellion was an incident that occurred during a training ride with J— and N— and a couple other guys, on the Morgul Bismark circuit. We saw a lone rider coming the other way. We recognized him as a random Mini Zinger guy none of us knew very well. When he saw us he turned around and, after sprinting to catch up to us, rode right up to me, and said, “Dana, I just wanted you to know that my sister is totally in love with you.”

I was speechless. This announcement hit me like a 50-foot wave. No girl had shown interest in me in years, not since I’d gone to the shed with L— when I was eight. That said, this guy’s statement actually confirmed something I’d already suspected. (I’d met the sister at a Mini Zinger qualifying race, where I’d done well, so I was in my element, feeling more confident and sociable than usual.) And she was really cute. I pondered this information silently for awhile, while the brother became more and more uncomfortable because nobody else was saying anything to him either. In fact, I think I had just enough of a view outside my adolescent girl-pondering haze to detect a bit of the cold shoulder coming from the others. “Anyhow, I just thought you should know that,” he said, and then turned around again and rode off.

We pedaled on for a bit, and then J— rode up beside me and said, “Uh, Dana, I hate to break it to you, but that isn’t a guy we really associate with.” Again, I couldn’t think of anything to say. Who was “we,” anyway? Since when was there a Board of Admissible Cohorts? J—, thinking maybe I didn’t understand, continued, “So you really shouldn’t hang around him.” This almost sounded like a threat. By this time I’d figured out a pretty good defense: I’d actually never hung out with this kid in my life, didn’t even know him, hadn’t encouraged the interaction, and was minding my own business when he decided all on his own to circle around and come tell me about his sister. I could have said all of this, but I was irked at the implication that I should.

I either said nothing, or the 1983 equivalent of “Whatever, dude.” J— seemed a little cool toward me for the rest of the ride (or at least I perceived that he did). I don’t think he appreciated my apparent lack of interest in playing by the new rules, and accepting his role as social gatekeeper. Maybe he thought I was being insolent, refusing to accept his dominant position in our pecking order. Certainly he saw me as drifting dangerously toward being one of those guys “we” don’t really associate with.

In fact, I was drifting in that direction. How far did my drift take me? Well, it is true that J— and N— associated with me less and less. It was perhaps fortuitous that J— and I went to different junior high schools, so he never had to decide whether to be seen with me there. N— kept me at arm’s length and even explained his position, which was that I was just a bit of a “social outcast.” That was the term he used. It become kind of a joke between us, but I was the butt of it. He was a year ahead of me, so in the fall he was no longer at the same school anyway. (Was he himself a big man on campus? Not that I could see, but then I didn’t fancy myself an expert.)

The next year (fall of ’84), I headed to high school where J— would once again be a classmate. We completely ignored each other there, which was weird since we’d been friends since first grade. We literally never even greeted each other in the hallways. We still rode together occasionally, and on one such occasion I lamented the erosion of our friendship. J— replied, “Hey, we’re still friends … you’re like my confidant!” Fair point, but of course the reason he could confide in me is that he no longer cared what I thought of him. He’d moved on.

None of this would have bothered me—I mean, friends do drift apart—except that as far as I could see, nothing had changed except this pecking order within the cycling realm … a realm that nobody at our high school could have cared less about. It really did feel, at the time, like my place in the sport had cost me these friendships.

Epilogue

What you have read above (and in previous installments) is all I managed to finish back in 2003 when I originally wrote this memoir. After that I kind of ran out of steam and felt like the tale was just getting depressing. Notably, things got much better after my fourth year, but that wasn’t a tale I ever felt compelled to tell.

Now it’s time to give you the rest of the story, lest you come away thinking this sport broke me. That was not the case. In fact, it’s truer to say the sport made me.

I kept racing. The next year (1984) was a disaster. I was a bit distracted by my parents’ divorce and changing schools, but I basically stayed at it, doing my first all-UCSF season. In 1985, miracle of miracles, I finally hit puberty, and suddenly all those miles I’d put in over the years suddenly paid off. It was like I’d spent four years winding up a huge spring, and it suddenly sproinged. Lo and behold, I was pretty fast!

I returned to the Mini Classic circuit (it was now a three-stage-race series) and started making the podium regularly. I befriended the winner of the Mini Zinger, Peter Stubenrauch, and he remains one of my closest friends. (We still get together for epic rides, like this one last summer.) I finally found success in the USCF ranks as well. Collegiate racing went even better, in terms of both results and the friends I made. After graduating and joining the workforce, I’ve continued to race here and there, and I never stopped riding. For the last five years I’ve coached high school mountain bike racers in the NICA program.

I’d never had specific goals for this sport (I’m not a big “goals” guy in general, as detailed here), but setting aside the godawful slow and frustrating start you’ve so patiently read about, cycling has been very, very good to me, surpassing anything I could have hoped to get out of it. And actually, those frustrating first years were probably the most important ones of all. After making it through that much failure, I didn’t have much fear … competitively, socially, or otherwise. For me, cycling is not about winning races or being popular. It’s about showing up, riding, staying fit, and never quitting.

In lieu of describing bike racing years 5 through 39, here are some photos and captions.

Horsetooth Mini Classic, 1985, 2nd in the criterium. That’s Peter on the top step.

Red Zinger Mini Classic, 1985, 3rd in the NCAR hill climb time trial. Pete won again; second was David Anthes, who went on to win the Collegiate National Championship road race in 1989.

Red Zinger Mini Classic, 1985, 2nd in the Old Stage road race. David and Pete again. My purple jersey is for the King of the Mountains competition. (Pete was the real KOM but he already had the leader’s jersey, and the race organizers wanted all the jerseys out on the road.) I ended up second overall (behind Pete) and David was third.

Here are a couple of my teammates in the ’85 Zinger. That’s Andy Caplan on the left and Mark Syrene on the right. Funny story: the race director hated me, so after the preliminary qualifying races, he stacked my team roster with riders who’d barely made the cutoff for Division 1. During the two weeks between the prelims and the actual Mini Zinger I took Andy and Mark out for some rides, to get to know them and help shore up their skills where possible. I’d known Andy from swimming so I knew he was a good athlete. They both rode really well in the Mini Zinger and we ended up winning the overall team competition. The next year, the organizers broke the 15-16 age category in two since there were so many riders. Andy landed in one age group, Mark in the other, and they both won their categories!

Pete didn’t race the 1985 Denver Mini Classic, and I won. (I discovered that it felt much more awkward to be on the top step of the podium … my arms seemed too long.) I always assumed Pete’s parents made him skip this race, to leave some glory for the other riders. But actually, as Pete told me recently, his parents just hadn’t felt like driving him to the race. I owe them one!

I don’t have many photos from my collegiate racing years, but I did get this cool award.

In 1990, I was on the UC Santa Barbara team that won the Collegiate National Championship team time trial. Details here.

This is the penultimate switchback on Alpe d’Huez in the 2006 La Marmotte “cyclosportif.” I raced this twice; details are here and here.

At an early season mountain bike race in 2018, I made the podium. This was pleasantly novel … it had been 27 years since I’d last stood on one. Details are here.

The Albany High Cougars team I coached won the Division 2 title for the 2018-19 season. Coaching these kids was a total blast, and I’m happy to note that everyone got along swimmingly … nothing but support, goodwill, and camaraderie.

It’s funny how well I remember that first season as a wannabe bike racer, after so very many intervening years.

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From the Archives - Portrait of the Young Cyclist: Part 4

Introduction

This post continues the tale, from my archives, of how I became a bike racer. In Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3, I described how my early infatuation with the sport led to actually participating; the disastrous results of that doomed effort; and, how even learning how to train failed to vault me to glory, with all my friends easily passing me by. In this post I describe my third season and how my minor triumphs were offset by more salt in the wounds (figurative and actual).

Portrait of the Cyclist as a Young Man – Part Four: Insult to Injury (written in February 2003)

As I described in my last post on this topic, after the 1982 Red Zinger Mini Classic I tried my hand at some USCF races and didn’t really get anywhere. The next year I decided it made sense to race the Mini Zinger again, even if my friends N— and J— had moved on to racing USCF all year. (To refresh your memory, they’d finished first and third, respectively, in the ’82 Mini Zinger, and cleaned up in USCF races for the rest of the season.) Frankly, their absence was part of the appeal: they wouldn’t be around to crush me again and rub my nose in it. (To be fair, I was pretty good at rubbing my own nose in it.) Besides, the Mini Zinger races seemed a bit better organized than the USCF ones. An added bonus is that in the less elite field I could learn some tactics. The 1982 races taught me that strength wasn’t enough and I had a lot to learn. It’s hard to do that when you’re off the back, so why would I want to race USCF all year?

Over the winter I borrowed $750 from my dad and bought N—’s “old” bike, a Mercian Colorado with full Campy. (He’d gotten the pro deal on a fancier Mercian, that matched his teammates’ bikes, and didn’t need this one anymore.) The color of my “new” bike was light brown, which they called “champagne pearl.” It was, more precisely, the color of a perfect young fawn. It was the prettiest bike I’ve ever had. I rode it for a few weeks and then (riding at night without a light) crashed it into a curb, ruining the frame. The down tube got rumpled, the head tube steepened, the top tube creased slightly. Even the fork was bent. I was inconsolable.

My brothers were really sympathetic and rallied around me in my despair. Ha. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha. Of course that’s not true. In fact they gave me endless crap, insisting that the frame was defective and I was a moron to have bought it in the first place. They contended that because the framebuilder had used pins to hold the tubes in place while brazing the frame, instead of using a jig for this purpose, that he’d introduced horrible strains into the structure that caused it to be inherently weak. (For some reason, we were all steeped in this kind of lore and knew for a fact that Mercians were pinned.)

My brothers teased me so much I finally wrote to Frank Berto, the technical guru at Bicycling magazine. I described the scenario in detail, mentioning my weight and size and the approximate speed of the impact, and how I hit the curb in a “perpendicular fashion” (I remember this phrase because I had to look up the spelling on “perpendicular”). Frank, or somebody on his staff, wrote me back directly, assuring me that the frame was not defective, that the pins are a widely accepted way of building a frame, and that any impact of that kind would bend any frame made of such lightweight tubing. The letter went on to praise my writing ability. “Sign that boy up!” he’d written.

Naturally this didn’t satisfy my brothers, who shifted their mockery to my letter, making up quotes like, “As I hit the curb, in an exactly perpendicularly fashion, my lightly muscled body slightly tense, a grimace on my perspiring face….” I guess they were paying me back for buying that Mercian in the first place. I had broken some unwritten rule by having a better bike than any of them did. In any case, I couldn’t borrow any more money from my dad to buy a new frame, so Geoff gave me a loan on the condition that he choose the make. He chose Miyata.

So in 1983 I had a Pro Miyata, which should have thrilled me except it was clearly inferior to the Mercian and I now owed money on two bikes. Still, I had to live up to such a cool bike, so I trained harder than ever, still riding with N— and J— much of the time. That year I made a couple of new friends, Spencer Crouch and Aaron Pickett-Heaps, and put together a Mini Zinger team with the two of them along with John Lynch, the good racer (and good friend) from my first year.

Here’s a photo of Spencer and me. I can’t recall what race this was. Look how great his jersey is. That thing I’m wearing? Not even a jersey. I think it may have been a pajama top. Also, note how suavely Spencer is posing for the camera. That didn’t occur to me. Perhaps I was still unaware that, as a teenager, I was supposed to look cool. Emotionally I think I was still like ten. I was just happy to be around. What an idiot.

Before the Red Zinger proper, the promoters held qualifying races to determine who’d be in Division 2 (the slower group) and who made Division 1. The first qualifier was the Kittredge Criterium, on the University of Colorado campus in Boulder. I went into the race with high hopes, and for the first time ever, things seemed to fall into place. I got into a four-man breakaway and felt like I was the strongest guy in it. In fact, I started to believe I could actually win the race! Then, with just a few laps remaining, I suddenly didn’t feel so well and totally puked. The barf was bright red and went everywhere, scaring the crap out of my breakaway companions. You can see a smear of it on my lip in this photo. (That’s Spencer behind me.)

John and I had eaten a whole bunch of spaghetti for lunch, at his house, right before the race. The sauce was made with ground beef, which I never got at home, and I totally overate. We lost track of time and had to haul ass over to the race. At least we were warmed up, but it would have been great to have digested our food.

So … surprise, surprise, I did not win the race. You may be tempted to infer causality between the vomit and me losing, but there was none, or little. Granted, barfing was distracting, but I felt better afterward. To be honest, the winner, Allen Copeland if I recall correctly, beat me for no good reason. I think when it came down to it I just didn’t have the nerve to win. For someone stooped in failure, with an upbringing based on the cult of inadequacy, victory would have seemed like overreaching. All the same, I was thrilled with my first podium finish (even though, this being a prelim, they didn’t actually bring out the podium).

After that promising start, things got tough again. The more I rode with Aaron, the stronger he got. Same with Spencer, actually, and in fact he bet me $5 he’d beat me in the Mini Zinger. That seemed pretty cheeky because he’d just taken up the sport. But then, this was all par for the course.

So, on to the Mini Zinger. I don’t actually remember that much, other than the podium continued to elude me. Aaron had become super fast and was trading the race leader’s jersey back and forth with this kid named Kevin Smith. Going into the last stage, Aaron trailed by a few points (points being the basis for the Mini Zinger’s general classification, perhaps so a kid could crash out during a stage and start back up again the next day). This final stage was the National Bureau of Standards criterium, an 8-shaped course on a bit of a hill. Thrillingly, I got into a three-man breakaway with Kevin and Aaron, and we seemed destined to stay off. (Kids tended to give up pretty easily in those days, I’d noticed. Until this day, I’d always noticed this from the perspective of the one giving up.)

It started to rain, first soft and then hard. This didn’t bother us a bit, though it’d have bothered me if I’d known better. I’d punctured right before the race and borrowed a wheel from my brothers’ friend Dave Towle. Little did I he realize, he’d glued a track tire to it. That tire surely got great traction on a track, in a velodrome. In the wet? Not so much. Bombing a 90-degree turn on the descent I totally slid out. Game over, man!

I had the good sense to get out of the road before 50 guys ran me over, but then I foolishly slumped on my back on a wet lawn. Somebody summoned the race medics, who went straight to work assessing my injuries. A small crowd gathered, including my brothers, a course marshal, and (I seem to recall) my poor terrified mother, along with a few random spectators with a yen for schadenfreude. The medics seemed to overreact a bit, either because they’d been bored, or because they mistook my shivering for going into shock. Actually, I was just cold, because I was lying in wet grass and had about 2% body fat.

The medics cut my shorts open, which I came to learn is standard procedure for some reason, and as I lay on my back, with all these people looking down at me, I felt my unit fall out from under its flap of lycra so it was in plain view of everybody. I poked it back under there, and for some reason this seemed to my brothers to be damning evidence of my obviously faked injury. They figured that if I had the presence of mind to cover Raulo, I should have been able to get right back up on my bike and finish the race. I suppose a more heroic racer would have done just that, but frankly I was not that heroic racer. I was a thirteen-year-old kid, and it hurt to crash, and when the adults took control of the situation it didn’t occur to me to shrug anything off and get back in the race. I suppose I could have at least told everybody I was okay, but maybe it didn’t occur to me I was okay, at least not at the time.

I was ambulanced to the hospital, and at some point my dad materialized and sat next to my gurney in the ER, helping to fill out the insurance paperwork. He was remarkably cheerful, and he didn’t even take the opportunity to remind me that he’d warned us of this, that the chickens had come home to roost, that my own stupidity had done me in. [If you don’t recall it from Part 1, my brothers and I took up bike racing despite our father having forbidden it on the grounds that, as he put it, “You boys are too stupid to be bike racers. You’ll get yourselves killed.”]

Dad made light fun of the redundant and poorly conceived questions on the insurance form. The form could have simply given a place for the patient or his guardian to write a brief description of what happened, but instead tried to shoehorn him into shaping a narrative out of multiple-choice or short-answer questions. The one I remember best was something like, “Did you/patient encounter an impact with any object?” My dad asked whether I thought “the ground” was an appropriate response. I did. He wrote it down.

Then a doctor or nurse (heck, maybe it was an orderly) came and scrubbed my road rash with a toothbrush. Somewhere there is a photo of this, which would be very handy now because I remember the road-rash as having been the size of an orange. Perhaps I inflated it in the telling so that it became a grapefruit; in any case in my brothers’ telling it started out a tennis ball and in successive retellings became a plum, then a cherry, then a raisin. Ask them today and they’ll probably say I didn’t have any road rash at all. You should totally ask them … they’d love to tell you this story in their own words, especially the part about how I was obviously unscathed because I’d had the presence of mind to cover my male member when it flopped out in front of the hoards of disgusted spectators. I’d be delighted to learn what new, shocking details they’d add to the story now.

So, on the basis of that crash, I dropped from 4th or 5th overall in the Mini Zinger to 7th. I was pretty disappointed, having really thought the podium would be in reach. At least I did beat Spencer, who as you’ll recall had bet me $5 he’d beat me in the general classification. I spent the rest of the summer trying to get him to pay up. Eventually I had to settle for $2 and a little sunglasses leash. (He had an extra.)

But there’s a silver lining! The day after crashing out of that criterium, as I spent the day in bed convalescing, I decided to have lunch brought to me. One of my prizes for the Mini Zinger was a gift certificate at Quizno’s, good for lunch-for-two. I offered J— a free meal if he’d go fetch it. He borrowed my 3-speed and headed out. Well, he was gone a lot longer than I expected, and when he finally returned, he had road rash of his own; the Cokes were pretty much empty; our sandwiches were soaked. On the ride back, going pretty fast despite balancing our lunch (in its cardboard tray) on the handlebars, he’d run over a squirrel and totally stacked. While he was lying there in the bike path, the wind knocked out of him, some typically pro-animal Boulderite stopped to bawl him out for having maimed the squirrel. Shoot, did I say my cloudy Mini Zinger tale had a silver lining? More like pewter or even lead.

To be continued

Check back in a month or so for the thrilling finale: my brave return to the USCF circuit and how my ongoing mediocrity undermined my closest friendships.

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