From the Archives - Portrait of the Young Cyclist: Part 3

Introduction

This post continues the tale, from my archives, of how I became a bike racer. In Part 1 and Part 2, I described how my early infatuation with the sport led to actually participating, and the disastrous results of that doomed effort. In this post (and its companion vlog) I go into what changed when I actually learned about training.

By the way, it appears that not a single photo was snapped of me cycling in 1982. My brothers didn’t race the Red Zinger Mini Classic that year, and my dad wasn’t about to go watch. I mean why would he, when I obviously sucked? My brothers and/or mom might have watched a stage or two, but none among them owned a camera. Since I try to include a photo with every post, here is one from around that time. I’m wearing my “Super Dad” pajama top. Why did it say “Super Dad”? I don’t know. Perhaps my mom got a deal on it because it was obviously too small for any actual dad, and not too many kids are real keen on the “Super Dad” graphic. Incidentally, this pajama met a bitter end when it somehow melted in the dryer. It had puddled up and then hardened into a stiff sheet, kind of like fruit leather.

Update! I found a bike race photo from 1982. I am number 62 in the below shot.

Portrait of the Cyclist as a Young Man – Part Three: The Curse Continues (written in February 2003)

Of all the decisions I’ve made in my life, the decision to keep on bike racing, despite mortifying and utter failure in my first year, on top of my ceaseless failure in all other sports I’d tried, is perhaps the hardest to explain. What could I have been thinking? Given the information I had in front of me, there was simply no reason to go on. It wasn’t like by this point I’d learned a valuable lesson about determination, and commitment, and all those other “values” that would have made for a really good ABC After School Special. I was just a stupid kid, and clung to my bike racer outcast identity despite the fact that any boy of my age plucked at random from any setting could easily have beaten me in any cycling event. Maybe this self identity was too much of a habit to drop. Or maybe I figured my body would catch up somehow, with or without training. (There was some reason to believe this; I was a short, small, frail child, after all.)

There were other reasons I stayed in love with the sport. I got a new bike, having completely outgrown the 24-inch-wheeled Fuji Junior. My mom gave me a Miyata catalog on my birthday, and I was shown the model that my family could afford to buy me at some later date. It was the middle-of-the line 310, with the coveted 1-1/8” wide tires, 27” wheels, working gears, and a really smooth ride. Thrilled as I was at the prospect of one day owning that bike, I was even more enthralled by the bikes we couldn’t afford: the Pro and Team Miyatas, and the 912. I still remember the description of the 310: “Offers the looks and the handling ease of the 912, with a price to fit most budgets.” The 912 was their “entry-level racer,” so the fact that the 310 could share a sentence with “912” suggested my new bike’s raceability. It was a great bike, actually. $265. Light blue, not unlike the Team Miyata, though lacking the flagship’s beautiful golden panels on the head, seat, and down tubes. I loved the 310 even before test riding it at the High Wheeler (aka Thigh Feeler), our favorite shop in town (where all four brothers would go on to work in later years).

I suppose it was a few days after the test ride, though it seemed like months later, that I picked up the bike. Mom wasn’t around that day to drive me, so I rode double on the back of Max’s Univega. It was about six miles, and his seat was just plastic on steel, no padding or even fabric, and I thought my butt would be too sore to actually ride home. We rode back at race pace, and as we sped through the college campus we passed some student who must have felt insulted to be one-upped by little kids, because he jumped on our train. He did pretty well until he failed to negotiate the sharp turn down by Fiske Planetarium, hit the concrete median, and wiped out big time. We stopped to see if he was okay, and this was the first time I saw real road rash up close. I was a bit worried the guy would pummel Max and me, and he was pretty pissed, but he let us go and we completed our glorious ride.

Nine days later I rode my new Miyata to the Morgul Bismark stage of the Coors Classic. By this time, my brothers and I were even further along than we’d been the year before in our appreciation of the sport. The hottest talk about this race concerned the dominant Russian team, famous for their Olympic success. At age 12 I could not only pronounce, but probably spell (though not in Cyrillic), “Sergey Sukhorutchenkov”. Sukho was the leader of the Russian team that dominated the Coors that year. Somehow it didn’t matter to us that Greg LeMond actually won the overall stage race. What we remember was that three or four of the Soviets, in their badass plain red Lycra jerseys (well, one guy in the blue KOM jersey), took LeMond out that day and worked him over, had him on the turnbuckles for the whole day.

I didn’t understand that by failing to drop him, they actually lost the bigger race. All I grasped was that a strapping Russian guy, Yuri Barinov I believe, won the stage in style, arms in the air but bent 90 degrees at the elbow, kind of a constrained victory salute, with his vaguely sinister grin, and I remember LeMond looking beaten and downcast as he rolled over the line. Okay, maybe these weren’t Europeans per se (and my knowledge of geography, it must be pointed out, was crummy), but the point was, this just wasn’t an American sport, and Americans even lost (or seemed to lose) on home soil. And this seemed right and good to me, appealing perhaps to my backlash against anything normal and upright, such as patriotism.

The other thing I remember about that July day in 1981 was that my new bike got stolen. I wanted to die. I was so upset I didn’t go to the North Boulder Park criterium, the final Coors Classic stage, the next day. My brothers and their friend Thaine did, though, and managed to recover my bike. The thief, a fourteen-year-old, was arrested. It’s a long but not that interesting story. (At one point I told a fanciful version involving a police raid, replete with K9 dogs, on the guy’s house, but the real events were doubtless much more boring and squalid.)

I think I would have ended up never improving at cycling except that in fall or winter of 1981, my best friend J—, who was a nerd like me but did pretty well in the longer Track & Field events at school, decided to become a bike racer. He got a bike identical to mine and started getting me to go out for training rides. I never would have trained otherwise. Even if I had understood the link between training and getting strong, it would have been for naught because I was incredibly lazy. Even when I was made to swim for years and years, dragged to practice every single day, I never worked hard. I guess it was a defect of some kind. As soon as my mom let me quit swimming, I quit that and virtually all other activity. I think I started watching TV at that time. Cartoons, Star Trek, even game shows. I wasn’t a complete nothing, I guess; I read, too, and for a period read for several hours a day. But athletically I was a non-entity.

Cycling was a particularly poor choice of sport for me given its lack of coaching and structure. J— saved me from a childhood of physical sloth. It may be that the first ride I did with him was the first bona fide training ride of my life. I remember the phone call. He was absurdly enthusiastic: “Hey, you wanna ride out to Eldorado Springs with me?” It sounded terribly far away. I’d never been there. I asked my mom if I could go, hoping that she’d say no. But of course she said yes. What could I do? I was supposed to be the big shot racer, after all. So we rode.

I don’t remember the ride all that well; most likely I tried to assume the role of wily old veteran, coaching J— the whole way, but if he didn’t figure it out on that ride, he must have realized within a few more that I had nothing on him. He was probably out-climbing me right off the bat. His willingness to train was not the main reason behind his superiority: he was also very talented. But he dragged me out day after day, and for the first time in my life I gradually became fit. Before long we were riding the Morgul Bismark circuit, which is hard enough that to this day the thought of riding it fills me with a kind of dread. The first few times we rode, we got kind of a late start because he lived a 15- or 20-minute walk from school. So to expedite things, we adopted a system whereby we’d walk to my house together, get my bike, and ride double over to his house to get his. I think this became such a routine we never even discussed whether we’d ride or not. After school we just went. When a big snow came, we kept to our routine but did cross-country skiing to stay in shape. He had the skis, boots, and poles; my contribution was a ceramic jug we’d fill with Celestial Seasonings tea.

The following spring, my junior high school, Baseline, had a program called BLAST, which stood for Base Line Activities Students Teachers. Every Wednesday for a month, the students and teachers would get a half-day, and would do a specific chosen activity instead of classes. These activities ranged from bowling to Hebrew language lessons to restaurant touring, and of course I chose cycling. By this time I was pretty strong, one of the strongest in the group. The strongest was D—, a really nice guy with a kind of crappy but very Euro bike, a Gitane I believe. He was a couple years older. There was another kid, skinny like me, but not as fair skinned and with black hair, by the name of N—. He was only a year ahead of me. He had a nice red SR Semi-Pro, with Campy shifters (a popular and affordable, if pointless, upgrade). He was a newcomer to the sport, though, I could tell: he wore full-finger gloves despite the 80-degree heat. I don’t think he knew how to draft, which I’d learned recently from my brother Geoff. (Geoff and I went on rides together and he’d make me stay just an inch off his wheel; to remind me how close I needed to be he would hold his hand back behind him, fingers held an inch apart, and if I didn’t do it right he’d drop me.)

The first time I rode with the BLAST group, I stayed on D—’s wheel and we dropped N—. The second time, one week later, N— kept up. The next time, he and D— dropped me. Probably by the last BLAST ride, N— was dropping D—. I don’t know: I was too far off the back to see what they were up to. This, after what happened with J—, began a pattern I would see for years and years: I’d meet somebody, get him excited about cycling, and then he’d pass me up on the way to greater things.

That year I came to the Mini Zinger much better prepared. I must have grown a bunch, because I fit my much larger bike pretty well. Of course the main difference was that I was physically fit, and knew how to draft, and could shift properly, and even had some basic suffering skills. The first event was the Boulder Mall Criterium; it was a qualifying race a week or two before the Mini Zinger proper, to determine which of the two divisions each rider would be put in. There was a good crowd, and a photo finish camera, and I was completely amped up.

From the gun I went straight to the front, just like my brother Max had done the year before, but instead of having a suspicious mechanical problem after a few laps, I was able to keep up the speed, lap after lap. For about five laps in a row I was on fire, feeling like God, leading the race. I was right at the very front, every lap. And I knew what was going on! It was absurdly simple: nobody was ahead of me, and everybody was behind me. If anybody wasn’t close behind me, that person didn’t matter, just like I hadn’t mattered the year before. All I had to do was hold this position, and I would win the whole race!

Of course it dawned on me, eventually, that I couldn’t stay at the front forever, and that every single guy behind me was benefitting from my draft, and that I would need somebody else to take the lead. But I couldn’t get anybody to do it. I’d move to one side, and the rest of the pack moved right along with me. So finally I slowed up just a bit . . . the horror! A huge long line of racers went streaming by. I felt like Wile E Coyote when he looks down and realizes he’s walked off the edge of a cliff and is standing on thin air. The pack had simply used me, taken advantage of a strong but dumb guy, and now it was all I could do to find a place in the pack. I finished somewhere between tenth and fifteenth—a huge improvement over the previous year, but the guys I trained with, N— and J—, finished first and second, respectively. I rode home by myself, bound and determined that I would never attempt anything again, ever.

There was more to embitter me that year, too. I’d assembled a great team for the race, consisting of N—, J—, myself, and a kid named G—, who’d finished second the year before. (Was there a fifth rider? I can’t remember.) I even lined up our sponsor, Fiske Planetarium, where my brothers’ friend’s dad was the director. We were to be called the Fiske Flyers, and would be in contention for the overall team title. It hadn’t been easy figuring out who our fourth guy should be, and it took all the assertiveness I could muster to approach G—, a complete stranger. Everything was perfect, until the race directors, led by Eric Sandvold, decided after the preliminary races that our team was too good, and so he split us up. He kept J—, G,— and me together, but put N— on a different team. I was pretty mad about that, but at least I was still paired with my best friend.

But almost right away, J— and N— had a private conversation following which N—, right in front of me, phoned the race promoter, Eric Sandvold (a teenager himself) and negotiated a change so that he and J— could be on the same team. It bugged me how syrupy sweet and glib he was on the phone, and it bugged me even more how utterly confident he was, like he and Eric went way back (though they didn’t) or like N—  was a made man with no chance of being turned down. It seemed like he did the phone call in my presence just to show off, and perhaps to rub my nose in it.

So I lost both of my best teammates, and endured a major smack in the face: because N— was faster, J— preferred to be on his team, even though J— had been my best friend for years, and though I’d started him in the sport and put the whole team together in the first place. I was left with only G—, who was plenty strong but crashed in about half the stages. The team with N— and J— on it won the overall, and my team wasn’t even in contention. I ended up finishing eleventh overall, and endured a lecture from my brothers about how I lost due to my own stupidity.

Later that year, we all got USCF licenses and N— and J— were recruited to the Flatirons Velo Club and got cool jerseys and bikes at cost, and went on to win many races. I continued to lose, and my only consolation was one race when J— crashed out and cried in front of his mom afterward. She was visibly embarrassed, and told him it wasn’t that big a deal, that there would be other races. He sobbed that it wasn’t the loss of the race that was making him cry, but that he was in pain. I knew this was a load of BS. He was crying because he couldn’t stand to be out of the limelight even for an afternoon. But what about me? I was training plenty, on my own, now, but it seemed I would never see the limelight at all. So even the pleasure of seeing J— getting peroxide in his wounds and bawling in front of his mom was short-lived. For me, bike racing was still largely a depressing thing.

To be continued

Check back in a month or so for the next installment: how I learned the ropes, endured another tragedy, hurled in a race, and suffered other indignities.

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From the Archives - San Francisco Grand Prix Spectator’s Eye View - Part II

Introduction

My last post was part one of an old Daily Peloton story from my archives (it is alas, not in their archive anymore). This week I give you part two. I left off describing how a bike race announcer has the difficult job of amping up the crowd and making the complicated sport accessible to non-fans. Here I pick up that thread again.

San Francisco Grand Prix: A Spectator’s Eye View Part II – September 14, 2003

Michael Aisner, together with Jeff Roake, did a splendid job announcing the San Francisco Grand Prix from the finish line along the Embarcadero. It’s not an easy job, but they managed to keep the crowd engaged during the long spells between laps, explaining the tactics of the race as they unfolded, and providing interesting tidbits such as the role of the team car and of the Mavic neutral support. In what seems to be a tradition, they had longtime cycling fan Robin Williams get up on the stage for some impromptu comedy: “Look for me, riding with Team Viagra. You’ll see in the team poster that not many of the bikes have kickstands. There’s a reason for this.”

But the better race commentary gig was at the top of Taylor Street, where another announcer, Dave Towle, had his station set up. Here, the crowd was at least half a dozen deep all the way down the hill, and was curb to curb farther up Taylor beyond the point where the course turns left. The upward block of the street is like a natural set of bleachers, except that these spectators were content to stand for four and a half hours.

Dave and I go way back—we grew up together in Boulder, Colorado, where he still lives—so it was with particular enjoyment that I watched him stoking the coals of the throngs of fans. It sure didn’t hurt that his own enthusiasm was off the charts—I’ve never seen anybody yell into a microphone at a bike race before—but he also knew the right buttons to push. He sensed that the crowd’s awareness of its own power was one such button. “If I yell, ‘Okay, Taylor Street, let’s give it up for these racers, show ‘em what you can do,” he explained, “I can bring their volume from here” (hand held, palm down, at chest level) “to here” (hand above head). “Of course, you can only go to that well so many times.”

Dave doesn’t stop with the spectators: he also works to motivate the racers themselves. Lap after lap he led the crowd in cheering on Jason Lokkesmoe, reminding them that this was a young neo-pro from Oakland on Health Net, a local team. Dave was convinced that for Jason to hear his own name must have motivated him. “Think about it,” he told me. “When you hear your name over the loud speaker, time and time again, you start to believe that the entire crowd, the entire world, is focused on you. And how could you not dig just a little deeper, knowing that?”

Dave explained the need to gradually build a crescendo as the race develops. “If you’re telling them on lap three that you’ve never seen anything so amazing in your life, what are you going to tell them on lap six? There are only so many times in a day you can be the most amazed you’ve ever been in your life. These guys are going to think, man, this guy amazes easy. What, did he just get out of prison?”

The highlight of Dave’s announcing was when he spotted his fellow Boulderite Trent Klasna, who earlier in the race had done major work for his Saturn team, then had dropped out, and now had changed into street clothes and was strolling the course. (To even recognize a cyclist in regular garb is something of a feat; earlier in the day Lance Armstrong rode right through the start/finish area in civvies, having dropped out as well, and just about nobody noticed.) Dave jumped at the opportunity to collar Trent and ask him a few questions, to give the crowd some insight from a cycling expert who’d sized up this field from within less than an hour before.

“Trent, right now Saturn has two riders in the group: Chris Horner and Mark McCormack. Mark is the better sprinter. I predict that if it comes down to a bunch sprint, Chris will lead Mark out. What do you say?” Trent grinned and assured Dave that it wouldn’t come down to a bunch sprint. And indeed on the final lap, Chris Horner crested the Taylor Street climb all alone, on his way to a dramatic victory. Thousands of fans had just witnessed a prophet in action. Even off the bike, Klasna came off as a most impressive cyclist.

Naturally, any race announcer is subject to the limitations of his material. If a race isn’t tight enough, no announcer in the world can inject it with suspense. But when a rider tries something bold, a good announcer can help the crowd enjoy it. Today was an interesting one in that Horner’s victory was far from expected, even though he is by many standards the winning-est rider in the domestic cycling scene. For a time it really looked like Jason Lokkesmoe was going to sew up the race. He had an amazing ride, starting out in a group of five that dwindled until it was just Jason and the huge German Rolf Aldag, both clearly giving it everything they had. But the race was very, very long. Surely there must have been a point when Lokkesmoe’s s effort seemed quixotic even to himself. Maybe he stayed out longer, even when he knew he was doomed, just to put on a good show.

Showmanship is not only a matter of riding fast. I well remember the Killians team in the Coors Classic who (unlike their sponsor) hailed from Ireland. I was a young fan, by no means an expert on the rules of the race, but had been convinced ever since the early 1980s that these guys were cut some slack on the time cuts because they were so popular with the crowds. So today I challenged Aisner on this point. “It might have been,” he said cautiously. “I don’t remember what the circumstances were but it wasn’t just at face value ‘we let them back in  [after missing a time cut].’ But they were crowd pleasers, they did all sorts of stuff. [Killians rider] Alan [McCormack] had a ... squirt gun, he would shoot other racers in the pack. There was one year when Paul [McCormack, Alan’s brother and teammate] was off the back of the criterium in North Boulder Park and he had an umbrella that had ‘Killian’s’ on it. He had it open, he was racing with an open umbrella over his head. But these guys weren’t just for show either. Alan won, he won a ton.”

I asked about Davis Phinney, who had enchanted me as a kid through his pantomime of a clerk punching the “SALE” button on a cash register every time he won a prime. Aisner replied, “Davis was flavorful and he was a double whammy because he also delivered and he had this huge sense of self-confidence, and though many loved it, others liked to see him lose, but either way [these fans] were out there.... A sport thrives on the combination of both of those, those who simply excel and those that can bring more than just cycling to the table.”

Oddly, American cycling may be, from the standpoint of spectacle, a victim of its own maturity. There was an unpolished, youthful exuberance to domestic cycling in the 1980s that at its best was Phinney’s cash register and at its worst was Alexi Grewal tearing his 7-Eleven jersey down the middle as he crossed the finish line in first. Either way, it was a wild show. Since that time the phenomenon of the American cycling professional has steadily developed. Lance is now expected to win the Tour de France, whereas Phinney’s first Tour stage win was a shock to everybody. As they have adapted to the European sport, these American riders seem to have adopted its culture and tradition, which isn’t given to theatrics (beyond the traditional victory salute, of course). This modern professionalism may make it harder for the American spectator to connect with the cyclists.

For example, this morning I watched the women’s field assembled a couple of hundred feet behind the start line. I could sense the tension in that group, especially in the half dozen front-runners waiting about six feet ahead of the rest of the group. Clearly they understood the importance of this race. Handled properly, this excitement can be a huge benefit to a racer, but there’s no benefit to showing your competitors how nervous you are. I know from my own racing days that when my head was right, the pre-race feeling was one I think of as “frothy”—my own coinage, based on the image of a champion racehorse that is literally champing at the bit to start a race, has whipped itself into a lather of sweat, and must be calmed by the jockey or the trainer. To feel frothy, but not to show it, is  admirable—a result of experience and discipline. The problem is, to the untrained eye it just looks like somebody who just isn’t taking the race very seriously.

The women I watched today didn’t just have poker-faces; they were joking around with each other like this was a social event. If you saw this on TV, you wouldn’t have felt the real tension there. But there was an odd moment when the announcer had just run down the impressive bio of Mari Holden, and was about to announce her name to summon her to the line, when his microphone suddenly cut out. For several awkward seconds, all was silent. Then I heard Mari whisper to Jessica Phillips, “He forgot his lines.” Jessica laughed loudly, but it wasn’t the hearty laugh of somebody truly amused; it had the tense quality of somebody laughing to bleed off nervousness, a venting laugh, like that of someone watching the tasteless over-the-top comic violence in “Robocop.” Eventually the crowd got tired of waiting for the announcer and yelled out, “Mari Holden!” and she pedaled to the line.

There are other ways a non-savvy spectator can misread a bike race. For example, a strong performance made as a sacrifice to a teammate can make a good rider look bad. A cycling aficionado knows that when a great rider crosses the line in fiftieth, it’s probably because he led out his teammate and his job ended 200 meters from the line. But to the casual spectator, it just looks like a guy who isn’t that strong. I looked for Tim Larkin in the main bunch at the top of Taylor Street on the last lap today, and while he was still in contact, he was right on the back and looked pretty fried. Afterward, I asked what happened and he explained that a group of eight made it off the front of the main pack before the Taylor Street climb, and because his teammate was climbing better than he was today, Tim gave everything to drag him up to the group. As so often happens, this move galvanized the rest of the pack, and everything came back together, making Tim’s work for naught. But had he not done it, that group may indeed have stayed off. Tim likely changed the outcome of the race, but not in any way that made him look good. How many similar scenarios played themselves out today, unappreciated by the fans? Probably dozens. And when a rider blows up badly enough to lose contact with the group, there is nowhere to hide.

Whether this experience is mortifying to the struggling athlete all depends on the crowd. This sport has the unfortunate characteristic of looking far easier than it is, so the uninitiated onlooker may not sympathize with the rider. But if the energy is right, a bicycle race brings out the best in people: the crowds that turn out cheer on every guy, even the ones who get dropped, because after all they’re out there pedaling their hearts out.

It’s a wonderful thing about cycling: even though it’s very much a team sport, it’s not just two teams, one of which you hope wins. No riot ever broke out at a bike race because CSC beat Telekom. Ages ago, I watched TV coverage of unruly Denver Broncos fans who pelted their own team with snowballs because they were losing so badly. These were not people who stumbled onto a football game in progress—these are people who paid good money for a seat. They’re supposed to be the loyal ones! I can’t imagine such an attitude from bike race spectators, who are watching for the entire spectacle, not out of a tribal instinct to support their home team. This is true of seasoned fans as well; consider all the French people who camp out a full week in advance to watch the Alpe d’Huez stage of the Tour de France, even though a Frenchman hasn’t won there since Bernard Hinault in 1986.

Granted, such devotion to the sport is far greater in Europe than in the U.S., but in San Francisco today it was easy to imagine that gap quickly decreasing. Today the magnanimity of the spectators was on full display. They didn’t have to be experts on race tactics—not when they were watching on Taylor Street. They recognized extreme depths of human suffering when they saw it. Lokkesmoe ended up struggling over the Taylor climb solo, well off the back, today, but the crowd hadn’t forgotten his earlier glory, and screamed their lungs out for him.

Of course the fans cheer on the superstars like Lance Armstrong, but perhaps no more enthusiastically than they cheer for the poor sods who are way off the back and just trying to keep their bikes going. You can see how the cheering animates the riders, too: about half way up a climb, just as one of these guys is about to grind to a halt, you see a little sheepish grin appear on his face, maybe he shakes his head a little, then gets out of the saddle and shoves a little harder. The crowd responds to this, cheers louder, the process repeats, and like a slow-motion hockey puck the guy is gradually buoyed up the hill, lap after lap. It’s like watching a butterfly smash against your windshield, and then—like a cartoon of some kind—unfold itself, try its wings, and fly off again.

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A Tribute to Steve Tilford

Introduction

This post is a tribute to the late cyclist and blogger Steve Tilford.  I have a tale of his to share, which I wrote down shortly after hearing him tell it a decade ago.  It’s the kind of amazing story he’d have eventually told on his blog, if only.  If only.

Steve was tragically killed in a car accident this past week.  Friends and fans are reeling.  Fans include not only those who have followed his decades of cycling exploits, but those who have enjoyed his popular blog, stevetilford.com.  He was one of my cycling heroes as a teenager, and I’ve enjoyed his blog for years.

Getting to meet Steve

I met Steve only once, at a Coors Classic bike race reunion held at University Bikes.  (I snapped the above photo that night.)  The occasion was a party that longtime Coors Classic director Michael Aisner threw to celebrate the release of a DVD set—all the original Red Zinger and Coors Classic movies.  Aisner opened the party to the public and it felt like everybody in Boulder was there.  Afterward, he invited my brother Max and me along to get some pizza and beer with Steve Tilford, Steve’s partner Trudi, Todd Gogulski, and a few others.

We lingered for hours swapping bike race stories, until the busboy was practically vacuuming under our feet.  Steve’s stories were particularly good because for one thing, he was a natural-born storyteller, and for another, some of his stories were totally new.  This was a guy who never stopped racing, and whose everyday life was like some crazy story.  For example, just four days before this night, he’d been in a cyclocross race and veered off-course, rolled out onto a frozen lake, watched in horror as the ice broke, became completely drenched, and yet climbed back on his bike and raced six more laps—his hands totally frozen and unable to work his bike’s shifters—and won the race!  (Steve’s account is here; the cyclingnews story is here.)

I was planning a freelance article about the Coors Classic party, so I wrote down the best of these stories the next morning, as close to verbatim as I could get.  Some of them are on Steve’s blog, like this one about bunny-hopping a stream at 60 mph during the Milk Race, a huge stage race in Great Britain.  On his blog, Steve wrote, “I have millions of stories from my time in England. I could do a month of posts on them.”  I wish he had!  But this wasn’t a guy who lived in the past—he had too many new things to blog about.  Thus, my favorite of his stories isn’t on stevetilford.com, so I’m going to share it here as a tribute.

(I feel as though I have Steve’s permission, because I asked him that night if I could recount his stories in my article.  He said sure, and joked, “You can even make stuff up if you want—just make me look good!”)

Steve’s story

Here is Steve’s story, presented just as I heard it, to the best of my recollection.  It’s about the 1985 Milk Race:

It’s the last big stage of the race and the last chance for somebody to win the race away from us.  We’re really worried about the Russians, who are supposed to be really fast on the hills, but when we get to the first big climb they all just get dropped.  I said to Andy Paulin, look, the Russians are all dropped!  And of course he’s a huge guy so it’s not like we were going that fast.  We get to this descent and are just flying down it, and when we come around this curve some guy is coming at us with his car.  Andy hits the car and just goes flying.  I figure he’s probably dead. 

Now, everybody says I laid my bike down on purpose so the crash wouldn’t be so bad, but that’s not really what happened.  When you break a leg and a collarbone, it’s not because you crashed gently.  I go sliding under the car and stop when my bars get stuck between the ground and the bumper.  I’m pretty f---ed up but I know it could be worse.  So when they put me in the back of the ambulance I can tell I’m about to lose consciousness, it’s like a black tunnel is collapsing over me, and I look up at Trudi and say, “What about Andy, is he gonna live?”  She says, “Oh, yeah, he’ll be fine.”  Now I’m slipping away but before I do I’m like, “Wait—what about me?”  But it’s too late, I don’t even get to ask.

            So they take me to this tiny hospital in the middle of nowhere where every other patient is an eighty-year-old man, and at first I’m stoked because I’m this young American guy among all these good looking English nurses.  I’m getting these nice sponge baths and everything, but then they tell me the doctor only comes once a week!  I’m pretty sure my leg is broken but all I’m getting is sponge baths.  Finally the doctor comes and tells me, yeah, it’s broken, and I’m looking forward to the plaster cast, but instead all I get is a nurse wrapping it in an Ace bandage!  Even so, I made out better than Andy.  He was at the other hospital and got sick of being there, so he just left, only to pass out at a train station that afternoon.  He made his way back to the hospital, but they wouldn’t let him back in!

Further reading

Here are a few links to Steve’s blog featuring (or mentioning) the Milk Race:

The British Milk Race

I Don’t Bounce So Well Now

One of the Coolest Race Moves I Ever Made

A close friend of Steve Tilford’s, Vincent, is maintaining the blog, providing news in the aftermath of this terrible accident, and offering friends a way to share their own stories.  You can click here for details, and visit the main site, stevetilford.com, for the latest updates.

The Best Advice I’ve Received

Introduction

The final page of this month’s Southwest Magazine is a column called “One Question.” The question—“What’s the best advice you’ve received?”—was directed toward Hilary Duff.  Her reply ran 73 words, of which 62 had just one syllable.  Including this sentence I’m already at 52 words, with only 29 one-syllable words.  This is why Hilary Duff gets to be published in a magazine and I don’t.  Perhaps it helps that she’s an attractive actress whose photo deserves to take up 3/4 of the page.

Since I can’t be an attractive actress or published writer, I’ve decided to comfort myself by answering the One Question myself, but better.  “Better” in this context means “more words, bigger words, and no photo.”  If that’s not enough to keep you reading, here’s another hook:  I didn’t even follow the advice I’m about to cite.

The advice

The best advice I ever received was, “You don’t need to go to college.”  I did go to college, and I would advise each and every high school kid to attend college if he possibly can.  So why do I appreciate this advice?

Let’s back up and look at the mindset I had when I received this guidance.  It was the 1980s and I was a teenager in Boulder, Colorado (where everybody was middle-class or higher, well-educated, and white).  The conventional wisdom was that if you went to college you would get a white-collar job and be happy and successful.  Oh, and we were generally encouraged to attend the best college we could.

Contrast this to the mindset of what appears to be the typical teenager today in my kids’ demographic (Albany, California; middle class or higher; well-educated; white or Asian).  The conventional wisdom here is, “If you ever get a single B in high school you will never get into a decent college and you will have NO FUTURE, and by the way, grades aren’t enough so you should be taking at least four or five AP classes and also doing all kinds of extracurricular activities that will look good on your application, but no matter what you do you’re probably doomed and will never go to a top college and you’ll never achieve the standard of living your parents now provide for you, you miserable wretch.”

Okay, that’s not entirely fair.  I don’t think our current crop of teens uses the word “wretch.”

The matter of perspective

As a teenager, I appreciated the odd “skip college” advice because it opened the door, just a crack, for an alternative point of view.  Of course it helped that this point of view came from a successful person.  Obviously if a homeless dude gave me that advice, it wouldn’t mean a thing.  But by “successful” I don’t just mean “has a nice house in Boulder and some cool toys like an actual Model-T Ford that actually runs, an actual NASA space suit, a cool working jukebox, a working parking meter, and an immaculate 1950s Pontiac 8 car with fins and chrome and an in-line 8-cylinder engine so the hood goes on for days.”  By “successful” I also mean “has a really wild career that he obviously loves.”

The person dispensing this advice was Michael Aisner, who at that time was the director of the Coors International Bicycle Classic, which was the biggest, most important cycling stage race ever held in this country (and which to date has never been surpassed).  I’m going to throw in a caveat here:  I won’t put words in Mike’s mouth and claim that he’d still give this advice today (though I suspect he would), and I’ll add that he wouldn’t necessarily have given this advice to just anybody (though I suspect I wasn’t a special case).

I got to know Mike because I worked as a volunteer for his race—not just when it was going on, but year-round at their headquarters in Boulder, Colorado—“the race office,” as we all called it.  I wouldn’t say I worked as an intern, though I suppose that’s what I was, because at that time I’d never heard the word “intern,” and had no idea that volunteering your time at a company would “look good on your college application.”  If you’d asked me at the time what this job would do for my college prospects, I’d probably have  just shrugged, or said, “I guess it slightly damages my college prospects since I’m so distracted from my schoolwork.”  I volunteered at the race office because it was a cool place to hang, and there were great people there, and I would get to use a computer, and figured I’d learn a lot.

My perspective going into that job was thus fairly compatible with Mike’s.  He just took it up a notch by suggesting that if you like to work, and you are surrounded by great people, and you learn a lot, and you just keep that up, you’ll eventually start getting paid, and will go on to have a fulfilling career, and it would be pointless to halt this progress in its tracks to go sit in lecture halls for four years and incur a bunch of debt.

A couple of paradoxes

Here are a couple of paradoxes introduced by what I’ve written so far.

First, Mike himself did go to college.  (Did he graduate?  I’m not sure … when I asked him he laughed and said, “Do you know you’re the first person who’s ever asked me that?”)  The point is, he’s had this great and diverse career history based on his ability to execute, not his formal education.  Working in his office, which had no walls and no cubicles, I got to hear him in action, mostly on the phone, and probably learned more about business than if I’d studied it in college.  (I’m tempted to apologize here to any business majors who might be reading this, but who am I kidding?)

The second paradox is that I didn’t follow Mike’s advice—I did go to college.  I ignored his advice for two reasons.  One, I didn’t have the balls to believe what he was telling me.  I felt in my very bones that without a college degree, I’d never amount to anything, no matter how inspiring his example was. (I’m still glad I have that degree, even though my most important mentor, in my current career, dropped out of college because he couldn’t bear to leave a great internship at the end of the summer.)

The second reason I went to college is that even then, I loved literature and I loved writing.  Studying English for four years under brilliant professors was something I wanted to do for its own sake.  I recognized even at the time that this was a departure from the typical results-oriented mindset that would have me studying engineering or business.  I was prepared to accept that my major wouldn’t automatically lead to good career prospects.

Why Mike’s advice was so good

What made Mike’s advice so good is that it conveyed a simple but evasive message:  there are many paths to success.  This is true even with conventional notions of success (e.g., big money, big house, cool toys, respect and prestige).  I’ll concede that college is probably more important to one’s prospects than it was a generation ago, but Mike’s basic idea still holds true:  the path everybody assumes is mandatory—that is, Perfect grades à AP classes à extracurriculars à great college à great career à happy life—isn’t the only path, never was, and never will be.  While I didn’t follow Mike’s specific advice, his overall message may have emboldened me to choose the major I wanted, and worry about my prospects later.

I try to pass along this wider perspective to my daughter Alexa, who’s in high school now, but she won’t listen.  After all, my cred as an alternate-path happy person is ruined because I graduated summa cum laude from a great college.  Nor does it seem to matter that I took an alternate path to get there:  my high school grades weren’t good enough for Berkeley, so I went to UC Santa Barbara for a couple years and transferred in later.  She counters that it’s harder to get into good colleges now, and you practically have to have perfect grades even to get into UCSB.  (I have no idea if this is true.)

The problem, I think, is her peer group.  These are high-achieving nerds (a lot like I was at that age, except higher-achieving and more socially comfortable, because nerds are cool now).  But evidently somebody is feeding them doom-and-gloom scenarios involving the necessity of perfect grades, the importance of AP courses and extracurriculars, and the implication that any deviation leads to being a hopeless miserable wretch.

Why should this be?  In general, the parents in my community don’t preach this perfection-or-else paradigm.  A number of my fellow parents went to non-elite colleges and more than a few like to laugh about what screw-ups they were in high school.  That said, the parents of some of Alexa’s friends came here from other countries, had to work really hard and make serious sacrifices to get here, and never had the luxury of growing up in Boulder and just assuming everything would work out fine.  I can’t fault their perspective, but I also can’t compete with it, because it’s easier to apply pressure than to remove it.

The best advice I can give

One of the great things about Hilary Duff’s column is that, in just 73 words, she not only passed along her mother’s advice (“do as much as you can in one day”), but turned it on its head with contrapuntal advice of her own (“I’ve learned the importance of stillness”).  So I’ll try my hand at dispensing advice, too.

The best advice I can give is “Take on a hobby that is fun but competitive.”  The point of this hobby isn’t to “look good on a college application,” but to learn how to stare failure in the face instead of trying to avoid it all the time.  As a recovering bike racer, I’ve had to accept failure hundreds of times, which has really sweetened the deal on those rare occasions I’ve managed to succeed.  The pressure here comes from within, not from some rule of thumb like toeing the line and keeping your school transcript in order.

This isn’t to say I don’t accidentally put pressure on my kid.  For example, I inadvertently added to her stress in the moments before her very first mountain bike race, by the very act of trying to help her relax.  It was a cold and rainy morning, and the race course—highly technical to begin with—had turned to mud.  Figuring this alone was a lot for any kid to take on by itself, not to mention the head-to-head competition, I casually said, “The important thing is just to hang in there and try to finish.”

Who know this simple statement was like lobbing a grenade into Alexa’s pre-race psyche?  Here is her own eloquent description of this exchange, taken from her race report: 

My dad looked about as nervous as I felt, and mentioned offhandedly that his goal was for me not to drop out.  This was worrisome for a number of reasons:  a) my dad clearly wasn’t super confident about my abilities, and b) it honestly hadn’t occurred to me that I could drop out.  The fact that I was [now] aware it was a possibility made it seem likely, and I was suddenly convinced that I would be possessed by forces beyond my control, forces that are less stubbornly competitive and ambitious than I am, and these would cause me to quit.

Of course she did finish, and placed higher than I think either of us expected, and she even took it upon herself to write a self-deprecatingly funny essay about it all.  I’m cheered to see that her embrace of the “perfect-transcript-or-NO-FUTURE!” ethos hasn’t turned her into a complete CV-building, book-pounding drone.

Again with the alternate perspective

I suspect that, whatever success my daughter ultimately has in cycling, it won’t end up on her college application, and I applaud that—it means she’s doing this for its own sake, as I had.  Meanwhile, this pursuit will give my daughter something more important than bragging rights:  the all-important opportunity to fail at something without the world ending.  She will drop out of races, and will lose races, and she will get the kind of results that don’t earn an A—but none of this will besmirch any written transcript.  Moreover, as Alexa races her bike over the next four years she will realize that the traditional path toward sporting excellence—which is something like The right parents à big talent à big drive à small victories à big victories à big glory—isn’t the only one, and that alternatives exist, such as Wrong parents à embarrassing mediocrity à fighting spirit à venom à big drive à technical mastery à cunning à small victories à moral victories à ability to eat a pile of tri-tip the size of a human head and still hear people say, “I wish I had your metabolism.”

And maybe, just maybe, that accumulation of experience will give her some peace and help establish the radical idea that there are many paths to take, and an alternative path can still lead you to the success you sought, or perhaps to an alternative success you hadn’t even thought of.  This process may ultimately have the same effect as Mike Aisner’s radical, incendiary words—“You don’t have to go to college”—and their subtext, “Dive in, do something you love, do it for its own sake, do it well, and you’ll be fine.”

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For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Bicycling in the Rain, or How To Be an Idiot

Introduction

With rain finally upon us (relieving for now a terrible drought here in the Bay Area), it’s time to talk about this ridiculous practice of riding a bicycle in the rain for fun and fitness.  I don’t mean getting caught in the rain, which can happen to any cyclist, or commuting in the rain, which is a noble activity that can involve fenders and such.  I’m talking about making a conscious decision to ride in the rain, which I did last Sunday, to my great misery.

This post should appeal to those with a yen for schadenfreude (look, two words—almost in a row— borrowed from another language!).  You can also read here about the strange notion of the "Reverse Murphy," and about why a cyclist who braves bad weather should never, ever begin to believe he's tough or something.  At the end I even have a surprising get-warm-quick recipe.

The idiocy of riding in crummy weather

For an amateur cyclist to train in bad weather is an affectation, like when a Master's racer dopes.  I mean, if you’re doing this sport as a hobby, and you’re not trying to make a living at it, there’s no point making yourself more miserable than necessary just to be better prepared for racing in crummy weather (which you should also avoid). I doubt you get better at tolerating cold with practice anyway. And, you’ll get a better workout on an indoor trainer, if you can handle the tedium. (Click here for motivational and logistical trips on training indoors.)

Besides, there’s the bike to think about.  Brake pads will usually last years if you only ride in dry weather, but in one or two wet rides (especially if your terrain is hilly, like mine) you can burn halfway through a pair.  Then there’s the time spent cleaning up your drivetrain; if you have that much time to kill, you should be training more, or—better yet—doing something truly worthwhile.  And if you go mountain biking in the rain, you severely damage the trail and basically sand away your drivetrain with all that grit.

So why did I ride?

Last Saturday night, I gave my bike a tune-up.  I filed the shellac off my new brake pads, cleaned everything up, and got my chain and cogs clean enough to eat off of.  I mixed up a couple bottles of energy drink for a Mount Diablo assault the next morning.  All this, even though I was certain it was going to rain.

Why was I certain?  After all, Accuweather said there was only a 25% chance of rain.  Well, it was simple Murphy’s Law:  whatever can go wrong, will go wrong.  And since I’d done such a nice job tuning up my bike, it had to rain.

Okay, so why didn’t I bail in advance, like the smartest of us four guys who had planned to ride together?  It’s because of this terrible drought we’ve been having.  It’s only rained once since last spring, and just barely.  All the liberals around here have been self-flagellating about it for two months.  So I figured I’d pull a Reverse-Murphy.  That is, I would cause it to rain—much as you’d do with a rain dance or cloud seeding—by tuning up my bike.  If I backed out of the ride, the drought would continue.

Being stupid in the rain

I woke up at 5:45 a.m. and went out on my porch.  No rain yet, but the wind in the trees was making a very specific sound, a slightly clattery whir that always means rain is imminent.  At about 6:30 I checked my e-mail; Todd had written, “My rain dance didn’t work (again), so Northside here I come.”  I figured he’d only looked out the window, and hadn’t noticed the special pre-rain breeze.

Fifteen minutes later I checked my e-mail again.  “Whoops,” Todd wrote.  “My rain dance worked after all.  Back to bed.”  Classic last-minute flakage but it wasn’t inappropriate … he’d signed on for this ride at the last minute anyway.  What I was looking for was an e-mail from Craig, who lives on the other side of the hills, an hour away from the coffee shop where we met.  Had he written, “It’s raining and frigid so I’m turning around,” I’d have probably bailed.  But no e-mail from Craig, meaning he was evidently well underway and toughing it out.  To stand him up and make him spend another miserable solo hour getting home while the rest of us slept … I couldn’t do that to a pal. 

I almost left on time, but when I got outside and found myself pummeled by some very big, very cold raindrops, I suddenly felt the urge to, uh, take care of post-digestive matters one more time.  You know about OCD; have you heard of its cousin, OCB?  Obsessive-Compulsive Bowels?  By the time I’d stripped off all my layers, done my business, and suited back up, I was running good and late.

I held out some hope that I’d roll up to the coffee shop and Craig wouldn’t be there.  I’d had this same hope on a similar winter morning in the early ‘90s when meeting up with my friend Trevor; when I saw him there, shivering in the rain, I thought, “Damn you to hell!”  He was, as he freely admitted, no happier to see me.

Of course Craig did show.  We steamed up Spruce Street, a nice uphill, and weren’t too cold then, but by the time we finished descending the east side of Wildcat Canyon Road to Orinda, we were completely drenched and miserable.  It was about 40 degrees out.  (I know, to most of the U.S. that’s downright balmy, but we Californians are a bunch of pansies.  Our routinely great weather makes us soft.) 

My shins felt like they’d been encased in ice.  I told Craig I’d escort him home but Mount Diablo was out of the question.  (A ten-mile descent in such weather would be the end of me.)  He suggested we ride out on the flats to Danville and then he could drive me home.  Drive me home?!  What would come next?  Aromatherapy and a subscription to “O, The Oprah Magazine”?  No way.

Riding home—the second hour of my ride—I just got colder and colder.  My feet felt like they were big blocks of ice.  The fingers of my fleece gloves became grotesquely distended with the wet, and when I wiped my nose I could taste all the salt the gloves had absorbed from sweat over the years, now carried away by the water.  Same with my helmet pads, though the water dripping from them also had a chemical taste.  My hands barely worked; shifting to a bigger cog was easy (swinging the palm of my hand like a hammer) but I could hardly click the smaller lever.  Most of all, I was too cold to even pedal hard, perhaps because my very spirit was waterlogged , soggy, and saggy.

I am not a hard man

When I was a teenager, I had this Coors Classic poster on my wall.  The cyclist pictured had thighs that literally gleamed.  Look, here it is now:

I’m going to admit something now.  In those years, riding in the mountains west of Boulder meant getting caught in thunderstorms not infrequently, and when I did, my legs—being wet—would gleam, and I would pretend I was the guy in the poster.  Laugh all you want, but haven’t you also fallen prey to mild narcissism at some point in your life?  It helped me brave some storms, anyway.  I wasn’t yet wise enough to be humble.

Well, I am now.   Slogging home through that incessant rain, I was too miserable, and feeling too sorry for myself, to feel like a badass.  I just felt stupid and lame.  I think it’s funny when some cycling fan bags on Cadel Evans for seeming a bit whiny during post-race interviews.  Did you see Evans in the Giro d’Italia last year?  (If not, click here or here for a blow-by-blow recap.)  Throughout the Giro it was raining most of the time, and snowing the rest of the time, and those poor guys had to not only brave the weather, but endure all the normal stress and strain of racing all-out.  I’d be bawling like a little girl after just one day of that, to say nothing of doing it for three weeks.  So I cut Evans plenty of slack.

And yet, even pro bike racers are nothing compared to 19th century sailors.   I’ve been reading Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana Jr., about his voyage around Cape Horn back in the early 1830s, in a ~100-foot merchant brig, and man, those guys knew how to suffer.  After all, they never had a choice.  Whenever the wind changed, which was pretty much a constant thing, they had to take in one sail or another, doing all kinds of complicated stuff with the rigging in all kinds of weather, day and night. 

For example, on one particularly stormy winter night near Cape Horn, the wind 

came on to blow worse and worse, with hail and snow beating like so many furies upon the ship, it being as dark and thick as night could make it.  The mainsail was blowing and slatting with a noise like thunder....  The yard over which we lay was cased with ice ... the sail itself about as pliable as though it had been made of sheets of sheathing copper.  It blew a perfect hurricane, with alternate blasts of snow, hail, and rain.  We had to fist the sail with bare hands.  No one could trust himself to mittens, for if he slipped, he was a gone man....  Frequently we were obliged to leave off altogether and take to beating our hands upon the sail, to keep them from freezing.

As cold as I was on my stupid little ride, I knew I’d be home in an hour or so, and the furnace would be going, and I’d have a hot shower and plenty to eat.  These guys?  They didn’t have a hot shower for over two years.  They’d go days or even weeks without dry clothes.  To eat they got nothing but salt beef, hard bread, and (on Sundays) a bit of duff (basically a steamed flour/water pudding).

At least last year’s luckless Giro riders didn’t have to worry about scurvy:  

The scurvy had begun to show itself on board.  One man had it so badly as to be disabled and off duty, and the English lad, Ben, was in a dreadful state, and was daily growing worse.  His legs swelled and pained him so that he could not walk; his flesh lost its elasticity, so that if it was pressed in, it would not return to its shape; and his gums swelled until he could not open his mouth.  His breath, too, became very offensive; he lost all strength and spirit; could eat nothing; grew worse every day; and, in fact, unless something was done for him, would be a dead man in a week, at the rate at which he was sinking.  [After encountering another ship, and being given a whole bunch of onions], we carried them forward, stowed them away in the forecastle, refusing to have them cooked, and ate them raw, with our beef and bread.... It was like a scent of blood to a hound.  We ate them at every meal, by the dozen; and filled our pockets with them, to eat in our watch on deck.

Imagine sharing a tiny forecastle with a bunch of unwashed sailors, and getting diseased breath so awful that the constant eating of raw onions is actually an improvement.  What a place to return to after slaving away with frozen rigging on an iced-over deck for four hours at a time.  Needless to say, absolutely nothing involving a white collar middle-aged man in Lycra doing a winter bicycle ride in California could possibly compare.

How to warm up

I got home, dragged my bike up the steps to the porch, and stood there a moment wondering how I was going to manage to dig past the gels, the tool kit, and the bags of drink mix in my jersey pocket to fish out my house key.  Fortunately my wife heard me from inside and opened the door.  A blast of warm air hit me.  It took me a few minutes to remove my shoes and I rolled my bike, which was dripping black filth, down to the garage.  I couldn’t shower right away for fear of chilblains on my lily white feet.  You can see my feet weren’t doing very well:

I huddled over a heater vent for at least twenty minutes before my teeth stopped chattering.  I don’t remember what I ate but it wasn’t hot cocoa; I wasn’t in the mood.  I guess I’d have felt like a girl scout or something.  Once, after getting stuck in the rain and snow on a Diablo ride, I came home and ate some rollmops, just to embrace my northern European heritage.  (What?  You haven’t heard of  rollmops?  It’s raw herring wrapped around a dill pickle.)  But on this morning I was too dejected by the futility of it all to play games with food and we didn’t have any herring anyway.

What I didn’t consider until much later, when my brain had thawed out, was that to warm up properly I should have done what the sailors in Dana’s book did: 

Throughout the night it stormed violently—rain, hail, and snow, and the sleet beating upon the vessel—the wind continuing ahead, and the sea running high.  At day-break (about three, A.M.) the deck was covered with snow.  The captain sent up the steward with a glass of grog to each of the watch; and all the time that we were off the Cape, grog was given to the morning watch, and to all hands whenever we reefed topsails.

What is grog?  It’s basically watered-down rum, named after Admiral Vernon of the Royal Navy, who was nicknamed Old Grog after the grogram fabric of his coat.  (The word “groggy” stems from “grog.”) 

So, when I had some friends over a few nights later, I found a few (widely divergent) grog recipes, did some improvising, and made up some good grog—so good, in fact, I had to make a second batch.  Here’s the grog recipe I worked out (this makes one generous serving):

1½ to 2 oz. dark rum

½ ounce lime juice

1 tsp sugar

1 small dollop of molasses

4 oz. water

In a pot on the stove, heat the water to a boil.  Kill the heat.  Stir in the sugar until it dissolves.  (You could use brown sugar instead of sugar and molasses.)  Put in everything else and stir well.  Serve hot.  Do not garnish with an orange slice or a cinnamon stick, because do you think those totally badass sailors ever went in for fricking garnish?

The best part of this (admittedly inauthentic) grog?  Due to the lime juice, you won’t get scurvy!

Postscript

If we’d stuck to our original plan and ridden up Mount Diablo, we’d have been snowed on.  Look!