From the Archives - Speech for Dad’s Memorial

Introduction

I’m coming up on the one-year anniversary of my father’s death. It’s rough. The fact of his death is compounded by the flashbacks I have of his terrible, wasting final month. Time does heal all wounds, but first they scab over which means they bleed from time to time. I’m dealing with all of that now.

Here, extracted from my archives but still warm to the touch, is the speech I wrote for my dad’s memorial service. I know it well, because I had to rehearse it, out loud, half a dozen times just to get to where I could read it out without crying. (I’m not above letting people see me tear up, but blubbering to the point of incomprehensibility does nobody any good.)

If I seem a bit less than fawning in this tribute-cum-roast, it’s because I’ve listened to memorial speeches that were so dedicated to burnishing the reputation of the dead, they lost their essential truth. To a large extent this was the case at my grandfather’s memorial, except for my cousin’s loving but honest speech, which I well recall included the statement, “He could be difficult.” That speech inspired me to write something that conveys loving feeling but hasn’t been totally declawed.

Speech for Dad’s Memorial – November 19, 2017

I was driving my dad’s old Toyota Scion the other day, and it was down to half a tank. I’d filled it up when I was out here in early October, figuring I’d do him a favor. He’d be stoked (he would say “tickled”) to climb into his car and see the fuel gauge on full. It never occurred to me, at that time, that he’d never drive this car again. Things like that drive home the point: he’s really gone.

Of course I’m going to miss my dad—but this is not entirely new territory for me. I have, in a sense, yearned for more connection my whole life. When my brothers and I were kids, it was often hard to get our dads’ attention, unless we were in trouble. As adults, we weren’t really focused on him, either. Work, our own families, and geography got in the way.

But even as kids, when we all lived under the same roof, our relationship with our dad was less a matter of mutual rapport than of us boys being kind of in awe of him. Often it seemed his amazing intellect could be a barrier. An old friend of his from Ball Aerospace sent a nice note to our “Remembering Harry” e-mail box recently, saying, “[He was] intelligent beyond all description. He formulated a way to map the non-linearities of an instrument’s measurement plane with a Zernike polynomial making it possible to linearize the pointing accuracy of a line of sight steering mirror. His idea for using the concept of a Seaman’s signaling mirror to bisect the angle between two laser beams was the basis for an entire pointing and tracking program.” Reading this was a bit like hearing my dad talk tech, back in the day: I really couldn’t follow it. Growing up, the dinner table was like some kind of science & technology forum. Much of it was pitched at my older brothers’ level, though I’m pretty sure they were lost, too.

This isn’t to say our dad wouldn’t ever meet us on our turf. One weekend morning when I was 12 or 13, several of my biking pals flaked on me. My dad surprised me by saying, “I’ll ride with you.” So we rode up Flagstaff together. I pushed as high a gear as I could, out of the saddle, rocking the bike, slogging away slowly to be macho, while dad stayed seated and spun a high cadence—an engineer’s cadence, perhaps—next to me. Of course he turned the ride into a picnic, literally. At the summit we parked our bikes and walked out to Artist’s Point, and ate the odd creations he’d packed, like bagels dressed up with sardines, dill relish, and mayonnaise, and a half grapefruit.

[Here is his beloved Trek, which he rode on this ride. I’m pretty sure my dad snapped this photo at the summit of Flagstaff, probably quite near where we had our picnic.]

On the way back down the mountain I let it all hang out—I’d mastered all the curves by bombing this descent several times a week—and halfway down I heard this incredible scream. I looked back, expecting that all was lost, but my dad was still upright, just behind me, looking totally unflustered. “Not to worry,” he said, “that sound is just my brake pads melting.” I don’t know where he found the nerve to fake it on a descent like that, other than being hell-bent on keeping up with his kid.

Another surprise from my dad came during the summer of ’94, when I took my new bride, along with my brother Bryan, on a bike ride up Mount Evans. We weren’t very well equipped for the harsh conditions up there, which would have become a big problem, except that Dad unexpectedly showed up in his car when we were about halfway up. He had a lot of warm clothing and a big thermos of hot cocoa.

[Here we are maybe halfway up, before the temperature dropped.]

I felt this outing had brought my dad and me closer together, and so, remembering that 22 years later, I invited him along as the “sag wagon” when I took my daughter on her first bike trip up Mount Evans in August of last year. He happily obliged, following along in his Toyota Scion, with his good friend J— [not shown since I don’t have her permission].

Dad made a picnic out of this outing, too, giving my exhausted daughter the most challenging sandwich of her young life: homemade bread, like particle board, spread thick with refried beans, ketchup, and—of course—mayonnaise.

But so much of the time during my childhood, my dad was immersed in his own thoughts. The childish ideas I tried to share just didn’t tend to grab him. He was a bit like the archetypal “absentminded professor,” often pondering a mathematical or scientific abstraction, or the workings of the natural world. I think everywhere he looked, he saw these intricate mechanisms that just begged to be studied and fathomed. I suspect his profound intellect could be isolating for him, too. A character in a Vladimir Nabokov novel wrote to his wife, “A genius needs to keep so much in store, and thus cannot offer you the whole of himself as I do.” Was my dad keeping something in store? Hard to say, but I did find it hard to compete with whatever good solid engineering problem had taken root in his brain. Where mechanisms, science, and engineering were concerned, my dad always knew where to start, and how to proceed ... humans were always a bit trickier, and relationships could end up being the problems left unsolved.

And so, with all this in mind, I’ve been gratified to see, over the last ten or twenty years, my dad expand his comfort zone and delve deeper into messy human stuff. I’m impressed by how social he became, how wide a circle of close, loving friends he had around him in his retirement. He developed a spiritual side completely at odds with the purely scientific approach he’d had as a younger man. He also described to me his (apparently willing) participation in activities I never dreamed he’d undertake: meditation, Buddhism, singing, even dancing. Dancing—man, I’d have loved to see that.

As I grieve, I have to remind myself that memory is fickle. When I look back on that high-speed bicycle descent of Flagstaff, and my dad glued to my wheel despite his brake pads melting, I recognize this alternate side of him. Even if he didn’t always nurture it, his capacity for reaching out and expanding that comfort zone seems to have been there all along.

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Ride Report - Mount Evans with Teenager - 14,270’ Summit!

Introduction

During my Colorado vacation a week or so ago, and two days after my disastrous attempt at an epic mountain ride there, I tackled an even more ambitious effort:  biking to the summit of Mount Evans, the highest paved road in North America.  I’ve reached this summit four times before, but this time I threw in something extra:  I brought along my 14-year-old daughter.  This would certainly be the toughest ride she’d ever attempted.

Did we make the summit?  I’ve decided to thwart the rules of journalism and not tell you right away.  If you want to find out, you’re just going to have to read on, or at least skim all this text and look at the photos.  (Note:  if you don’t have the stamina to read 3,000 words on this lofty topic, whereas a 14-year-old attempted to bike up a 14,270-foot mountain under her own steam, do you think it’s time for some soul-searching?)

About Mount Evans

The road up Mount Evans is, in local parlance, “hyper-gnar-gnar.”  It climbs almost 7,000 feet from its base in Idaho Springs to a blasted summit that looks positively lunar, if there were cold winds on the moon.  According to Wikipedia, the highest temperature ever recorded on the Evans summit was 65 degrees Fahrenheit, and it can freeze at any time of year.  The average wind speed up there is 28 to 35 mph.  The summit is way above tree line (the point at which conditions are too harsh for trees to survive).  In fact, a 2012 tornado touched down near the summit but didn’t cause any damage because there was nothing to damage.  What was the tornado gonna do … move some fricking rocks around?  (There was once a building containing a gift shop and restaurant, but it burned down in 1979 “and was not rebuilt, but remains as a place of contemplation today.”  Here’s a jumping-off point for your contemplation:  “What the hell are you doing up here?!”)

How does Mount Evans compare to the famous peaks reached in the Tour de France?  Well, Mount Ventoux is even windier, but its summit is a paltry 6,273 feet … that is, 1,267 feet lower than the base of Mount Evans.  The Col du Galibier is the highest mountain that the Tour de France ever climbs, but at 8,678 feet it’s still a dwarf by Mount Evans standards.  The Galibier climb, by itself, lasts only 11 miles—far less than the Evans climb, which goes on for more than 28—but the Galibier taken together with the Col du Télégraphe is 21.6 miles and gains almost as much vertical as Evans.  Does this make it as hard?  Well, the Galibier is steeper, but it also features way more available oxygen.  Thus, I think Mount Evans is harder, especially for somebody only acclimated to sea level.  (Full disclosure:  I’ve raced up Mount Evans and the Col du Galibier twice each, and the worst suffering I endured was on the Galibier.  But there were extenuating circumstances.)

Logistics

While I was foolhardy enough as a teen to take on pretty difficult rides (particularly this one), I didn’t attempt Mount Evans until I was 17.  Frankly, teenagers aren’t very good with logistics—at least, I wasn’t and my teenage friends weren’t, and my kids aren’t, nor are their friends.  Teens don’t think about things like the wind chill factor being 20 degrees on Mount Evans on a typical day in August.  I don’t remember what I wore in 1986 when I first did this climb but it was probably just shorts and a short-sleeved jersey. 

I well remember two things about that day.  First, when I started I was freezing my ass off while warming up—despite Idaho Springs typically being 20-25 degrees warmer than the Mount Evans summit.  (I was warming up because it was a race and could be fast from the gun; more on this in a moment.)  Second, I remember crossing the finish line and hearing this guy we called The Yeller yelling, “Get this rider into a warm van—now!”  This wasn’t special treatment, but standard operating procedure.  Somebody caught me, and another person took my bike away, and I was thrown into the back of a van—engine running and heater jacked up—with a bunch of other racers.  After lying there dazed for a dozen or two minutes, I came to and started chatting with the others, mostly about how bad that sucked, etc.  Then we were all driven down the mountain to Idaho Springs and reunited with our bicycles.

(About the race starting out fast:  the Bob Cook Memorial Mount Evans Hill Climb is a huge, prestigious event and records are kept of the fastest times up it.  There is (or at least was) a special prize for the first Junior to finish, even though—as was common in those days—we had to race with the Senior Category 3 riders.  The first couple miles are almost flat, and the normal custom of the peloton was to take that part easy and chitchat.  So it was in 1986, to the dismay of my friend John Smathers who felt he could get the new Junior record if we went out fast enough.  I remember him looking back at all us slackers, and saying, “Oh well, I guess we won’t be getting a record today.”  But he actually did, winning the race more than five minutes ahead of my teammate Peter and me, and the record John set that day, thirty years ago, still stands!)

As a 14-year-old, I was fairly reckless and thought, for example, that it was kind of cool to get stuck in a thunderstorm at way over 10,000 feet elevation and get treated for hypothermia.  As a parent, I think it would be incredibly lame to subject my 14-year-old to that sort of ordeal.  So for this trek I arranged to have my dad drive up as our sag wagon.  I also picked a day with a favorable weather forecast (and when that forecast changed for the worse, I rescheduled the ride).

There’s one more thing I did as a hedge against the ride being a nightmare:  I tried to set my daughter’s expectations appropriately.  “I never made the summit at your age—I did the race at 14 but it was only to the halfway point at Echo Lake,” I told her.  “Let’s shoot for that, and anything we make beyond it is gravy.” 

She was having none of that.  “There’s no way I’m not making the summit,” she declared. “I’d never be able to live with the failure.”  Okay, kid—but that’s your decree, not mine.  (Not that I was surprised at her position, and I’ll concede that acknowledging the existence of a summit was tantamount to entrapment.)

The ride

We got up at 5:30 a.m. to drive from Boulder to Idaho Springs and try to get on the bikes by 7; no matter what the weather forecast says, high mountains in Colorado always carry an afternoon thunderstorm risk.  We got rolling a bit after 7:30.  Here’s the “before” shot.  Of note:  I was a bit anxious and couldn’t be bothered to frame the shot very well, and Alexa’s smile seems a bit forced. 

Our second “before” shot shows that the road is open.  This is no small thing … it doesn’t open until June, and two or three times the race (typically held in July) has been canceled due to snow.  In fact, the last time I rode Evans, with my brother Bryan and my new bride in June of 1994, there were snow flurries at the top.

It was 44 degrees F when we started.  The first hour slid by, the day warming up slightly despite the increase in altitude.  At 9,000 feet the temperature was 45.5.  Alexa was in fine spirits.

Before 90 minutes had elapsed we made the 10-mile marker.  I’m curious whether the abundance of trees offset the gradual diminishment of oxygen as we climbed.

By 10,000 feet the temperature had climbed to 53 degrees.  We’d brought full-finger gloves and were too hot for them as we toiled along.

Echo Lake is at mile 14 and I dimly remembered my race finishing there in 1983.  My main recollections of that race:  a) there was one girl in our group, who deliberately dropped back when one racer called another a very vulgar and profane name, and b) I got absolutely shelled and was miserable.  The next time round (1986), when Echo Lake was our halfway point, somebody attacked here and blew the Junior/Cat 3 field to bits.  Things were a lot mellower this time around.

We stopped at the Echo Lake Lodge to use the restroom.  It’s kind of amazing how much souvenir paraphernalia is available there:  commemorative keychains, license plates, and even pocketknives with the altitude and your name engraved on them (unless your name is Alexa, which they don’t have).  Tourists are encouraged to believe they’ve really accomplished something by making it all the way up there in a car.

Here’s the sign pointing to the summit.  You can tell we’ve had a rest because our gloves are back on and Alexa has tugged her sleeves back down.  By the way, she was supposed to wear either her East Bay Velo Club jersey or her Albany High School mountain bike team jersey.  But she forgot to pack them, along with cycling socks (which we had to go buy in Boulder).  Did I mention teens aren’t good with logistics?

It was a perfect day to ride up this mountain, but not a perfect mountain to ride up because a) it’s too tall, and b) our planet is too large.  A lower mountain on a smaller planet (i.e., with less gravity) would be easier to take.  The effort began to take its toll.  My daughter isn’t exactly Mary Lou Retton to begin with (I mean, who is?) and though she didn’t become surly, her manner drifted in the direction of, say, Alf.  Fortunately, about 2 ½ hours into the journey, our sag wagon showed up.  That’s my dad behind the wheel and his friend Judy riding shotgun.

We stopped for a tasty hot beverage (tea? coffee? cocoa?—I don’t know, I didn’t have any) and fig neutrons.  I was carrying thousands of calories of Clif shots and bars in my pockets but normal food is always welcome.

Unfortunately, my dad hadn’t remembered sunscreen either, but had a large bandanna I fastened under my helmet and draped around my ears and neck like a Bedouin.  I figured I was wearing enough Lycra to avoid being misidentified by some redneck and shot on site.  You’ll sees a photo of this headgear later.

Eventually we approached the tree line.  The timber began to recede, not unlike my hairline.  (The metaphor, I now realize, is rich:  as I slowly climb the mountain of age, there’s a trend toward less of everything … less abundance, less luxuriance, less vigor, less speed, less oxygen, and—it must be said—less assurance.)  By now our conversation had totally dried up.  Was Alexa fighting an internal battle, or had her respiration crossed over the Peak Conversational Threshold?

We made a painful descent to the wrongly, cruelly name Summit Lake.  This lake is not at the summit—not even close—and the descent to it undoes some of the important climbing work you’ve done.  Moreover, from this point on, large cracks across the road transmit right through the bike painfully into your hands and butt.  These cracks don’t look like much, but everything already hurts.  Here, we’ve gone past the falsely named lake and resumed our long climb toward the actual summit.  Note the tree line, now just below us.

By now my poor kid was well and truly suffering.  Neither my wife nor I has a very high hematocrit (i.e., my last measurement was 37%, which is below-average even for a non-athlete) and Alexa has probably inherited that.  On the plus side, she seems to have inherited my ability to recover within a ride or race; we benefit hugely from just taking a breather by hiding from the wind for a bit.  This doesn’t help on Mount Evans, though.  It’s just a continuous effort for 28+ miles.  It’s hard to tell from this photo because Alexa’s form is so good, but she was dying.  Perhaps the way she’s staring at her front wheel, refusing to look ahead, is a bit of a tell.

Maybe it’s a bit more obvious in this photo.  In any case you can see my silly headgear.

I’m not a proponent of rest stops during bike rides.  I have always held that getting going again is just too hard.  On this particular ride I was especially loathe to stop because I’d twisted my ankle on a hike the day before and could barely unclip my foot from the pedal.  But of course when Alexa asked for a break I granted it immediately.  We sat down in some huge overstuffed La-Z-Boy chairs and geishas came around to give us a soothing footbath.  Wait … I’m remembering it wrong.  We actually just stood on the side of the road along the blasted landscape for a spell.

I gave Alexa a fig neutron and said, “There’s more where that came from if you’ll go with me to prom.”  Without missing a beat she replied, “I like your sleeves.”  So there was still a sense of humor lurking in that tortured soul, even if she couldn’t make herself smile for the camera.  Then it was more slogging along.

It’s scenic up there, in a blasted kind of way.

A couple of years ago, in my Everest Challenge race report, I wrote, “It’s kind of funny how I train hard for like ten weeks for this [race], and my reward is abject misery.”  So it was with Alexa:  we rode all summer with this ride as our carrot, and now here it was and it was like, “Who the hell wants to eat a carrot for four wretched hours?” (or more to the point, “Who wants to stab himself in the legs and lungs with a carrot for four hours?”).  The training, it turns out, is the fun part; the “reward” is the kind of awful suffering you just wish would be over with already.  Look at Alexa here, at another rest stop.  Man, she is pissed! 

Nah, just kidding. I was going for an artsy shot with my reflection in her sunglasses but couldn’t get the angle right.  She was very patient about this.  Since she happened to look pissed in this photo (in the American, not British, sense) I figured I’d throw it in.

Alexa got a flat tire a bit later which gave her a nice, long break and the opportunity to watch 15 or 20 Model-T Fords drive by while enjoying the spectacle of her father trying to pump up a tire with his feeble T-Rex arms.

We got higher and higher up, to where even the lichen on the rocks started to become sparse.  Did the road start to get steeper, or were our legs just running out of juice?

Oh my god, the road sign lies!  You saw that sign yourself:  14 miles from Echo Lake to the summit.  But the magic 14 mile marker came and went, and still no summit.  The actual mileage is more like 14.5, and that extra half-mile is huge.  It’s the longest half-mile on the planet.  My dad and his friend had stopped here and there along their drive but now reconnected with us and drove behind Alexa for moral support for this last bit. 

Suddenly Alexa called out, “Dad!”  I wondered if she had another flat tire.  But actually, she’d stopped to look at a marmot that was, due no doubt to utter unfamiliarity, unafraid of humans.  By the time I got there it had moved on, but she got a nice long look.  (That’s right, my daughter is never too tired out to appreciate nature.  She saw several pikas on the mountain and tried to point them out, but I’m too blinded by adulthood to notice such things.)  Here’s a photo my dad snapped a bit later on:

Alas, after the marmot stop Alexa had a really hard time continuing on.  After a couple hundred meters she needed to stop again.  How close can you get to the top without making it?  I thought I might find out:  she really didn’t seem to have enough air to start back up again.  You know, cars have to be tuned for high altitude—the carburetor or fuel injection system is adjusted to mix more air with the fuel, to offset the lack of oxygen.  Humans can tune themselves this way, but it takes 4 to 6 weeks to produce the necessary extra hemoglobin.  If you don’t have 4 to 6 weeks to hang out at altitude (or a World Tour team-issue blood bag), you just have to dig deep.  Alexa had been digging deep the whole way.  Now she was experiencing something like panic, because her brain rightly recognized that her system wasn’t getting what it needed.  Could it be that we would have to abort, a quarter mile from the summit?  I don’t think we seriously considered this.  We did some relaxation exercises and set off again.

Have you ever noticed that batteries can seem completely dead, so that your flashlight doesn’t turn on at all, but then the next day you try again and get like five seconds of weak orange light?  Well, that’s about what we got after this last break.  And it was enough, because we bloody well made it to the summit!

My dad arrived after a few minutes (traffic was a bitch near the top) and Alexa climbed into his warm car.  Here she is having some solid food and a giant mug of hot, strong cocoa.  Poor thing has obviously had the stuffing knocked out of her.

While Alexa warmed up, my dad lashed her bike to the back of his car.  When he was done, I dragged her out for a couple of photos at the summit sign, just to make it official.

Can you tell it’s a bit cold up there?  We  didn’t dally—she got back in the car and I began my descent.  As luck would have it, I happened upon a mountain goat who was cooperative enough for a sweet photo-op.  (Alexa got to see it too, from the car, a bit later.)

Alexa had been conflicted about whether to accept a ride down the mountain—after all, she’d earned that descent!—so we arranged to meet at Echo Lake so she could do the bottom half of the descent, where it’s warmer and the road isn’t like a medieval torture device.  While I waited for the others, I popped into the lodge for some souvenir stickers.

We had a nice (late) lunch in Idaho Springs:  fried chicken for me and chicken and dumplings for Alexa.  She asked for some of my potato salad and I forked over the whole serving, no questions asked.

So was the ride fun?  Well, yeah, in that strange, warped, kind of un-fun way.  One thing is beyond doubt:  it was fricking epic.  Anyone can do fun; Disneyland is “fun.”  It takes a pretty special kid to do epic.  I think as time goes on, our memory of this ride will get all the sweeter, and I’m sure Alexa has forged, in her soul, a new capacity for perseverance.  (And did she have fun?  I’m not sure ... I’ll have to wait for her ride report.)

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2014 Epic Colorado Mountain Ride - Part 1

Introduction

If you’ve been following albertnet awhile, you may recall that I did a road trip with my family a year ago April to visit Boulder, my old hometown.  One goal of that trip was to do an epic ride with my friend Pete.  Alas, the drive out was marred by a massive blizzard that almost did us in, and all the mountain passes were closed throughout my visit.  Pete and I did a 40-mile flat ride among the snowfields but that was it.  I’ve vowed never again to drive to Boulder in the spring, and Pete and I hatched a scheme to do a 2-part, double-epic ride during August, when snow is much less likely.  Last week, we finally pulled it off.

Who is Pete?

The short answer is, Pete is a former professional bike racer whom I met in the 1985 Red Zinger Mini Classic, where—despite his costing me the overall victory—we became friends.  The long answer requires some background.  When I was a teenager my bedroom was an unfinished basement.  It was pretty dark down there, so I could sleep in good and late during the summer, at least in theory.  Unfortunately, Pete would invariably phone me up first thing in the morning.  I didn’t have an answering machine, nor would I pick up, so it became a battle of wills as I tried to fall back asleep while he let the phone ring and ring.  After like twenty minutes of this continuous ringing, I’d finally go upstairs, pick up the phone, and yell, “You bastard!”  He’d laugh, and then we’d go ride.  That tells you pretty much what you need to know about Pete.

Food

My bike pals and I like to send around e-mail race reports, which sometimes end up on our club’s blog.  My race reports—and also my ride reports, since I almost never race—tend to focus on the food.  Why is this?  Well, food and bike racing are tightly intertwined.  Do we eat to ride, or ride to eat?  Both.  Without massive consumption of starchy food, we’d never be able to finish the super-long rides we like to do.  And without the super-long rides, we’d all be too overweight to get around on our skinny-tired, über -light racing bikes, and/or we’d be embarrassed to ride them.

So, yeah, food.  Pete and I ate big the evening before our big ride.  We went to the Gondolier restaurant, a Boulder institution since 1960. In our teens we used to eat there every week because they had a Tues/Wed Spaghetti Special:  all you can eat, brought to the table, for $1.99. I always ate at least five plates, my record being seven.  Here’s what a plate of Gondo pasta looks like:

My wife has pointed out that watching me eat such vast quantities would be a disgusting spectacle if I weren’t so skinny.  How true this is.  The joke would wear thin if I had to pay for my overindulgence.  During this Boulder road trip, I went to Squeeze In, a celebrated diner in Sparks, Nevada.  There was a wait, and I had to stand around because the bench in the waiting area—which would have accommodated at least five cyclists—was filled by this giant tattooed guy and his wife.  The guy was interrogating the hostess about whether this was the place featured on some TV show, and whether his burger would be like on the show, with the cheese oozing out past the bun onto the plate.  (He gestured very precisely to illustrate this.)  The hostess replied, “I’m not sure if the cheese will do that, but if it doesn’t, just send your burger back and have the cook add a few more slices of cheese.  Don’t worry, we’ll do whatever it takes to make you totally stuffed.  We’ll roll you out of here on a damn gurney if that’s what you want.”  (Did she really say this?  Of course not.  But I’ll bet she was thinking it.)

Anyway, at the Gondo I had some garlicky rolls, three plates of pasta, and four slices of my brother’s large everything pizza.  This was definitely less than I used to eat as a teen, but I do have some fat reserves now, and anyway I’d had a big lunch.

Six Dark Thirty

Our ride would be something like 100 miles with over 10,000 feet of climbing.  That might not sound very hard, but Pete’s house in Golden is at about 6,000 feet elevation and we’d be climbing to an elevation of over 11,000 feet, twice, and finishing at around 9,000 feet.  That would give us a net elevation gain of about 3,000 feet.  We figured we’d better get an early start.  I set my alarm, which was a pity because I was crashing in Pete’s basement, which was nice and dark and would have been a great place to sleep in good and late, just to right an old wrong.

My alarm went off, I dragged myself out of bed, and I headed up the stairs, huffing and puffing because my sea-level lungs were ill equipped for the altitude.  There Pete was, slouching on the sofa, flipping me the bird.  He was ticked because his little daughter had climbed into bed with him at 1:30 a.m., following which he hadn’t slept well.  This came on top of several nights of very little sleep due to his occupation.  Of course none of this was my fault, but he could legitimately begrudge me all the sleep I’d been getting during my vacation.

Here we are, early in the ride, at the Red Rocks Amphitheater.  At least, I think that’s where we are in this photo.  To be honest, I know Pete said something about it but I wasn’t paying enough attention.

After Red Rocks we climbed Squaw Pass for like two hours straight.  We’d both had some knee trouble leading up to the ride but for now our knees (and legs) were behaving.  I clicked through the data screens on my bike computer and was thrilled to discover that we’d climbed for over 25 miles, meaning we must surely have broken the ride’s back … right? 

Well, not really.  I mentioned this impressive stat to Pete, who said, very casually, “I guess that means we’ve got about 30 more miles of climbing to go.”  Man, that really took the wind out of my sails.  I could almost hear my resolve hissing out of me, like air from a punctured raft.  Or was that my breathing?  Near the top of the pass we stopped for a breather.

 Pete is trying to smile, but you can see it’s faked.  Look in his eyes:  they tell the real story.  There is definitely suffering there.  You see, he forgot to train for this ride.  His longest ride of the year was 80 miles, his second-longest 50 miles.  And then there’s the sleep deprivation.

I wasn’t doing so hot either.  If you look closely you’ll see fear in my eyes, because I’d already drawn 100 miles worth of breaths in half that distance.

We descended to the Mount Evans visitor center at Echo Lake, which is about halfway up Mount Evans.  If we’d been real men we’d have taken a left and ridden to the summit, which at over 14,000 feet is the highest paved road in North America.  But since we know we aren’t real men—this is made embarrassingly evident by our compact cranksets—we had nothing to prove and stopped at the visitor center for Cokes and to get out of the rain, which had just started up in earnest.

We were in the visitor’s center awhile.  It was pouring rain and I went two rounds in the restroom.  I was tired enough that I found the noise of the high-powered hand dryer almost intolerably oppressive.  In the gift shop were all kinds of bumper stickers, t-shirts, and other stuff saying things like “I made it – Mount Evans, 14000 feet!”  I guess some people consider that making it all the way up there in a car is a pretty big deal.

Out on the porch I saw a middle-aged motorcyclist putting on waterproof rain pants.  To make conversation, I said, “I wish I had some of those.”  She retorted, “You should have brought some.  It rains all the time up here.  Are you from out of town or something?”  I allowed that I’d lived in California for a couple decades, and she snorted, “That’s what the weather report is for.”  I could have pointed out that any weather report that didn’t forecast possible thunderstorms at this altitude would be delusional, so actually the forecast was immaterial.  But that wasn’t the point. 

The point is, bike racer types don’t have saddlebags to carry all that gear, and we’re prepared to suffer accordingly.  I’ve been caught in plenty of rainstorms, and even snowstorms, without sissy waterproof pants.  I could have pointed out that I’m made of better stuff than she, that I don’t need a gasoline engine, and that what she might consider hazardous—e.g., a cold rain—is to me just a nuisance.  “At least your jacket is orange,” she said.  “Yep, it’s pretty visible,” I replied.  “No, that’s not what I meant,” she continued.  “I mean it’s orange like the Denver Broncos.”  Maybe my parents were right all along:  I shouldn’t talk to strangers.

The weather gods, as if to mock this motorcyclist, shone on Pete and me:  the rain stopped at the exact moment we climbed back on our bikes.  We had a sweet descent to Idaho Springs, getting a bit cold and wet before becoming warm and dry again, and then began our second long grind, this time up Berthoud Pass.  As we regained the higher elevations, the sky darkened again and we heard thunder.  We were getting close to the tree line, aka timberline, which (as you can see in this photo) looks a bit like male pattern baldness.

By the way, in addition to energy drink and gels, I ate a lot of Lara bars during this ride.  Not only are they yummy (or did they just seem yummy because I needed them so bad?), they pack more calories for their size and weight than other energy bars.  No, I’m not a weight freak, but when your jersey pockets are overstuffed, and you have like four bars in there, every bit helps.  (I am not sponsored by Lara bars or I’d be forbidden to tout them like this.)

I forgot to wear my Road ID bracelet, which was unfortunate because it seemed like any moment Pete might just ride away from me, leaving me for dead.  So I reminded him that his best protection against being struck by lightning would be to crouch low over his bike and ride right next to me, so I’d be the tallest object around.  People do get struck by lightning up here, so maybe I shouldn’t joke about it, and perhaps I should take the threat more seriously.  But compared to the threat of being run over, how serious is the lightning threat, really?  And what are we supposed to do, skip the ride entirely?  Stay home and ride the trainer?

I was breathing good and hard all the way up the climb, but at least it was that delicious-smelling air that you get before and after a rainstorm.  I was hit by about half a dozen raindrops before we made the summit of Berthoud Pass.  A friendly motorcyclist, who found it in herself not to chide us for our foolish lack of raingear, snapped this photo.

I would like to point out that Pete’s bike doesn’t actually have a giant sheepskin-covered saddle.  That’s just a rock in the background.  It’s also not the case that we deliberately set up the photo so as to be on opposite sides of the Continental Divide, as my wife had thought.  We’re not nearly that clever, especially when our brains are deprived of oxygen.

The point of this next photo is the sky, but it didn’t come out right.  I forgot my camera on this ride and had only my smartphone.  That’s why there are so few action shots:  it’s hard to handle the phone while riding and I’d hate to drop it.

So, yeah, we did finally get really rained on during our descent to Winter Park, but I didn’t mind.  After all, we’d defied the odds all day; we could have just as easily been rained on for hours.  Besides, we knew we’d have a hot shower waiting for us at the end.

Food, revisited

We chilled out in the condo for awhile.  (Actually, we warmed up.)  Outside, it rained steadily up until it was time to walk into town for dinner, at which point the rain stopped.  At a little brewpub Pete knew, we started our feast with nachos, which were terrible because of vulcanized faux-cheese goo, but it didn’t matter because we subsequently hit upon the pure genius of ordering both sliders and burgers. 

For a place with such crappy nachos, the sliders and burgers were delicious.  I ate all my fries and most of Pete’s.  And I broke my vow of temperance (undertaken to prepare for the upcoming Everest Challenge) because beer does such a nice job of relaxing tired muscles.  After all, this had been just a warm-up ride, to get us fit for the real ride two days later.  Visit albertnet again soon, because I’ll be posting that story next.  Here’s a little teaser though:  Pete showed me the Strava-generated Day 2 route on his phone beforehand, saying casually, “I think it’ll actually be a bit less than 170 miles.”

Update:  you can read about the Day 2 ride right here!

Stats and maps

Since I’m not on Strava and you wouldn’t be following me if I were, here are some statistics and a couple maps of our ride.  Most of these stats are from my bike computer, which understates the climbing due to its dependence on barometric pressure measurement, which isn’t very accurate when the weather is spotty. 

• 97.3 miles
• 6:18:40 ride time
• 15.0 mph average speed
• 73 rpm average cadence
• 10,581 feet cumulative elevation gain
• 49.6 miles total climbing
• 7,153 feet cumulative elevation drop
• 39.3 miles total descending

Unintentional Fiction in Bike Race Stories

NOTE:  This post is rated R for mild strong language.

Introduction

I’m trying to learn how to write fiction.  I’ve dabbled in it but I’m more comfortable with essays.  And yet, recently I discovered that for years I’ve been telling a story about the French cycling champion Bernard Hinault that I only thought was true—I’d unknowingly fictionalized an account of one of his victories.  Does this count as fiction?  Probably not.  But this got me thinking about the fictions we unintentionally create all the time.  This post explores the different reasons why, and methods by which, we  create “unintentional fiction.”

What, you’re not that interested in reading about the act of fiction?  Well, in the following post I explore this topic through bike racing stories, so you might enjoy it anyway.

Would you rather read actual fiction than read about fiction?  Well then, here are some links to albertnet short stories:

The Phantom Solace

Rejection Affects Health

Guide to Managing Millennials

Poolside

Before the Fall

Hinault wins Liège-Bastogne-Liège

Here is the story I have been telling for over twenty years about Hinault winning the 1980 Liège-Bastogne- Liège bike race—the oldest of the classics:

That fake autobiography, “Hinault by Hinault,” got it all wrong.  It was your typical blather about Hinault wanting so badly to win this race for France, since only three Frenchman had won it in its 100+ year history, so he pushed through with unflagging motivation even though the weather was terrible, snow and sleet, etc.  But in his actual autobiography, “Memories of the Peloton,” Hinault told the real story, which is that he didn’t even want to start the race.  He tells his coach, Cyrille Guimard, “This is bullshit, I’m not racing in these conditions.”  Guimard says, “Just start the race, and when you’ve shown your face you can drop out.”  Hinault asks for a jacket.  Guimard says, “No, start without it, and I’ll give it to you later.”  So Hinault starts.  Ten kilometers in he drops back to the team car and says, “Okay Cyrille, give me my jacket, I’m riding back to the hotel.”  Guimard says, “No, just stay in a bit longer until more of the others have quit.  You don’t want to look bad.”  Several more times Hinault is denied his jacket until Guimard finally says, “I’m not giving you your jacket until you finish.  So you might as well race.”  Furious, and wanting to stay warm, Hinault drops the hammer and obliterates the field, ultimately winning by almost ten minutes.  After the race he finds Guimard, who says, “Well, now are you glad you raced?”  Hinault snaps back, “Fuck off.  Give me my jacket.”

It’s a great story—but largely untrue.  As I discovered when I reread “Memories of the Peloton” recently, my memory of this tale has proven seriously defective.  Yes, Hinault won by almost ten minutes, and Guimard and a jacket were involved, but the real story is quite different.  Hinault lined up with everybody without complaint, and “everyone was wearing a cape or a windcheater.”  Hinault continues:

I was riding with a hand up to my face to keep the snow out of my eyes and came very close to retiring.  I told [teammate] Guilloux that it was impossible to carry on and I was all for getting back to our hotel, but he persuaded me to carry on to the feeding-station and pack it in if it was still snowing then.  [At the feeding station, 100 km from the finish] there was a bit of rain and it was cold but the weather looked more stable.  Cyrille Guimard told me to remove my racing cape because the real race was about to start.  My cape was made of a waxed fabric and I was very warm inside it, but I took it off as instructed….  I decided that the only thing to do was ride as hard as I could to keep myself warm….  [After dropping everybody, I was] like a kind of snowbound Tom Thumb protected only by his balaclava, but heading for a heart-warming victory in Liège.

My account was scarcely better than the one I’d remembered from “Hinault by Hinault” (which is out of print so I can’t even check up on how well I’ve remembered it).  In my story, Hinault had railed against authority, but in truth he did as he was told.

How could I have remembered this so wrong?  Well, the idea of Hinault as a rebel is entirely valid.  Later in “Memories of the Peloton” he writes, “The atmosphere at Renault had been cloudy since 1980.  Cyrille always wanted his own way:  the rider had only to pedal and keep his mouth shut.  He gave orders but no explanations.  In my case, it all went in one ear and out of the other.  I tended to do whatever seemed right to me and, as time went by, I found his attitude less and less acceptable.  He treated us like naughty children and it had to stop.”  So he ultimately fell out with Guimard, and went on to start his own team.

Through faulty memory, I took matters of truth—Hinault’s pugnacious spirit and his support of riders’ rights (revolutionary at that time)—and illustrated them concisely through a dramatic narrative, which is exactly what fiction should do.  The only trouble was, I wasn’t aware of my own fictionalizing and presented my fanciful account as fact.

Perhaps the “Hinault by Hinault” writer, far short of the manipulative propagandist I had taken him for, was similarly misled by his own faulty memory.  Perhaps he couldn’t imagine a non-nationalistic motive for Hinault to persevere in such conditions.  (I doubt, though, that Hinault was actually very nationalistic; in his book he reports that, even after his famous rift with Greg LeMond in 1986, “We agreed that, in the world championship, neither of us would work if the other got away.”  This is significant because at the world championship, riders race are supposed for their countries, not for their trade teams, and not for their friends.)

Here’s a photo of Hinault, racing the Niwot time trial in the 1986 Coors Classic:

I thought my brother Geoff had taken this photo, but he couldn’t have because he’s in it (on the right, no shirt, high white socks, cast on his wrist).

Gauchos win national TTT championship

Some years ago, I wrote a story for the Daily Peloton about the 1990 National Collegiate Cycling Championships, where the UC Santa Barbara team I was on won the team time trial.  It had been over a decade since the race when I wrote my story, and I had to rely heavily on memory.  I seemed to recall that only one team started their race after we did, and that was CU Boulder.  We’d beaten all the other teams, and had only to watch them come in to know that we’d won.  But looking back, I wasn’t sure about CU having raced last:  I also remembered  having been really nervous about the Cal Poly team from San Luis Obispo, who had won the collegiate national TTT the year before. 

I didn’t want to get this detail wrong, so I asked three of my former UCSB teammates how they remembered the race.  Without any prompting or leading questions from me, all three of them recalled, very assuredly, that it was Cal Poly who was the last team on the road.  Figuring that three matching accounts couldn’t be wrong, I wrote up my story accordingly:

Ah, the torment! Cal Poly still had four riders together, and they looked a lot faster than we’d felt coming up the home stretch. We looked at the clock. Then at Cal Poly. Clock. Poly. Clock. And then a shocking thing happened: their paceline broke in two. Several seconds went by before the front two noticed. A huge gap opened, fifty meters. The gap never closed. Their third guy finally crossed the line but was six seconds too late. Such a close margin—and suddenly, doubt set in. Could Steve’s [timing] number have been inaccurate? Or approximate? Trevor grilled him. Are you absolutely positively sure? Steve was. No doubt whatsoever. We’d won. Gold.

Pretty specific description, eh?  Well, I had the benefit of a photo my brother snapped of Cal Poly’s finish.  Once I found that photo, I vividly remembered how the Cal Poly paceline had fallen apart at the end.  I remembered this as clearly as if I’d seen it with my own eyes—but actually I hadn’t.  I came across another photo years after my Daily Peloton story was published:

Zoom in.  See the dude in the background on the far left with the red and white helmet?  That’s me.  To my left you can just make out my teammate Trevor.  Our other teammates are obscured by the guys who have just released the Cal Poly riders (in the green and white).  Sure enough, Cal Poly went before we did.  The last team on the road was indeed CU Boulder, as I’d originally remembered.  Dang it!

So why did three of my teammates all remember it wrong?  It’s hard to say, but one explanation comes immediately to mind:  it’s a lot better story if Cal Poly goes last.  That sets up the gut-wrenching suspense at the end.  More likely than not, my teammates had simply remembered things how they’d wanted to.  Unintentional fiction.

How much time is involved in creating such fiction?  If you’d asked my teammates and me about this race a week, a month, or six months after it happened, we’d surely have remembered it right.  But a decade later, such details have faded, and the brain fills them back in as well as it can—which in this case meant that accuracy succumbed to drama.

Mount Evans and the Stelvio

Memory is not the only culprit when it comes to such inaccuracy.  There’s also our fallible interpretation of real-time events.  With simple matters (e.g., is that traffic light red or green?) we do just fine, but with more complicated matters our interpretations are best-effort.  When we make sense of unfolding events, we’re really telling a story to ourselves about what we are seeing.  We do this automatically whenever we imagine another person’s perspective; researchers call this  “theory of mind.”  (One test for autism demonstrates that severely autistic children cannot employ a theory of mind, while the rest of us take it for granted.)

As an example of inaccurate interpretation of events, I offer a tale of the 1986 Mount Evans hill climb.  Just after the halfway point of the race, the peloton exploded and I found myself in the company of just two other riders:  my teammate Peter Stubenrauch and our friend (and rival) John Cotton.  Pete was the best climber of the three, and normally John was much stronger than I.  On this day, though, we seemed well matched and climbed together for many miles.  I was having the best race of my life, despite a bizarre mechanical problem:  my front hub, a wacky Dura-Ace AX, had these big plastic dust caps and one of them was catching on the fork tip and grinding against the rotating hub.  This made an intermittent but relentless noise, somewhere between a whine and a shriek.  Eventually Pete rode up next to me and asked what the hell the noise was.

Mount Evans is a really long race—27 miles, climbing almost 7,000 feet—so our pace allowed for some light conversation, and after discussing the hub a bit Pete and I somehow got on the topic of my new aero brake levers (among the first type to have unexposed cable housing).  At about this time John was suddenly dropped, and by the finish Pete and I had taken something like five minutes out of him.  A little while after the race, John came over and congratulated us:  “You guys really did some good teamwork there.  I overheard you discussing tactics but I couldn’t make out what you were saying.  Then you timed your attack and counterattack to perfection.  What can I say … there was nothing I could do!”

We of course had no idea what he was talking about.  There had been no tactics in that race except to pace ourselves carefully.  The only thing we’d talked about was my bike.  John imagined that we beaten him through teamwork—which must have been preferable to admitting that he was just slower that day.

A more recent example:  the Giro d’Italia, which just wrapped up last weekend.  I watched the penultimate stage twice:  once on Saturday morning via a live Internet feed, and again that evening on TV.  The morning coverage was from Eurosport so the announcers were David Harmon and the veteran cycling champion Sean Kelly.  As the racers tackled the brutal Stelvio pass, Kelly talked about how this late in a grand tour, on a course this difficult, often the tactics cease to be that important:  either the racers have it in their legs or they don’t.  The evening coverage was from Universal Sports so the announcers were Steve Schlanger and the former American pro Todd Gogulski.  Schlanger made a predictable comment about this being a “chess game on wheels” or some such thing.  Gogulski agreed, citing the importance of teamwork and tactics in the race.

I had to laugh.  These announcers seemed to be saying opposite things.  Who was right and who was wrong?  Well, it’s complicated.  Tactics certainly were in play.  For example, Christian Vande Velde dropped back from a breakaway to help his teammate, Ryder Hesjedal, who was in contention for the overall Giro d’Italia victory.  Damiano Cunego should have done the same for his leader, Michele Scarponi, but unaccountably didn’t.  Overall race leader Joaquim Rodriguez needed to attack Hesjedal but waited too long (setting himself up to lose the Giro in the last stage the following day).  Was it tactics that ultimately determined the outcome?  Probably not—to Kelly’s point, many riders just didn’t have the legs to carry out tactical moves.  (If this was a poker game, former Giro champ Ivan Basso couldn’t even afford the ante.) 

There was no single “accurate” way to narrate that race.  No two racers had the same experience, and announcers can only speculate on each racer’s story.  Perhaps we’ll know cycling has truly come of age in America when we have talk shows where sports pundits argue onscreen for hours at a time about this stuff.

The Stelvio and the Mini Zinger

Unintentional fiction also results when, aware that others are telling themselves stories about us, we try to control or influence those stories.  On the Stelvio, Vande Velde led the group of overall contenders kilometer after kilometer, grinding out a grueling pace designed to paralyze and shrink the group, and yet he wore a perfect poker face.  Looking at him, you’d be tempted to think this was easy for him—but it obviously wasn’t.  After he finally completed his job and dropped from the lead group, he lost over seven minutes in just a few kilometers.

It’s a good bet Vande Velde was deliberately looking as unfazed as possible so he could psych out his opponents.  Even though they were behind him, their team directors, following the race in their cars, had access to the same video feed we viewers did, and could talk to their racers via radios.  If Vande Velde showed how much he was suffering, he might have given comfort, however indirectly, to the enemy.  (Hesjedal, meanwhile, looked like he was really suffering, but then he always does—so his mask of suffering told his opponents nothing.  Maybe his lack of poker face, given with his routinely tireless performances, carries out a mind game of its own.)

In my own humble races I sometimes told misleading stories through my actions.  In the 1985 Red Zinger Mini Classic, an 8- or 9-day stage race, I got in several breakaways with my friend Peter, who won every stage.  Being much stronger, and a way better sprinter, he was content to do most of the work in the breakaway.  But in the criteriums I was always sure to take my pulls as we went through the start/finish stretch, where there was a higher concentration of spectators.  Here I am on a back-stretch, preparing to once again get Pete’s wheel:

Meanwhile, Pete would often let me beat him in the primes, because he know I wanted to get the sprint leader jersey away from another kid whom neither of us liked.  Pete made it look close:  I’d throw my bike at the line and just barely win the prime.

What were we up to?  Well, I led through the start/finish area because I wanted to glean all the glory I could from a race I wasn’t capable of winning.  Meanwhile, I wanted to make the race look good by seeming to give Pete a run for his money.  He must have also had the race’s image in mind when he pretended to almost win the primes:  if the spectators had known how totally dominant he was, they’d probably have gotten bored.  Not that we thought all this through or discussed it, of course.  We just followed our impulses.

After one of these criteriums, a spectator took me aside.  He was a grown-up and spoke with authority:  “Look, you can beat this guy, but you have to be smart about it!  You can’t be dragging him around the course all the time—he’s taking advantage of you!  You’re almost as fast in the sprint—if you just conserved your energy for the end I’ll bet you could beat him!”  I could have told the guy it was all smoke and mirrors, but I didn’t.  I just mumbled something noncommittal.  I wasn’t telling any stories, per se:  just trying to influence the ones people told to themselves and each other.

Unintentional fiction vs. artifice

The chief difference between unintentional fiction and real fiction is artifice:  that is, intent.  The true fiction writer is aiming for a specific effect, conveying a certain idea, and has at his or her disposal anything imagination can conjure.  The essayist, biographer, or journalist must stick to the facts.  And yet, the truths the essayist conveys are still a matter of insight and intent.  Choices are made, a perspective is advanced, and best-effort interpretations still abound.  Fiction, in its various guises, has us all surrounded.

Perhaps what feels so “honest” and forthright about “Memories of the Peloton” is Hinault’s apparent absence of artifice.  He’s a retired bike champ, not a writer.  The translator, in his preface, suggests “that Hinault dictated his memoirs into a tape recorder and then had them transcribed exactly as he had spoken them.  The result was original and created a very immediate impression of the man and his character, but it lacked the logical structure you are entitled to expect in a book.”  Indeed, Hinault breezes from one topic to another, and one passage that has really stuck with me concerns the training rides he did with local riders during his late teens: 

We used to set off on Thursday afternoons … and ride 100 or 120 kilometres.  We used to amuse ourselves by sprinting for all the signs.  We’d go to a grocer’s to buy yoghurt and sometimes the grocer would lend us little spoons.

I absolutely love that those little spoons made it into the book.  Perhaps this shows how important those early, carefree training rides were to him.  The 1979 Tour de France, which Hinault won, isn’t even mentioned.