Vlog
Remember those old Ovaltine ads saying how kids will drink what they will not eat? Well, in case this post is discovered by a person who will watch what s/he will not read, I am making it available as a vlog. Watch this video on your laptop, tablet, phone, or in theaters everywhere! (Where available.) Share it with friends and family! And if you share it with a blind person, lie and say it’s a podcast ... s/he will never know the difference!
Introduction
This is the third “old yarn” installment on albertnet (inspired by my pioneering effort “The Cinelli Jumpsuit” and the subsequent post “Bike Crash on Golden Gate Bridge”). This is the kind of story that would normally be a “From the Archives” item, except I’ve never before written it down.
(Here’s what I looked like around the time this story takes place. You can see how scrawny, goofy, and yet somehow self-possessed I was.)
The Enemy Coach - Spring 1988
I realized the other day that I’m in my tenth year of coaching high school mountain bike racers. I had no idea, when I started out, that I would stick with it this long, but it’s been a blast so why stop? Something my student athletes don’t know (and there’s no real point in telling them) is that before becoming a NICA coach in NorCal, I already had experience coaching.
Decades ago, after high school, I took a gap year and moved to California to get residency, to lower my future college tuition costs. During that time I had several jobs, including a gig canning underwear, another answering phones at a radio station (yes, that was me taking the 9th caller who won the free passes), and a third working in a bike shop. On the side, I coached a team of junior road cyclists. There were eight or ten of them, and they were part of a larger team, the San Luis [Obispo] Cycling Club, SLCC, which also had something like forty adults. This was in fall of 1987 through the summer of 1988.
The coaching was supposed to be a paid gig, something like $7/hour, but I don’t think I ever got paid. That was fine … my love of the sport was enough incentive. In general my role was to ride with the juniors, show them the ropes, drive them to races, console them after the races, and try to keep them from quitting. That last bit might seem uncharitable but it was in fact a real struggle, because bike racing is a very, very hard sport and as you can read here, here, here, here, and here, it can take a long time to get good at it.
It was kind of hard for me to build cred with these juniors because (as you’ve probably already grasped) I was scarcely older than they were. I considered but rejected the strategy of briefing them on my own (albeit modest) success as a junior road cyclist, because it would have sounded like (and, well, would have been) bragging, and after all talk is cheap. So I just did my best to explain and model the right technique. To the extent I talked about my own racing it was to describe how frustrating the sport was for me starting out, to impress upon them how normal that is.
Well, one early spring day, in March or April of 1988, our team director decided, as a treat, to bring in a big, fancy USCF-certified coach to run a one-day clinic. (The USCF was the United States Cycling Federation and was the governing body of road cycling; it’s now known as USA Cycling, or USAC.) We all met up at the bike shop that sponsored the team. I knew nothing about the USCF coach certification process but could only assume it was a complete joke, because from the very beginning this guy struck me as a clown.
Yeah, I know what you’re thinking … of course I would have it in for this guy, since here he was stealing my thunder. And sure, that’s part of it, but it’s not like I was immune to being impressed myself, and of course I was interested in getting whatever knowledge and insight I could from the guy. But right off the bat he showed his true colors by showing up on a bike with upturned, sawed-off handlebars. This was a somewhat fashionable fad among douchebags of that period. It was supposed to be aerodynamic and tell the world how fast you were on the flats. Here’s what that setup looked like:
Of course it defeated the purpose of the drop handlebar, an excellent design that remains the standard today because it gives the rider so many different ways to hold the bars over varied terrain. I scoffed at sawed-off bars even at the time, and in fact doubted it was actually more aero, based on the result of the Colorado state time trial championship the previous year.
(Quick aside on that. In 1987 my friends P— and J— were both on the 7-Eleven junior team, which gave the riders all free road bikes but had only one time trial bike to go around. The TT bike had a smaller front wheel, a down-sloping top tube, and upturned “bullhorn” style handlebars—the non-DIY version of what you see above. There was a bit of a debate over who got to use the TT bike for the state championship time trial. J— pushed his case harder, P— shrugged it off, and guess who ended up winning the race? P—, on his bog-standard road bike, and by a significant margin. Years after this, wind tunnel tests confirmed that the bullhorn bars are no more aero; only the hoop-shaped “clip-on” bars give an advantage.)
The other thing about this fancy certified coach is that, despite the temperature being in the lower- to mid-50s, he had bare legs. I’d spent all winter trying to teach my juniors to wear leg warmers when it’s cool, and maybe half of them had actually listened, but now that was out the window. The coach’s goal in eschewing leg warmers was obvious: he was showing off his big, shaved thighs. He was a sprinter, in fact more of a track rider than a roadie, and it showed. Of course there were stars in the kids’ eyes, which the guy’s swagger only increased. He talked constantly, and so much of what came out of his mouth was malarkey.
For example, he told the riders not to try to do two races on consecutive days: “Your body needs to recover. Target just one of the weekend’s races.” This flew in the face of what I’d been saying, which is that if we’re attending a race weekend, and are at the venue both days anyway, everyone should do both races, and that’s the best way to improve your day-to-day recovery. This blowhard also instructed the kids to figure out what they’re good at and focus on that instead of trying to do everything well … which is ridiculous because stage races require the full range of capabilities, and it’s fun to ride in the mountains even if you’re better at sprinting. I feared that my juniors would note the discrepancies between what I, their almost-peer coach, was saying vs. this big-thighed, USCF-certified, grown-up coach, and systematically un-learn everything I had tried to teach them.
My own coaching style was (and remains) just to ride, not talk too much, answer questions, and only provide tips during an obvious teachable moment. But this dude just loved to hold forth, and during our training ride kept up a steady stream of do this, don’t do that, etc. At no point did he acknowledge that I was even a coach, much less ask me if he was teaching something (e.g., a rotating paceline) that I’d already covered (which I had). I was just another kid to him, which—I will freely confess—caused a quiet animosity to mount in me. But what could I do? I just silently went along, wondering if this one clinic could effectively end my coaching gig by stripping away all the scraps of cred I’d managed to stitch together over the preceding months.
At the far point of our ride, before heading back toward the bike shop, the coach stopped us at a city park and said, “We’re going to do a drill here. It’s very important, in bike racing, to be able to jostle with other riders and not be afraid of some contact, of bouncing off each other. You also need to know the proper way to fall.” (I’m quoting this as though verbatim; obviously I’m paraphrasing from memory as best I can, but you catch the drift.) So he instructed the riders to ride around on the grass and bump into each other, to get a feel for that. I wasn’t so sure this was a good idea, since several of these kids were pretty new to the sport and might be a little freaked out, but what could I say? I stayed on the sideline and watched.
To my horror, this big stupid thick coach started riding around among the juniors like a big cat selecting his prey, and then knocking over one rider after another. What a dick! Just a big freaking bully, showing off by terrorizing my poor juniors! That was one of the thoughts racing through my mind. The other thought was: oh, good. This is gonna be AWESOME. Because this coach didn’t know about Road Warrior.
Road Warrior was a game my brothers and friends and I had invented and played at since we were like 12 or 13. It consisted of biking around on residential streets and trying to run each other into curbs, parked cars, and/or each other. It was not so different from what this douchey coach was doing, except it was on asphalt and was a more level playing field, our skill levels being similar. For the most part it was a game of chicken, though we did occasionally hit a car or the ground. Minor scrapes suffered in the process were as natural and expected as messing up the kitchen when you cook. The most important thing I learned from Road Warrior is the importance of staying low and getting underneath your opponent’s body. I noted the effectiveness of this when playing against the neighbor kid, a pretty tough hard-knocks type who had lived with various foster families and kept all their names, such that we referred to him as J— L— R— R— H-N—. (By protecting his privacy with initials I’ve ruined the almost poetic sound of all those two-syllable names strung together, but so be it). J— L— R— R— H-N— had street cred because was almost the only kid in Boulder, it seemed, who wasn’t completely white (nobody, not even he, knew what all ethnicities he had), plus he’d cut off half his thumb in shop class. Still, I’d naturally assumed I’d get the better of him, being a) bigger, and b) already a somewhat seasoned cyclist … but he was really, really good at Road Warrior, despite being on a BMX bike which we assumed would somehow be a disadvantage. From him I learned about coming in low.
(I was also no slouch at jostling in an actual race. In Colorado they’d often mix the already large junior field with the senior Category 3s, resulting in a peloton of well over a hundred riders. This photo is from just such a race, the 1987 Rocky Mountain News Criterium in Denver, snapped not long before I was taken out in a massive pileup.)
I didn’t do anything right away. Instead I waited a bit, savoring my anticipation of this coach’s comeuppance, letting him bully my juniors some more until I was sure at least a couple of them were fighting back tears. Then I casually rode over to the douchebag and took him out. He was absolutely astonished. I’m quite sure he’d never even considered this possible, and probably wasn’t even expecting anyone to challenge him. His dominance was of the untested Mike Tyson variety: run roughshod over your opponent because he’s too terrified to respond. Well, now he was on the ground.
He immediately leapt to his feet, climbed back on his stupid bike with its upturned bars, and came at me, certain that it was only the element of surprise that had allowed me to take him down. Wrong! I knocked him over like a damn bowling pin. Then I circled around to set up for the next bout, looking across my juniors to see their reaction. (You getting this, guys?) Another clash and the certified dumbass was on the ground again. He got angrier and angrier and his efforts got more forceful, but he just lacked the skill to accomplish anything. Eventually the juniors put their bikes down and just sat on the grass on the gentle hill at the edge of the park, watching and enjoying the spectacle. Finally, after I’d gone at least 8-0 in takedowns, the humiliated coach realized he wasn’t going to achieve anything except maybe a heart attack, and ended the drill.
The ride back to the shop was very quiet. And oddly, on my subsequent rides with the juniors, there was no trash talk about how badly I’d schooled the big bad USCF-certified coach (which trash talk I’ll confess I’d kind of been hoping to hear). In fact the enemy coach was never mentioned again; it was like he’d never existed. Which was, needless to say, totally fine with me.
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