From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume V

Introduction

This is the fifth installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. Volume I is here, Volume II is here, Volume III is here, and Volume IV is here. I got the idea for this series from all the published writers who, when they run out of new material, basically print their own money by publishing old letters or diaries that had just been gathering dust. Surely they edit and polish the stuff though, and choose only the best bits, which is what I’ve also done with the following passages, from letters I wrote to my friends or brothers. I’ve provided, for each snippet, the locale I was writing from. Enjoy please enjoy.

(Below is a fairly representative photo from those days. You can tell from my grin that I either had no idea how foolish I looked, or just didn’t care.)

July 17, 1991 - Berkeley

Remember all the hoopla surrounding the solar eclipse? Well that was barely noticeable here in the Bay Area. We’ve had a dark sky for weeks: nothing but cloud cover. I have had the blahs for days, real bad. I can’t seem to focus on anything but the negative. I try to count my blessings, but when the sky is this grey for this long, nothing seems to satisfy. It’s like the Book of Ecclesiastes: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity” (1:2) and “The eye is not satisfied with seeing,/ Nor the ear filled with hearing” (1:8). Of course, that narrator had it easy, because he was talking about all things “under the sun” and there is no sun to be had here. I just get so glum, I end up with songs like Pink Floyd’s “Dogs” in my head:

       So have a good drown
       As you go down
       All alone
       Dragged down by the stone

That was my feeling this morning when I looked outside and found another dreary day facing me. Even rain would be a nice change, but the sky outside is one of thick formless cloud cover, far too high up to break the monotony with rainfall. A day should ideally begin with a lovely dawn, breaking into a sunny yet cool morning, followed by a hot sun burning directly overhead at noon. This accomplished, the heat should taper off into a lazy sunny afternoon, ideally broken up by a short thundershower to set the scene for a slightly cooler evening and finally dusk. But for the last few days, nothing like this has transpired. Ten in the morning has been identical to noon, to 2 p.m., and to the evening. It’s been bland nothingness.

But then I looked out our sliding glass doors and was struck by something out toward the horizon. Out of a background of stony grey, I saw the island of Alcatraz, framed perfectly by the only structure that wears fog well: the Golden Gate bridge. I have seen Alcatraz countless times before, and never with so much as a second thought. But now it was the only brightly lit thing I had seen in days. Somehow the sun had found a loophole in the cloud cover and aimed itself right at the former prison, lighting it brilliantly. The scene looked like something out of The Wizard of Oz, with its emerald buildings shining as if lit from within. I grabbed the binoculars Dad gave me last Christmas and got the best look of Alcatraz I’ve ever had, as if the bridge and island were right in my backyard. That was the whole morning—only a few minutes long, and only out there on that island—but we had a morning nonetheless, and while it lasted “Dogs” evaporated and was replaced in my head with another Pink Floyd song, “A Pillow of Winds”:

        Green fields,
        A cold rain is falling
        In a golden dawn
        …
        And I rise like a bird
        In the haze
        When the first rays
        Touch the sky
        And the night winds die

The appearance of this oddly localized shaft of sun was so brief, I thought I might sink all the way back down into my earlier despondency, but I didn’t. Somehow, that little taste of sunshine seems like enough to sustain me for a while. After all, this is California. The sun is bound to come out soon. Right?

August 17, 1992 - Berkeley

School starts in about a week. The realization that this is my final semester is slowly sinking in. Last night I had a dream I went to interview for a job with a former employer. I wore this light blue cotton suit with white vertical stripes that was totally inappropriate, and in fact looked pretty ridiculous. Some receptionist kept trying to turn me away because of my suit, and due to my lack of ability with the new word processing software, and the fact that I didn’t even have an appointment. I kept trying to convince her that I could learn the new software quickly, but she wouldn’t believe me. Finally the office manager recognized me from when I’d worked there, and told me someone would talk to me in a few minutes.

While I was waiting in the lobby, I realized my suit was stretched really tightly over my body. Unbuttoning the jacket (which had buttons all the way to the collar, making it even less appropriate for the business world), I was horrified to find I was wearing another suit jacket underneath it. Unbuttoning this jacket, I found not one but two dress shirts, one beneath the other. I even had two pairs of shoes: some giant white Nike Air Super Solo Magnum Team Force Court Flight basketball shoes, and underneath those, some more conservative black Reebok tennis shoes. I began to strip off all my clothing and sort it by appropriateness so that I could end up with one decent outfit. Just as I was down to my underwear behind the two piles, the president of the company walked out to meet me. Glancing at my watch, I realized I was ten minutes late for my first class, and since this was the first day of the semester, I would be disenrolled from college if I didn’t get my ass over there. I fled from the building, leaving behind all the clothes.

January 10, 1994 – San Francisco

I almost got shot. E— and I had driven all the way to Ventura to visit friends and arrived at like 2 a.m. Our friend D— lives on a little street called Bath which is in a fairly nice area, near the beach. Bath Street isn’t all that wide—parking along it is illegal—so it’s kind of like a little alley. We were parked temporarily while unloading and I was taking the bikes off the back of the car when a car drove by us really slow. D—, being new to the neighborhood, thought it was either a neighbor or somebody looking for directions, but the guy didn’t stop. He just drove on, down the dead-end street, and D— said, “Wow, that guy looked at me really funny.” I hadn’t actually looked; I was busy unhooking bungee cords (if you aren’t paying attention and one snaps you, it’s quite painful, you know). Well, after turning around the car drove by again, really slowly, and again I didn’t look. D— was curious, though, and looked in at the guy. A short distance later, the guy stopped and got out of the car.

I didn’t want any trouble, and have adopted a big-city policy of minding my own business, so I just continued with the bikes, unlocking them and juggling the Straight-Jacket and Bad Bones (which sound like handy ghetto weapons but are actually U-lock accessories). I could hear the guy saying to D—, “What’s a mattah, man, you ain’t useta seein’ dudes like me ‘round heah?” D— said no, and the guy came back, “Man, you lookin’ at me funny, man, like ya got a problem wit me or sumpin.’” At this point D— came back with a response which he will never live down: “I think you’re paranoid.”

I glared at D— at this point, but I still didn’t look at the stranger (perhaps out of fear of his thinking that I, too, was looking at him funny). Had I looked, I would have seen him pull a handgun out from his jacket as he yelled, “Paranoid? I’ll show you paranoid!” At this point, E—, who clearly possessed the most presence of mind of us all, rabbited. D— quickly backed up towards the garage door, and I continued to mess with the lock. Not having seen the gun, I simply locked the lock and tested its weight in my hand, evaluating its effectiveness in bashing in a human skull. I mean, hell, I’d never scrapped with a gun-toting lunatic before so it never occurred to me the guy was armed. I figured we had a minor altercation on our hands and we had him outnumbered. I was puzzled by D—’s obvious terror as he smeared himself up against the garage door with his arms up, saying, “No problem, man, no problem!”

I looked over, finally, at this point, and the man was bending over. Not having seen the gun, I thought he was picking up something off the ground to throw at us. I was just standing there, like a great big dopy-looking target, trying to remember if I’d packed my mace in my bag. (It’s actually this new jalapeno pepper spray, which has now been made illegal in the state of California. Ironic, isn’t it, that handguns and automatic weapons are legal here, but harmless self-defense sprays are not?) Anyway, I finally realized what was going on: the guy was bending over to get a clip out of his sock. He loaded his gun and pointed it right at D—, and by this time there was nowhere for me to go. You don’t want to move too quickly, you know, when a lunatic is pointing a loaded gun.

Oddly enough, in the moment I didn’t feel that scared. I was thinking to myself that if the guy really wanted to go out and shoot someone, he’d have loaded his gun before leaving the house. Keeping the clip in his sock and reaching down to get it seemed kind of theatrical. Of course this was probably pure rationalization—my brain’s desperate effort to keep panic at bay by pretending the situation wasn’t that dire. Meanwhile D— just kept saying, “No problem, man, no problem!” until finally the guy got back in his car, where his woman had been waiting (I now noticed), and they drove off.

At that moment, I realized the gravity of the situation, and my teeth began chattering uncontrollably. We ran into the house, where E— had scared the daylights out of D—’s wife and her friend who hadn’t recognized her and wondered why this strange woman had suddenly burst through the door. E— had looked for a phone but failed to find once since the only one in sight was a crazy transparent terminator-style phone that look like a science project. It was at least five minutes before we were able to actually think straight, fetch the phone, and dial 911. An officer arrived within minutes, and we gave him a description of the man. (Interestingly, I had somehow remembered the car as a white ‘70s boxy thing, whereas D— was saying it was a dark, modern one—but I kept my mouth shut. I mean, the man had had a gun and I didn’t even realize it: I was clearly not star witness material.)

The cop said, “You’ll be interested to know that a man of the same description robbed a Motel 6 a few blocks away from here about two minutes before you called. We had four officers in the area but nobody got him.” I guess if we’d called earlier, they might have caught him in the act. On the other hand, people might have been shot.

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Non-Race Non-Report - 2021 Fort Ord CCCX XC MTB

Vlog

It occurred to me that some of my readers might be the types who unconsciously mouth the words they’re reading, as though they were reading aloud, and that others might be the type who turn their entire heads instead of just moving their eyes to track along the lines of text. Either of these types of people might get mocked while reading my blog, and I don’t want that. Meanwhile, still other people (I’m told) simply prefer a video. Thus,  I’m providing the vlog format here, and for everyone else the text follows below.

Introduction

It’s become a tradition for me, at this time of year, to head to Fort Ord in the Monterey area and do a mountain bike race. Normally, I’m a high school cycling coach and this is an opportunity for my riders to watch me suffer. But this year the NorCal League and our team are shut down due to the pandemic, so we didn’t get to go. And this means I don’t get to blog about my wretched, ill-fated race … another tradition stymied.

For a moment, I considered embracing the fake-news zeitgeist and writing a purportedly true but actually totally fabricated race report. After all, as we already knew but formally learned by watching The Social Dilemma, false information is much more interesting than the truth. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Then I considered doing a short story, but in my experience, people seem to prefer their fiction be labeled fact.

What follows is a completely honest report of the race I didn’t do (inspired, perhaps, by a story I dimly recall from the early ‘90s called “We Didn’t,” by Stuart Dybek). In accordance with the high standard set by my bike team for race/ride reports, I focus on the food, and provide the report in various versions, starting concisely before waxing verbose.

Executive summary

• We didn’t have our annual team dinner in the windowless back room of the Monterey Brewhouse (slogan: “We’re actually in Salinas”)
• The GPS didn’t direct me to a lonely stretch of a desolate road in the middle of nowhere only to announce, “You have arrived”
• No student laughed so hard a French fry came out his nose
• The portions weren’t so small I had to beg for the shrapnel from my daughter’s plate; after all, she’s off at college now and the meal never happened
• At the team tent that wasn’t erected in the morning, nobody forgot to bring the coffee, thus the lack of coffee was actual
• During the non-race non-warm-up, I didn’t fail to secure a student’s bike properly to the trainer, thus he couldn’t literally crash at zero mph
• All the training I didn’t do never had a chance to not pay off
• The race did not knock the stuffing out of anybody because there was no race and no stuffing
• I did not make an endless speech afterward, during which the parents clapped politely and the teenagers suffered silently
• When I didn’t return home because I hadn’t gone anywhere, I did not pour a beer and toast my own robust good health, nor did I drown my sorrows over the loss of my cycling fitness, though that loss (and my beer) are very real

Short report

Race stats: 0.00 miles (vs. 22.4 last year); 0 feet of vertical gain (vs. 2,362 last year); 0:00 race time (vs. 1:41:07 last year); 0.00 mph average speed (vs. 13.3 mph last year). 

Conclusion: I have no reason to believe I will ever again have the fitness necessary to race a bicycle. As far as I can tell, life will not go on—not in any recognizable way. You might say wait, that’s not true, this COVID pandemic shall pass. To which I respond, perhaps. Only perhaps. Consider these words from the writer Vladimir Nabokov: “At best, the ‘future’ is the idea of a hypothetical present based on our experience of succession, on our faith in logic and habit. Actually, of course, our hopes can no more bring [the future] into existence than our regrets change the past.”

Non-Pre-race Dinner (the night before I didn’t race):

• Lamb steaks that were deliciously rare because they caught fire under the broiler and had to be pulled out prematurely
• Mashed potatoes with salted butter and extra salt
• Sautéed zucchini
• German-style purple cabbage
• Rocky road ice cream with hot fudge because what do I need to be fit and trim for?

Breakfast (on the morning I would have raced)

• Two eggs, scrambled, burnt because I was too impatient to gradually wait for the pan to warm up and instead put a big flame under it so it was too hot—I could tell it was too hot because the butter smoked, and I knew I should hold back the eggs, take the pan off the heat, let it cool, wipe out the burned butter, and start over—but damn it fuck it all I just didn’t care and poured in the eggs in the pan anyway
• Two slices white bread that I thought would be wheat because the package said “Whole Grain Oat Nut” which was a lie but I was caught off-guard because the bread aisle was disorienting because my glasses were fogged up by my mask and I wasn’t at my normal store, where they require a reservation, a temperature test, a long line, a letter from your doctor, and support a maximum occupancy of like five, and I’m only slightly exaggerating
• An apple that just wasn’t very good because see above

During the non-race: nothing but half a bottle of water because my legs just kind of petered out halfway up South Park because I’m just so tired from the work week since my colleagues, newbies at teleworking, take all the time they would be commuting and pour it into working more, which in a perfect world would help everybody finish early, but instead everyone just launches more projects, generates more deliverables, and creates an overall culture that brings to mind that study NASA did of spiders given too much caffeine.

Unnecessary glycogen window treat: more ice cream because it’s so rare to have it around the house and even with one daughter no longer around, I better get the ice cream while I can; also a macaron that my daughter made, from a recipe that was incredibly complicated and took like a day but then a) the cookie was amazing, and b) what else is she gonna do with her time?

Full report

To my discredit, I was not very successful in looking around at the start and deciding who the fastest guy was likely to be, because there was no start line and no racers, not even myself. As soon as the race did not start, I didn’t get right on the wheel of the fastest guy, but if I had, he would have passed everybody during the slight uphill asphalt run-up to the dirt. I would have hit the single-track in second position, and then died on the guy’s wheel for a few minutes, and then the single-minded, sport-obsessed, totally unbalanced evil tech titan quasi-retired uber-fit bike bastards would have started passing me. It would have been a long race, four or five laps, and my strategy would have been to pace myself and wait for the guys ahead to start detonating so I could pass them.

If I were in racing form this year, that would make uphills a blast, obviously. I could be at the CCCX race and see a horrible 12% grade looming ahead, and I’d think, “Yeah! Bring it!” I’d look at the guys around me with something like pity. But of course I’m not in racing form; why would I be? I’m taking this shelter-in-place opportunity to develop the physique better suited to my current lifestyle: more like the shape of a Coke botte, or a bowling pin, or those inflatable clown bop bags or a Weeble that may wobble but it won’t fall down. That would stabilize me in my desk chair. Maybe if I can add some flesh to my face, I won’t look so gaunt, and thus so old, and after all nothing below my waist shows on a videoconference so why not develop a big soft woman-y butt? Perhaps an extra fifteen or twenty pounds would give me an air of gravitas.

Anyway, notwithstanding my new COVID physique, the non-race wasn’t too bad. I mean, how bad could it have been? I did find that on the climbs I wasn’t doing that I could, or perhaps couldn’t, put the hurt on any of the people who weren’t there. I’d heard these climbs described as “really long” but they seemed really short, as in actually literally nonexistent. It was a fun race, if only in my mind. But that’s actually overstating things. The race did not exist even in a reverie … this is the first time I’ve thought of it even hypothetically.

It’s been rainy in the Bay Area so there would have been several very deep puddles on the course that we’d have bombed through, sending water gushing up everywhere like one of those amusement park water rides. Oddly, only my trailing foot would get splashed. By the end of the race I would have had a drenched left foot and a bone-dry right foot.

On the last lap of my race, had there been one, I might well saw have seen this guy I’d remembered from the previous years’ races whom I’d have been chasing for the whole race (though most of the time he’d have been too far ahead to even see). His jersey would have said something pompous like “Woodside Beasts,” or some other rival high school team, meaning he’d be a coach too. I’d have started to close in on him on the final climb, right toward the end of the race. It would’ve looked like I wasn’t gaining fast enough and that he’d hold me off, except that I’d have been able to tell he was just dying.

I’d have dug deep, deeper, and deepest, and literally 50 feet from the end of the climb I’d have finally passed him. Damn, what a sucker-punch that would have been! He’d still be pissed off about it! The tricky part would have been holding him off on the fast, technical descent to the finish line. I’m not that great a downhiller because my wife would kill me if I crashed, but I’d have gone for broke, and presently on a narrow single-track section I’d have come up on a young high school girl who wouldn’t have been going that fast. I’d have realized that if I got stuck behind her, the Beast would catch up and surely pass me in the twisty bits near the finish line. On the other hand, there would be no place to pass except the thick bramble alongside the trail. Bramble is a notoriously tricky surface to ride on, because the ground can be really bumpy, even rock-infested, beneath the brush, and you won’t know until you’re on it. You could run over a rock, a beer bottle, a human skull, an empty bottle of hand sanitizer, maybe even a landmine because what the hell, this is all speculation anyway. I’d have taken the gamble, and though it would’ve been indeed bumpy—my bike would have heaved like a bucking bronco—I’d have made it past the girl, returned to the single-track, and never saw the Beast again.

After the finish line, feeling truly shattered, I would have been filled with the sublime feeling of having truly given it everything, so it wouldn’t have mattered how I’d placed—which would be good, because I would really have no idea about that. It’s better that way, I think, to decide how it went without worrying about the more or less meaningless matter of how I compared to those who happened to show up and race my category. Had they actually shown up. And had I.

But instead of being at peace no matter the result, I feel only a gap, a void, a lack, a profound sense of nothingness, the absence of any feeling about the race because there was no race, there was no course, there was no pit zone, there were no team tents or trailers, there was no podium and there was nobody there at all at Fort Ord, in the gentle dunes that would have been the course. Well, to be really accurate, surely there were hawks, and rodents, and earthworms, and it’s possible one or more of these creatures perceived something different this year, no groaning of cars and trucks and racers, no whirring and clunking of chains, no ticking of freewheels, no static-sound of tires on dirt, no cheering, no PA system, no nothing. This year, there was only—to quote the poet Peter Kane Dufault—“one huge hush the whole day.”

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Race Report - Everest Challenge 2014 (Stage 2)

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

Introduction

Ideally, you’re reading this because you’ve already read my race report for Stage 1 of the 2014 Everest Challenge and are dying to find out what happened in Stage 2.  If, however, you stumbled upon this page by googling “pastrami not lean” or “Jennifer Lawrence nude cycling burrito race,” please don’t leave!  This post really is where you need to be … just go read about Stage 1 first.  That way, much of this report will make more sense (though, honestly, probably a lot of it still won’t).

Pre-race

On Saturday night, I was filled with near-absolute dread.  Given that Saturday’s race had featured dire cold, rain, sleet, and snow, you might assume that I dreaded a continuation of awful racing weather.  Well, not exactly.  In fact, I was dreading the prospect of the weather not being bad enough.  I was holding out some small hope that the cold and wet would be so grossly extreme that the race would be shortened in the name of safety, or my pals would say “Let’s bag it,” so I could shrug my shoulders and follow along, thus escaping both the race and the disgrace of cowardice.

I voiced this strategy when chatting with my daughter Alexa on the phone.  “Dad, you can’t quit!” she protested. “No matter what the weather’s like, you have to race!  If you drop out, you’ll never forgive yourself!”  Translation:  “I’ll never forgive you!”  And imagine the repercussions:  every time my daughter gives up on something, she could throw it in my face.  “Yeah, I’m a quitter!” she’ll say, “and I learned it from you!”

On Sunday morning I dressed in a long-sleeve Patagonia thermal top, shorts, jersey, leg warmers, arm warmers, Smartwool socks, a jacket, and Craig’s extra pair of full-finger gloves.  (Yes, I was humbled by his superior planning, just as I’m humbled by his greater strength every time we ride.)  

I confirmed at the check-in what I’d gathered the day before:  I was sitting eighth in the Masters 45+ category; in ninth was the Talented Mr. Ridley, some four minutes behind me; and in tenth was Marco, whom I’ve seen every year at the EC, another ten minutes behind.  So all I really had to do was finish this race without completely cracking and I could hold onto eighth.  Sounds simple, eh?  Well, considering I’d completely cracked two out of the last three times on this stage, and I hadn’t held anything back this year on Stage 1, things didn’t look so hot.

Stage 2 – 73 miles, 14,030 feet of climbing

There was a mile or two of neutral riding before we crossed the highway and started the real racing.  My teeth were chattering uncontrollably.  I hoped everybody would chill out (pun intended, sorry) for a  good long time before dropping the hammer; it takes enough energy just staying warm.  But as soon as we reached the end of the neutral section, a guy went to the front and laid down the smack.  This was Chris Walker, who had finished third the day before, and was obviously wanting to turn the tables.  I saw my heart rate go into the 150s and decided my legs weren’t complete shit as in years before, which was kind of nice.  On the other hand, this meant I had to actually try.  (You see what a frail ego I have to work with?  Go ahead, pity me.)

I hung in there for a couple miles, but this was all too much.  I let eight guys roll away.  I looked back; the peloton was shredded like confetti behind me.  As the front group continued to distance me, it shed another guy:  Bobby, who had finished four minutes ahead of me, in seventh, the day before.  I was soon joined from behind by Marco, his teammate Jaycee, and one other guy.  We eventually caught Bobby, to form a group of five.

I was stoked to have riders to work with, but they were going a bit too fast.  I couldn’t bear to let them ride away, so I just had to suffer.  Can a person get better at suffering?  Of course.  Does suffering ever become any less unpleasant?  Please.  Read my lips:  it sucked.  It’s kind of funny how I train hard for like ten weeks for this, and my reward is abject misery for six hours, two days in a row.  It’s kind of an odd thing to plan your summer around.  Maybe my kids are right (“Dad, you’re crazy!”).  I’m reminded of what my brother Max swears my dad said to me when he heard I’d ridden over Trail Ridge Road during a thunderstorm at fourteen:  “You’re not very bright, are you?”

At least we weren’t being rained on.  It was really wet at the top, though, enough that the spray got our legs and butts all wet.  There’s a distinctive squeaky sound a cyclist’s wet shorts make when, after climbing out of the saddle, he sits back down.  It’s like a windshield ice-scraper being dragged across ballistic nylon, and we were all making that sound.  At the Glacier Lodge turnaround I took a bottle of water, mainly as ballast.  A minute into the descent I saw the Talented Mr. Ridley heading up toward the turnaround.  I reckoned we had three minutes on him.  My group took the descent easy due to the wet, and he caught us just as the road leveled out at the bottom.

I needed more Cytomax, but as we came through the parking area before heading up Waucoba Canyon, I couldn’t find my team’s cooler. So I pulled a baggie from my jersey pocket and mixed up a bottle while riding in our paceline.  “Really?” someone said.  The Talented Mr. Ridley rode away from us.  Marco seemed surprised.  “He’s kind of a lone wolf,” I explained.  Some twenty minutes later, the guy reappeared ahead, gradually drifted back to us, rode next to us for awhile, and then fell off.  “There goes Lone Wolf,” Marco said.

I’ll get right to the point:  our group of five got to the second summit turnaround together.  It may seem like this took no time at all, the way I’m reporting it, but believe me, it took a good while.  The race organizers lengthened this climb a couple years back, and I’ve never adjusted.  Imagine going to the dentist and having the hygienist poke and scrape at your teeth and gums for the entire normal duration, and then—just when you think it’s all over and you can get your new toothbrush and leave—she starts all over again and goes another round with her poking tool.  That’s the new, improved Waucoba Canyon climb.

We worked well on the descent and were still together when we reached the cars again.  We’d all agreed to stop to refuel and shed some clothing (it had warmed up a bit).  A couple of the roving race volunteers gave us some encouragement.  “You’re our favorite racer!” one of them told me.  I must have looked as bewildered as I felt because she went on to explain, “You smile more than anybody else!”  Now I was more confused than ever.  Could I have actually smiled at any point during this race?  She must have mistaken my rictus of pain.  Still, as misguided as the statement was, it’s still the nicest thing anybody has ever said to me, and I suppose I was encouraged.

Good thing, too, because that last climb—over 20 miles long and gaining over 6,000 feet in elevation—is a monster. At least I wasn’t facing it alone—I was happy to be in this small group, with nobody in it a threat to my GC placing. Not that it was windy or anything, and drafting wouldn’t make much difference at such low speed, but the miles go faster when you have company. As the Coen brothers put it, “There’s a spirit of camaraderie that exists between the men, like you find only in combat maybe, or on a pro ball club in the heat of a pennant drive.” The Coen brothers were talking about prison, but it’s an apt comparison; indeed, when (just a couple miles into this final climb) I couldn’t hack the pace anymore, and I had to let the other guys go, and was distinctly bummed at the long, silent miles stretching out ahead of me, I wondered if this was like going from the prison yard to solitary confinement.

I toiled away solo, buried in my lowest gear, starting to actually get too warm for the first time all weekend. Paul and Ken drove by in the Intimidation Van. “Do you need anything?” they called out. I did—I needed a lot of things, starting with a higher VO2 max and improved lactate threshold—but I didn’t need anything they could provide. I hoped I didn’t look too pathetic, pedaling away like a girl scout fighting the fierce current of Lake Chabot in a crappy little paddle boat.

Paul drove ahead and parked so I could ditch my jacket and arm warmers as I came by. Ken was quick enough to snap a photo. Look carefully at my crow’s feet—which are actually longer than an actual crow’s actual feet—and Paul’s waiting hands at the right edge of the frame.

The group of four that I’d dropped from was still visible at various points, and it disgorged another of its riders, whom over a period of twenty minutes I caught and dropped. Then Jaycee fell off the pace, and I gradually made up ground on him for another thirty minutes until, along a straight, shallow section of road, I saw him off the side of the road peeing. It seemed a pity to pass him under such circumstances, but my supersized bladder is one of my only athletic talents and I suppose I should take advantage of it when I can.

Not long after thus moving into ninth on the road, I suddenly felt completely nauseated. This happens sometimes, particularly at altitude (I was at about 7,000 feet elevation), and I truly hoped I wouldn’t hurl. Barf is really caustic so even just a mouthful can make your throat burn for hours. Fortunately I only dry-heaved. I did this a number of times. You know things are bad when you “only” dry-heave and feel fortunate about it. I retched wretchedly for a couple of minutes, and then felt a bit better and soldiered on.

Paul and Ken drove by again. I’m sure they felt a bit awkward trying to say something encouraging to somebody locked in such a seemingly pointless struggle, with so far still to go. What could they say? “Almost there!” No, that’s not true. And “You’re doing great!” might come off as sarcastic. But these guys know what they’re doing. “Dana, there are two bearded riders behind you!” Paul called out. “You are leading the bearded division!”

The temperature steadily dropped. The next time I came upon the parked van I got my arm warmers and jacket back from the guys and put them back on. Riding on, I was aware of a rider gradually catching up to me, but knew by his form that it wasn’t the Talented Mr. Ridley. Eventually the guy caught me. It was one of the bearded guys, and he pulled level right at the 5-KM-to-go sign. I felt oddly demoralized: not because I was getting passed (this guy wasn’t even in my category), but by how tired this guy looked. I thought he’d just roll away from me, but he couldn’t; it was like catching me had taken all he had. He was a living reminder of how hard this was. And for the first time all weekend, I began to battle despair.

How could I, with just 5K to go? Well, they’re long kilometers. I had about 1,000 vertical feet yet to climb. And it just suddenly seemed as though I couldn’t do it anymore. My legs simply didn’t want to turn the pedals. What if I stop? I wondered. Just for a minute? Just a little rest? I knew, of course, that these were the crazed delusions of a madman. I was like a car with an almost-dead battery: if I shut off the engine, I’d never get it going again. But 5K? It couldn’t be done! I reminded myself what was at stake: Marco (in tenth) was surely only a couple minutes ahead, and The Talented Mr. Ridley was behind me and unlikely to catch up, much less drop me by four minutes. All I really needed to do was finish. But that made it worse: so close, yet so far.

And so: I just kept pedaling, somehow. And after a few minutes, the damnedest thing happened: I started to feel better. Not so much physically, but emotionally. My mind relaxed. Yes, I can do this, I realized. Perhaps the grade had let up a bit, or the energy drink was doing its thing. Whatever the case, the despair melted away and in fact now struck me as having been silly. This was an epiphany of sorts: the idea that despair can just be a passing mood, that goes away all by itself. I suppose I’ve heard words to this effect before, but now I’ve experienced it. I’m going to remember it.

I reached the finish, made sure the ref got my number, rolled down to the refreshment station, grabbed a couple Clif bars, got my medal and t-shirt, and rode immediately back to the van before my tired body could cool off.  Even still I froze my ass off before reaching the van.  Ian and Craig rode by after a bit, and made a quick turnaround after the finish themselves.  We didn’t even pause for a photo-op; this was the only shot I managed to get.

Post-race

We showered at the hot springs.  I had a beer stashed in the cooler and chugged it:  doctor’s orders.  We went to Erick Schat’s for sandwiches, where we encountered (at like 3 p.m., spang between lunch and dinner) a crazy mob of people.  We had to sit outside in the cold.  Here we are.

Here is my sandwich.  It became more glorious when I’d stuffed the tomatoes, pickle, and sauerkraut into it.

Not shown:  the crazy bird that attacked Paul, and then attacked Craig.  Also not shown:  the little kid who started crying when Craig violently shooed away the crazy bird.  Seriously weird goings-on.  At least there wasn’t a group of firemen seated next to us, as there had been at Astorga’s and then at the Italian joint the next night.  For them to have joined us a third time would have been too much.  Instead it just started to rain.  We finished our lunches standing under the eaves.

We got on the road earlier than ever before, only to see on a flashing roadside sign that Highway 120, through Yosemite, was closed, along with the next highway to the north over Sonora Pass.  Getting home looked like it would take forever, meaning our merry band would go the way of the Donner Party, or the guys in “Deliverance” or “The Osterman Weekend.”  Fortunately, Highway 120 was open when we reached it.  Look closely in this photo (taken at the park entrance where we stopped to pee) and you’ll see the blowing snow.

We stopped at the pizza place in Groveland.  The staff seemed really out of it, bickering over who had to make the pizzas.  Ken asked if we could get a basil and tomato pizza and the cashier said, “No, we can’t make that.”  He asked which ingredient they couldn’t do, and she absolutely could not parse the question.  When I described this to Ian (outside) he said, “But that’s a classic Margherita pizza!”  I replied, “If I tell her that, she’ll say they don’t have a liquor license.”

I think the pizza-making job finally went to this fat guy in a filthy t-shirt who was chewing on a toothpick.  The poor cashier took a long time miscalculating the check.  I asked for a receipt and she had to write it out by hand on a scrap of paper, misspelling the name of the restaurant.  We got the two pizzas to go and ate them in the dark (the dome light seeming unwise as Paul was driving us down Priest Grade).  Ken said, “Dana, I’m gonna be pissed if I come across that guy’s toothpick.”  The thing is, it was nevertheless pretty dang good pizza.  Or were we just insanely hungry?

Postscript

On my third (short) ride after the EC, I went to shift into my big ring and my front derailleur cable snapped.  Bizarre.  I can’t help but feel grateful that this hadn’t happened during the race, when—despite the awful weather and rote suffering—nothing major went wrong.  And now I’ve been clobbered by a virus, which so easily could have struck earlier.  I’m pretty jazzed about this race, really; on my sixth try, I feel like I pretty much finally got it right.

From the Archives - Getting the Brush

Introduction

When I was around fifteen, I owned an album by the punk rock band Fear.  I didn’t much like Fear, but I liked to listen to them.  There was more fascination involved than aesthetic pleasure.  (A one-star reviewer of the album recently wrote, “I used to like this band until I had the misfortune of seeing this band live. The whole time I thought the singer was going to croke over and die. That’s the only reason I stayed.”)

Years later, in college, I came across the tape and played it again for old time’s sake.  The only song that still intrigued me was “Getting the Brush” (you can hear thirty seconds of it here).  I wrote a little essay about this song.  Here it is.

(If you read my previous post about rock covers, or even if you didn’t, you may be interested to know that Fear, though a relatively minor band, sparked nineteen covers, including versions from mainstream bands like Guns N’ Roses and Soundgarden.)

Getting The Brush – March 18, 1992

Getting the brush

Getting the brush

Life seems so

Futile

Getting the brush

Getting the brush

I call my baby

But she never

Picks up the phone

You know what I mean

She just leaves me there

Standing all alone!

Getting the brush

Getting the brush

You can do anything

But I can’t stand

To be ignored anymore

Getting the brush

Getting the brush

getting the brush  

getting the brush

I have quoted in entirety the lyrics to a song which is (not surprisingly) called “Getting the Brush,” sung by a wonderfully heinous punk rock band called Fear.  The song is actually far more complex than it might appear on paper.  Try as it might, it cannot get beyond the utter despondency of its main theme:  “getting the brush.” 

The song begins with this chorus; then, the opening lyrics seem to promise something more complex, but ultimately cannot deliver.  This “life seems so/futile” inspires the question, “Why?  What is your sad story?” but no explanation of the singer’s dilemma immediately follows.  Instead, he goes back to lamenting his plight:  “getting the brush.”  And then—suddenly—the drum strikes loud, accompanied by a hard pluck on the electric guitar string, and for a fleeting moment we feel the music is on the verge of finally breaking out into its normal head-banging, fast-paced, harsh style. But the drum and guitar have only teased us:  they vanish, and we’re left with nothing but another stagnant “getting the brush.”

Finally, the full lyrical theme is tackled:  “I call my baby/ but she never/ picks up the phone.”  This long-awaited explanation of the pitiful theme is a blatant cliché.  Its very intention of being a cliché is openly announced with a stock phrase:  “You know what I mean?”  Of course we do, we’ve all been dissed before—but that’s not the point here.  The point is the struggle to overcome despondency:  and in another ignis fatuus, the drums and guitar kick up louder and more defiantly than ever as the singer finally raises his voice to yell, “Standing all  alone!”  At last, the headbanger gets out of his seat and the hair stands up on his spine, his heart races, he may even begin to drool in anticipation of the angry and abusive lyrics he has come to expect from Fear (from songs like “I Don’t Care about You” and “Let’s Have a War,” for example). 

Perhaps surprisingly, but in retrospect quite appropriately, the promising crescendo loses all momentum and dries up into lifeless curls of ineffectual sound:  the band simply cannot transform the singer’s sorrow into real anger.  The nightmarish recurring theme is back:  “getting the brush”—twice more.  At this point we realize that the song is clearly nothing more than a repetitive cycle of utter despair.  What more is there to say?  Clearly nobody is listening to this voice:  he is, quite simply, getting the brush.

The singer has given up explaining the circumstances behind his distraught condition.  But before he ends his song, he makes a simple point:  he can’t stand “to be ignored anymore”—and he seems to have a final flicker of anger as he says these words.  But alas, even his band has become too despondent to back him up, and for a brief interval all is silent before a pair of drum beats tries a final time to conjure up some fury.  By now, alas, the singer has lost all drive, and submits completely to his emotional ruin:  “getting the brush/ getting the brush/ getting the brush/ getting the brush”—without any suggestion of rebellious fire.  Finally even the rhythmic, ever‑ steady thud of drum accompaniment dissolves, and the song ends in an echoing of bells in a clock tower.  The singer is trapped in an eternity of despair.

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