From the Archives - Marin Headlands Big Ring Tale

Vlog

This post goes well beyond the 160-character length of an SMS text, not to mention the 180-character limit of a tweet. Since I cannot reasonably expect anybody to read more than that in a single sitting, I have made this available as a vlog. Here:

If, on the other hand, you cannot stand to look at my face for 13 minutes, either close your eyes throughout the video playback, or read the text below like I originally intended.

Introduction 

As I wrap up 2020, I’ve made a challenge for myself: can I finish the year with more cycling miles than I logged in 2019? This means riding the rollers six days in a row, which at my age feels nearly impossible. But this self-directed age-shaming is a bit silly, really … of course I can keep right on cycling hard, well into middle age. It’s not like I’m in the NFL or something.

My defeatist thinking goes way back. I felt utterly washed up as a cyclist as far back as 1998, having no idea back then how much glorious hammering still lay ahead. The following Big Ring Tale, from my archives, showcases this self-delusion. (To put this story in context, I was just 28 years old at the time, living and working in San Francisco, and I’d quit racing—temporarily, as it would turn out—about six years before.) 

Marin Headlands Big Ring Tale – April 28, 1998

I was outbound on Greenwich street, half a mile into my ride, when I passed a bike messenger with a huge, stuffed-full messenger bag. It was a windy evening, a headwind, and I figured if she wanted to slip in behind me for a draft, I was fine with that. She’d probably had a hard day dodging cars, etc. I was vaguely aware of her presence on my wheel most of the way through the Presidio before he passed me—that is, someone besides the messenger; a racer-type who had traded places with the messenger somewhere along the line. He was a tall guy, with a US Postal Service jersey, a Dura-Ace equipped Serotta, and shaved legs. By this point I was sick of the headwind myself and dropped in behind him. He was setting a good pace.

We cruised pretty fast through the rest of the Presidio, and on the Golden Gate bridge kept up the pace, taking turns pulling. I was grateful for the help since I didn’t have all that much time to ride before dark. A third of the way across the bridge I was trying to predict whether this guy was riding into the headlands, like me, or turning off toward Sausalito after the first short, steep section of the headlands road. A lot of guys who go fast over the bridge do so because they know they have a long coast into Sausalito afterward. They kind of irk me because they can afford to hammer and I . . . well, I guess I can afford to, too, but it’s not a great way to start that longish headlands climb.

This guy looked pretty legit: decent form, back pretty flat, reasonably relaxed on the bike. His pedaling was smooth too, but frankly too fast, as though he were a modern fitness cyclist who reads Prevention magazine, takes antioxidants, and worries about his knees (even though he was a fair bit younger than I). It was like he was slapping at the wind instead of throwing big punches. And yet, something about him was just a little too fresh, a little too springy. He somehow wasn’t brittle enough; he seemed like the ‘98 model, freshly minted. Whatever a crusty old veteran is, he wasn’t.

I thought about how I must look on the bike. Let’s face it, I’m a mosher. I stay on top of the biggest gear I can (on principle or because I have no patience for a high cadence). There’s not much sparkle in my eye. I’m visibly worn. Not just my clothing, either—although it’s pretty sad these days, the side panels on my shorts going translucent, the once neon jersey now completely pale. But as I said, it’s not just my clothing. My form is fine, my position right, but I think I probably look tired most of the time. My pedal stroke is smooth enough, but surely looks unenthusiastic somehow. I don’t pop out of the saddle—I drag myself out of it. I think I must give the impression of an old, beaten-up Dodge Dart; not zippy like those new Neons.

Perhaps as a reflex against feeling intimidated, I began to make judgments about my companion, and probably unfair ones. I mused that although he certainly seemed fitter than I, he didn’t seem the type to have deep wells of guts, either. He seemed the kind of rider who might cave in at the first sign (be it real or a ruse) that he’s outgunned. It dawned on me that I was doomed to mix it up with him—my motivation mixed up between the foolish aggression of aging prizefighter and the detached eye of a scientist conducting an experiment.

I decided to take the last long pull just before the final section of the bridge. The last stretch is always super windy, and can cut your speed significantly, enough to make you feel weak and worthless. Thus, I wanted to make sure this guy had to lead through it, not me. I wanted to arrange it so he pulled good and hard there, so I could hope to demoralize him on that short, steep rise before he (presumably) turned right towards Sausalito and I turned left toward the headlands. When I took the lead for my last pull, I accelerated slightly, upshifting noisily. I hoped this would make him feel slighted, like his previous pull hadn’t been fast enough, and thus shame him into expending too much energy on this last flat bit.

Well, he took the bait, and hammered through the last section of the bridge, while I did my best to achieve cardiovascular hibernation in his draft. Just as the climb started, I punched it. A foolish pace given the length of my climb, but I couldn’t bear to let this guy dust me at the end before his cowardly downhill turn. Well, it worked, and I got a pretty decent gap by the top of that first rise, but then something terrible happened. He turned left, too, to follow me up the hill. He’d planned the same headlands loop I had, all along.

This must be what the dog feels like when it finally catches the mailman. What now? Well, suffer, stupid! It would be humiliating indeed to falter now, and besides, I had the psychological edge. He must have felt pretty outclassed to let me open up such a gap, and so quickly, and he probably had no idea how hard I was going. My heart rate was 189, which isn’t high at all for an adrenaline-engorged junior, but for me that zone is almost off-limits, like that far wing of the house you close off to save on the heating bill. I decided that pacing myself would give him too much hope and he might close the gap—or worse, counterattack me. It’s sure happened enough times before; one time, my assailant had a Fuji Road Look saddle, or seemed to. It’s a humiliating thing. So I decided to stretch out my lead by really kicking it in the guts. A foolish plan, but such recklessness had gotten me this far, hadn’t it?

I rounded the first bend at the Golden Gate Bridge Lookout overlook (not very scenic today, with the bridge engulfed in fog) and the wind switched slightly, now in my favor. This cheered me up a little (luckily, since my body may have been planning a biological mutiny), and I humored myself with the notion that my nemesis was still facing the headwind. Through the next section I cranked up the pace even higher, my throat getting raw and bloody-tasting. Towards where the road flattens out in the twisty section, I really started to bog down. The wind was now against me once again, and I was starting to pay for my ill-considered aggression.

This shallow part of the climb is normally where you can throw her in the big ring, and indeed the propriety of calling this a “big ring tale” demands that I did. But I couldn’t do it. My pace was slowing and I didn’t dare look behind me. I could just picture my opponent seeing my weakness and gliding by me with that jaunty springiness of his. So, despite the apparent impossibility of honoring the gesture, I did put her in the big ring.

It was to avenge the widespread demise of thousands of losers like me that I dug even deeper now, with the pathetic desperation of Ichabod Crane in his final flight from the Headless Horseman. My opponent was a winner: clean bike, clean jersey, shaven legs, real fitness, verve and vigor incarnate. He was probably chuckling at the earnest, flailing efforts of this ragged, washed-up has-been. Well, he could chuckle all he wanted, but he was still behind me. I pushed the big ring all the way to the four-way intersection where you head left toward the summit. By the time I had to go back to the little ring, something important had happened: I had become sick.

Not physically sick, mind you (though that didn’t seem far away). No, I became psychologically sick. This is a dark and disturbing place, the point at which my opponent no longer mattered, my pace no longer mattered, my vital signs—heart rate, speed, rate of vertical gain, elapsed time—all ceased to matter. All that mattered was that I increase the suffering. Some switch had been flipped, some crazy trip-wire had been tripped, some natural system had been deeply subverted. Sometimes a lioness washing her cubs loses track of normal biology and begins actually eating her young instead, and this quirk of nature couldn’t be far from the strong need I had now to increase my own suffering. Like a junkie who craves more and more of what is killing him, I now increased my effort.

You know how some athletes are described (or describe themselves) as having the ability to “turn off” pain? Well that’s total bullshit. Whoever says that just doesn’t get it—the extreme athlete learns now to turn on the pain, how to hurt himself badly and seem to thrive in the process. I was tapped into something sick and wrong, and exhilarating. (How come I so rarely found this spot back when I used to race? Astute tactics tended to get in the way.)

This near-frenzy didn’t last long, but it didn’t end abruptly either. It mellowed out a little; I came off the rush. I came to realize how awful I sounded—my breath a horrible, rattling wheeze. In all the excitement I forgot to look at my heart rate. I finally looked behind me, and . . . my rival was just plain gone. My pace had now dropped a bit, but I was close to the top now [the blue dot in the map] and victory was assured. But what a hollow victory it somehow seemed now; all that hyperbolic effort and near-psychosis, all wasted on an opponent who wasn’t even in sight. And when I reached the top and checked my stopwatch, my time was an unimpressive 10:12. My record is 8:54 … so what happened? Did I misgauge the size of my effort, and the strength of my opponent? Did I just beat up a fifth-grader with a bat?

No, I reassured myself—I had suffered dearly. I had simulated actual fitness, which isn’t easy to do. And by the bottom of the descent on the backside, after it no longer mattered, my rival had caught up with me. (I’d convinced myself my rear tire was half-flat and took the corners wide.) He couldn’t have been that far behind to catch me so quickly.

As if to further reassure me he was a legitimate Goliath, he dragged my sorry ass up the short climb on the backside [not shown in the map above, but heading back to the four-way intersection]. I was too proud to fall off his pace, but too blown out to try anything else. This was normal, regular suffering, and I was back to disliking it. At the intersection, he turned right to do another lap.

Yes, he was the better cyclist—thus I’d scored an (albeit pyrrhic) victory for lesser men everywhere when I shelled him on the first climb.

—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—
Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

From the Archives - Mountain Biking “Big Ring Tale”

Introduction

My older daughter is looking to join her high school’s mountain bike team. We went to the kick-off luncheon recently, and the head coach said to her, “I hope we’re not too late ... your dad hasn’t turned you into a roadie yet, has he?” I was surprised that he’d pinned me as a roadie. What gave it away ... my lack of facial hair?

The story that follows is from around 1996, when I was about 25 pounds heavier than I am now, from too many business trips and not enough biking. I hesitate to call this a “big ring tale” (i.e., a tale where at a pivotal moment the hero shifts onto the big chainring, which is the rough equivalent of Popeye eating his can of spinach) because mountain bikes don’t really have a big ring. Most have no more than a 46-tooth, which is smaller than the small chainring a pal of mine sported on his road bike back in ’82. But, as with so much of my life, this will have to do.

(The photo below is the oldest one I could find. It’s from a decade after this story; imagine this guy with another 15-20 pounds of pure gut.)

Off-road Big Ring Tale – ca. 1996

Cycling has been frustrating for me since I quit racing. I just slow down more and more every year­. Today I stepped on a scale and I weighed in at 200 pounds ... my all-time high. Last week, I was riding my normal loop and some guy just blew past me. Within a minute he had 30 seconds on me. And it occurred to me that a few years ago, I was that fast. In fact, for several years I was that fast. Sure, I could get there again, but I don’t see it happening. A lot would have to change. I wouldn’t say age has so much to do with my decline, but accepting the new, sluggish me is probably good practice for getting old.

Which brings me to the tale of my ride with Dennis, a pal who never actually raced (though I was on the college team with his brother). We rode over the Golden Gate Bridge to start, rode about halfway to the top of the Marin headlands, and then took a series of trails and fire roads that loop around more or less randomly.

About two hours into the ride, we crested a hill and from behind us came a lean, shaved-legged, slick-looking dude with $150 Oakley sunglasses, a jersey that looked just a little too clean, and an expensive aluminum Stumpjumper M2 mountain bike, complete with Rock-Shox suspension forks. He was going at a respectable speed (more respectable than ours, obviously) but I didn’t think that warranted his lack of a greeting. When I said “Hi,” he just ignored me. I hate that.

I didn’t expect to see this guy again, but on the descent I happened to overtake him. He’d gotten himself into a bit of trouble taking a curve too wide, and I had ample room to pass him on the inside (the alternative being, of course, to crash into him). I suspect he’s a road racer who isn’t terribly experienced in the dirt. Anyway, he seemed embarrassed, and yelled, “Hey, buddy, call out when you pass!” This all happened, of course, in a matter of a couple of seconds, so I didn’t have time for a response.

I found this irritating. I mean, he was essentially out of control, in the process of being a major trail hazard, had been decidedly antisocial earlier, and now expected some kind of special trail protocol. If your natural tendency is to give people the benefit of the doubt, please suppress it and consider this guy our enemy. That will make my story much more enjoyable for you.

A bit later, Dennis and I regrouped, and the slick dude passed us again. This time he was working really hard to keep up with another racer-type on a road racing bike with cyclocross tires. This bike was really better suited for the fire road we were on, since the surface was smooth and the grade was steep. (Mountain bikes, no matter what the salesman tells you, are in fact heavy and slow.) Initially, I let the two go; they were going far faster than Dennis could have gone, and to be honest, climbing that hard really didn’t look like a pleasant thing to do. Besides, they were clearly both well-trained cyclists who wouldn’t take kindly to any insolence from an apparent nobody such as your humbly equipped, hairy-legged narrator. I decided to leave well enough alone.

However, when they were almost out of sight I suddenly changed my mind and decided to go after them. Of course it was a stupid idea to strike when the iron was stone cold, but I went for it anyway. In fact, I threw her in the big ring! The big chainring, I mean: the stuff of heroes. Thus began one of life’s rare and delicious surprises. For no good reason, my body decided to perform as it used to, in the days of yore. I was amazed at the rate of acceleration I was able to attain. Within no time I must have been going three times my initial speed.

As if in a video game, I passed several chance cyclists as if they were standing still. My effort took on an unreal quality, as if I had somehow become “seemingly infinitely powerful” (a phrase I coined back in my racing days to describe whoever was beating me at the time). It seemed as if I was ascending the hill about as fast as I could have descended it. (In retrospect, perhaps I wasn’t going that fast, but please permit me these narrative indulgences.)

Needless to say, I came up fast upon our slick mountain biker dude, who had by this point been dropped by the guy on the road bike. To say I caught this quasi-man would be an understatement indeed; I was like a hawk overtaking a earth-bound duckling, or a tsunami rolling over a boogie-boarder. This time, I took a wide outside line around him, and zestfully shouted out, “PASSING ON YOUR LEFT!” The look of absolute disbelief and disappointment on his face was priceless. I imagine he scrambled to pick up his pace and get my wheel, but I sure wasn’t around to see it. I may have actually spun him around like a pinwheel.

By this point I had my sights set on the road bike guy. Not out of any vendetta; I assure you I had none. I simply sought to give the macho dude the message that I don’t even bother with his petty ilk—that I’d had my sights set on the roadie all along. And this is how I found myself in the middle of a badly considered and hellishly ambitious endeavor.

By this point, my speed was so high there was no way I wouldn’t catch the roadie. In fact, I believe that only my ten extra pounds of gut kept me from reaching escape velocity. Oh, I caught the roadie, all right, but as the unchallenged king big man cyclo-god, ruler of the trail and destroyer of mountain bikers, he had slipped into a lazy, complacent rhythm which was only a starting point for him. He instantly responded to my unwelcome presence, and by the time he overtook me, I was beginning to really suffer. The initial euphoria of my conquest had faded, and with it the Supersize 32-ouncer of adrenaline, the six-pack of endorphins. I was like the car-chasing dog who’s caught up with a Dodge Ramcharger. Now what?

The roadie was hella fit and capable of chitchat. “I was wondering if somebody was going to try to catch me,” he said, clearly as a deejay and as calmly as Clark Kent. I lacked the breath to say, “Well, that arrogant jerk with the fancy shades made his bid, but I guess you didn’t notice.” Instead, I attempted a suave “yup,” and it came out a croaked “yip.” At this point the roadie seemed to sense that I’d written a check I couldn’t cash. He said, “Now that you’re here, are you ready to hammer?” My back to the wall, I put my illusions aside and came clean. “No,” I told him.

“Take my wheel,” he said. “I’ll tow you awhile.”

Well, that was nice of him. On a flat road, his gesture would have been more kind, but this was a long, hard climb and I wasn’t exactly excited about suffering on his wheel like a prize fighter up against the turnbuckles. He picked up the pace, and I was thinking just clearly enough to know that I should try to stay with him and not pass up a good thing, since the spiffy guy behind us was probably highly motivated to fish his ego out of the ditch by catching me. So, I made every effort to glue myself to the roadie’s wheel.

With every pedal stroke, his gift of a draft seemed like less of a good thing. Soon I was deeply in the throes of oxygen debt. Eventually, I had to take a second mortgage on my legs. The bill collectors began to come around, and I was beginning to pay a lot in interest. Then my body took on the kind of crazed effort that a praying mantis makes when he continues to copulate even after the female has eaten his head. All the blood began to be rerouted past my brain, directly to my legs. Brain cells immediately began to die at an alarming, glue-sniffing rate, and with the loss of intelligence I began to feel more optimistic about the world. Maybe Newt Gingrich is actually onto something, I thought.

Then all thought was crushed out and I became a simple, pedal-spinning automaton. The only thing that saved me from riding myself into the ground, in fact, was a panicked telegram from my legs that finally made its way to my brain: ZIPPY GUY WAY BACK STOP NO NEED TO CONTINUE STOP STOP STOP.

I slowed down just enough to restore my will to live. When would this climb end? For all I knew, it went on for miles. I had suffered so badly that the slightly decreased effort gave me a lot of relief, even though I was still going pretty hard. I finally crested the hill about midway between the roadie and my victim. I waited at the top for a while, and when the vanquished would-be-big-shot came by, he didn’t look too happy. I tried to look as nonchalant as possible, and I don’t think he figured out that the effort had left me with a bad case of oxygen bankruptcy, coupled with acute testosterone poisoning.

Sweetness & Light on South Park Drive

Backstory

What is “Sweetness and Light?”  It’s one of the mottos of my bike club, the East Bay Velo Club, for one thing.  But where did we get it?  I’ve asked this question over the years, and nobody actually knows for sure.    According to Marty, John Leslie came up with it, but he thought it was Marty, though Todd has also been linked to it.

In the photo above, I’m wearing my arm warmers on the wrong arms.  The intention, Marty tells me (now, when it’s too late because the photo has already gone to the printers), was to have “sweetness” and “light” printed on the inner forearms so we can read it while riding and be reminded.

In literature, the phrase “sweetness and light” first appears in a tale by Jonathan Swift.  Aesop (in this tale he’s a book, but also a character—it’s weird) is weighing in on a debate between a bee and a spider, and compares ancient writers to bees who “fill their hives with honey and wax, thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light.”  Another old (dead, white, male) literary figure, Matthew Arnold, used the phrase (as Wikipedia has summed it up) to “designate the positive effects of a (predominantly classical) humanistic culture in arts and letters.”

Obviously a cycling team isn’t that interested in arts and letters.  Our club’s use of this phrase goes back to around 2000, when a bunch of former UC Berkeley cyclists returned from years of cycling exile and started beating each other up on the road again, physically and verbally.  “Sweetness and Light” was an admonition to back off a bit when things started to get ugly.  When the guys founded EBVC (a reincarnation of the last cycling team they’d formed just after college), “Sweetness and Light” appeared on our socks and water bottles.

I learned all this while fact-checking this blog post.  The original usage of this phrase is not widely understood among the team now, and certainly not written into the by-laws (of which there are none). The phrase has always given me a sense of mystery ... I cannot think of it without also being aware of its  flip side:  something darker, heavier, and more bitter lurking beneath the surface.  In this post I examine this notion through the lens of a chance showdown on the road, on one of my favorite climbs, South Park Drive in the Berkeley hills.  Specifically I’ll try to shine light on the matter of how, as we roll into our autumn years, we might embrace the Sweetness and Light ethos without giving up the intense drive and combative spirit that made us bike racers in the first place.

“I was just riding along”

The preamble “I was just riding along” actually derives from the bike shop, where customers bringing in a bike (usually one that looked like it had been dropped from an airplane or run over by a tank) would begin their warranty request by saying, “I was just riding along, minding my own business, not a care in the world, when suddenly, out of the blue” (etc.), “there was just this big noise, wa-ka-PANG!” etc.  Well, that’s how my tale begins:  I was riding alone, not looking for trouble, and had just ridden around the closed gate at the base of South Park (the road is closed at this time of year for the newt crossing), when an angry biker appeared behind me.  He wasn’t actually angry, per se; as a very handy online cycling dictionary puts it, an angry biker is “a biker who has a fancy bike, fancy clothes, and usually a stern expression, who really needs to lighten up.  In other words, just about everybody on the road.”

I guess I’m kind of smurfy in that I think it’s nice for cyclists to greet each other on the road, and that if they’re going the same direction, they should exchange a few pleasantries before one of them inevitably outpaces the other.  At a minimum, a nod or a simple “hi” is customary—or ought to be.  Actually, the “angrier” (i.e., more expert) a cyclist is, the more likely he’ll be too self-important for this.  (Novices, I’ve noticed, are more likely to flash a huge smile; on a recent ride, as I headed up a hill, a woman coming down toward me, riding a basic bike and wearing a huge puffy neon windbreaker, actually yelled, “Yay!”)  So, this guy looked like a serious angry biker, but nevertheless  I looked back and said, “How’s it going?”  He didn’t respond.  Perhaps he wanted it made clear that this wasn’t some muffin ride or social outing.

Dropped

The guy rolled up alongside me.  Again I greeted him:  friendly, you know.  I nodded, an uplift of the chin, because he was he was wearing headphones.  Finally, he acknowledged me, minimally (half a grunt), and then he picked up the pace.  What was he listening to?  Heavy metal?  He continued to accelerate.  Maybe he just didn’t like me and wanted to be alone—but would it hurt him to give a quick “hi” before being on his way?  Did he have to appear so grim?

My instinct said this was an act of naked aggression.  Of course I wanted to match his pace, on general principle, even before I noticed his physique, which was….  How can I put this?  He was … chubby.  Not chubby for an average joe; in any random lineup he’d be one of the fitter-looking guys.  But he was chubby for a cyclist, particularly a cyclists who thinks he can just blow a skinny guy like me away on a really hard climb.

Skinny is relative, of course.  I’m a bit heavier than usual right now; I can finally wear my jeans without a belt.  Kate Moss wouldn’t angrily call me a bitch or anything.  But still, anyone encountering me in a weight room (if I ever went to such a place) would snicker at me.  Of course, appearances aren’t everything.  This guy could well be faster than I uphill.  But given that I have to go around looking like a scarecrow all the time, couldn’t he humor me and let me keep up, and maybe wait until the downhill to drop me?

I normally keep a little in reserve for such situations, so I can dig deep and, for example, manage not to be disgraced by an antisocial chubby guy on a climb that ought to favor me.  But I’m not stupid.  This guy was just going way faster than I could go.  If I matched his pace, it would only be a matter of time before I blew sky high—not a pretty site.  It was a pity; I was rocking my brand new EBVC uniform, with its resplendent blue and orange, and felt like I was showing my club in a poor light.  But that’s life.

Accounting

On a positive note, this experience would increase my stores of self-loathing, which would fuel my training in the coming months.  “Self-loathing” isn’t exactly right, since I don’t actually loathe myself, but let’s just say defeat is motivational.  Sweet-Self-Loathing-Lite, you might say.

Meanwhile, I had a small hope that if I couldn’t keep up that pace, perhaps he couldn’t either.  Some guys count on bluster:  if they demoralize an opponent, and he just caves in, the supreme effort doesn’t have to be kept up.  I’d seen it too many times before to fall for it now.  So I figured I’d just go down swinging and make this guy earn it.

For the next three minutes I suffered mightily, and in vain.  I was in my lowest gear, though machismo suggested I should shift up, just to improve my morale.  But it’s January and I couldn’t do it.  But I had a pretty decent cadence, and maybe that’s the better thing, since I’m getting older and all.  And besides … after a point the guy’s gap was no longer increasing.  Plus, he was looking worse and worse on the bike.  His upper body bounced with the effort.  His cadence slowed.  He should have downshifted, but maybe was too proud, or was in denial.  It was starting to look like he’d written a check he couldn’t cash.

To put it another way, the guy was having trouble “controlling the narrative.”  I’ve borrowed his phrase from Lance Armstrong.  When Oprah asked him why he was such a bully, rolling over anybody in his path, Lance replied, “I felt I needed to control the narrative.”  On a much smaller scale, this is what people often try to do during competition.  But sport doesn’t really work like life; the athletic narrative is more like that junior high creative writing project where you write a story for five minutes, then pass it to the student on your right who takes it over for the next five minutes, and so on.  There will always be some kid who takes the story to outer space, and then another who turns everything that came before into a dream sequence, etc.  It can be a pretty frustrating project, and so it is when we try to script an athletic showdown.  The trick to these sporting narratives is to be the last one holding the script.

Gradually I closed the gap to the guy.  He was riding like a man possessed.  No he wasn’t.  Don’t worry, I think we’re done with that hackneyed expression.  He was riding a Wilier.  Something about these spontaneous road duels brings out my most ornery side, and suddenly a Wilier seemed like the lamest bike money could buy.  “Ooh, I’m just like Jan Ullrich on my Wilier!”  There is no bike this guy could have been on that I wouldn’t have scorned, unless he was on a cheap mountain bike or something.  But he wasn’t.  He was also wearing some fancy-pants club kit, not as cool looking as mine, of course, and I made sure not to note what club it was, because surely they didn’t deserve to have their good name tarnished by Punky Chubster.

Remember those reserves I mentioned?  Well, now I had a good business case.  Extra adrenaline was swiftly allocated, along with some sweet endorphins.  Suddenly I was flush.  I latched onto the guy’s wheel—there was a slight headwind—and began to plot his defeat.  This was no time for irrational exuberance.  I was going to behave responsibly, budget my resources, and not make the mistake he had in underestimating a rival.  Maybe the guy was toying with me, or maybe he had a Plan B.  There was still a lot of climbing left to go and the grade had further steepened.  I wished I could downshift and spin the legs … I looked down and—what?  I wasn’t in my lowest gear after all!  I’d been torquing along the steepest part of this climb in my 24, at that higher cadence!  Wow, we were really going fast.  I wished I had my bike computer but the thing had crapped out the week before and I was flying without instruments.

I sat on Wilier’s wheel; he bobbed more and more, and eventually wasn’t riding in too straight a line.  He got out of the saddle, thrashed around a bit, then sat back down.  I could hear his panting as he tried desperately to wring more speed out of himself and his machine.  The thing is, as wise as it might have been to sit on the guy, I was sick of him.  I got impatient and decided to storm the citadel. 

I came up on his right side, and then changed my mind, remembering a previous showdown that hadn’t gone my way.  Some guy—a rather thick, I would almost say chubby guy—had started to come by on my right, then faded back (giving me false hope) only to show up out of nowhere on my left.  I’d found this temporarily disorienting, and then the guy had finished me off, handing me a humiliating defeat.  Well, I was the cleverer for it now.  I let the Chubster catch a glimpse of me in his right periphery, then drifted back and passed him on the left.  I hope this produced the right effect.  But I didn’t attack … I very gradually accelerated, as if silently offering him my wheel.  “Really, take my wheel.  I want you to.  I want you to have it … really.”

Of course I didn’t want him on my wheel for long—just long enough to ride him off it.  Then I hoped to crush him utterly.  Substantial penalty for returned checks.  I was really digging in, completely slaving on the bike, but you know what?  It didn’t actually hurt that bad.  The strain was serious and my breathing was like a turbine, but the pain was being masked very well.  This wouldn’t last, of course; it was a temporary effect.  No payments for 30 days! 

I could hear him back there huffing and puffing, but needless to say I wouldn’t look back.  He didn’t deserve that satisfaction.  Who did he think he was, scorching the bottom half of this climb like that, making a bold move on a scrawny guy like me?  Now the pain hit me full on, but I could handle it.  I’ve suffered like this for years.  I was probably suffering on a bike while this guy was still into wind-surfing or lacrosse or whatever.  I’ve paid too many dues to let my form go to crap just because I’m dying, and I knew this road too well to miscalculate like he had.  By the time I got to the final stretch of the road—which is particularly steep—I knew I had it in the bag.  I couldn’t hear him anymore, and didn’t sense him either.  Only as I approached the gate at the top did I finally  look back.  Wet Wilier wasn’t even in site.  He must have given it everything and then detonated.  I’d foreclosed on him.

Epilogue

I came to a near-stop as I swung around the gate.  The guy had been with me at the halfway point; how far back could he be?  I put on my jacket.  My breathing slowed all the way down.  I really hoped the guy would appear, so I could make some friendly chitchat, just to show how little our clash had meant to me.  Something like, “Great day, but it’s colder than it looks, huh?”  You know.  Sweetness and light.

From the Archives - Big Ring Tale

Introduction

I did not coin the term “Big Ring Tale,” but a Google search on this phrase turns up only five results, two of which are mine. I thought it was a household term, but perhaps it’s not. Suffice to say, it refers to a story of a showdown on bikes, with the climax coming when the hero, just before launching his final, devastating attack, “throws it in the big ring”—that is, shifts into his bike’s higher gear range.

The following Big Ring Tale came to mind when I was planning my blog post about bike helmets, and recalled the last time I broke a helmet in a crash. This was in 2008, when I was hit by a car during a training ride, and suffered a third-degree separation of my shoulder. It took a long time and a lot of physical therapy before I could return to riding, and when I finally did, I was slower, heavier, and in worse shape than I’d been in many years, perhaps more than a decade. This left me vulnerable to weak assaults on my ego, one of which resulted in a bike ride showdown with a complete stranger. As it happened, part of the reason he provoked me was that he was apparently too cool to wear a helmet.

(Original art courtesy of my daughter.)

Big ring tale – September 15, 2008

It’s not looking like I’ll have any race reports to file this year, so I thought I’d make do with a humble Big Ring Tale.

So I was humping my Salsa up South Park one day last week and thinking how utterly absurd it was for me to have thought I could come back from my injury in time to ride the Everest Challenge in Bishop. I was actually feeling relieved that my physical therapist vetoed the idea, and then annoyed at myself for feeling relieved.

I clocked a slow time up South Park, and then headed down Claremont. This would be my first time doing these climbs back-to-back since my wreck, 2½ months before. I turned the ship around at the bottom and tried to get my engine going again to climb back up. I was still sputtering away when this dude passed me. He looked pretty fit, and pretty smooth, and he had that pocket climber build, and right away I decided it would be futile to try to hang with him. The wimp in my brain assured me, in soothing tones, that the outcome of any engagement with this guy had been decided at my birth, and that there was no shame in an out-of-shape old injured dude, with what felt like a woman’s butt growing out of his belly, being passed up by a young fit climber guy. I even reflected on the words of a slippery Nabokov narrator, “Fate should not jam.” Why should I mix it up with somebody who is destined to leave me far behind?

But then, as I scanned this guy for more excuses to wuss out, I noticed some things that complicated the matter. True, he was on a nice, modern racing bike, a carbon Specialized, not some 1980s Novara or something, but on the other hand he was wearing a Camelbak (not exactly the gear of a true road cyclist). And then there was the matter of his attitude. I said “Hi,” and he didn’t reply. What, the big, puffy, puffing guy doesn’t warrant a greeting, not even a nod?

His apparently snooty attitude was exacerbated by his youth. There was something too fresh in his face, some aura of having been untested, something the opposite of weathered, like he’s just some young guy who thinks the whole world is laid out before him to just take, and he cares nothing what the older, long-suffering bastards like me think of him and his insolence. If he were in an old Native American tribe, the elders would cut him down to size by giving him some humiliating name like “White Man’s Bitch” or “Forest Pansy” or something, until he did something impressive to literally make a name for himself, at which point they’d switch to calling him “Schools Lardy Has-Been” or “Spanks Happy Buddha.”

Suddenly, I marveled at how critical I was being. After all, this was simply an angry biker like myself out for a ride. And then it hit me why he bothered me so much: the guy reminded me of Riccardo Riccò, that hot-shot self-worshipping doper. Of course it wasn’t this guy’s fault he happens to bear a physical resemblance to Riccò, but on the other hand, if I looked like that I’d make sure to act really friendly and humble.

And then there was the matter of this guy not having socks. Maybe he was a tri-guy, or—even worse—a roadie who lets the tri culture influence him. And though his form was good, his pedal stroke smooth, his physique fairly toned, he was just slightly bow-legged, which interfered with my ability to chalk him up as a classy rider who deserves to drop me. And to top it all off, he wasn’t wearing a helmet. This was forgivable twenty years ago, when people raced in worthless leather hairnets and the hard-shell helmets were hot and heavy, but in 2008, when even the Europeans wear helmets on their road rides? Who does this guy think he is? It’s a given that he’s going to be descending something steep; just how sweet a bike-handler does he fancy himself? What, he’s just so damn cool he has to be the last guy on the road without a helmet? What is he, James Dean? So I decided he had to die, or at least one of us did.

Now, if this were an ABC After-School Special, I’d have pulled up next to him, stared him down like Lance did Ullrich on Alpe d’Huez, stood on my pedals, and blown him away. Or maybe he’d put up a fight but my ultimate supremacy would never be in question. Alas, in reality, in the process of my deliberations I’d let the guy drop me already. I had to claw back up to him, very slowly. By the time I reached him, my heart rate was over 170, which is pretty much redline for me. How on earth was I going to throw down on this guy? It dawned on me that the real victim of my effort would doubtless be myself. But I deserved this punishment, I figured, for ever letting things get to the point where this bow-legged, fresh-faced, sockless, antisocial helmetless little bastard could drop me so easily. So I sat on his wheel and suffered. Of course there was still a chance he’d sit up, offer a greeting, and we’d have a social ride up the hill. Or, he’d be annoyed at me, kick it up a bit, and cast me off. But instead he just stayed at it.

After a minute or two, Scotty frantically warned me, “The ship can’t take much more o’ this, Captain!” I simply didn’t have the minerals to win a war of attrition. I decided my only hope was to take a deep breath (this I was already doing) and then cruise past the guy with my best simulation of ease and infinite strength, in hope that it would break his spirit and he’d descend into a low-performance bout of self loathing. A Hail Mary, to be sure, but what else could I do? Every now and then you get lucky, and your opponent is like one of those Imperial storm troopers whose minds are putty in Obi Wan’s paws, who say, “These aren’t the droids we’re looking for.” So I rolled on by the guy at the first steep section, as gracefully and unhurriedly powerfully as an expert rower in a racing scull passing a kid in a paddle boat. (At least, that’s how I convinced myself I looked. I was probably more like a dancing hippo from Fantasia: fluid, and yet somehow pathetic.) I kept this up until things got really steep, and I got further into the red, and no longer had the luxury of pretense. Once out of the saddle, I was thrashing ugly, like Escartin in the early Lance years. God.

We think of roads as having a fixed length, like Pi or the wavelength of Cesium. Of course this is simply untrue. Claremont when you’re fit is pretty long. Claremont when you’re really fit isn’t so very long. Claremont when you’re getting in touch with your inner fat bastard is basically endless. Why, why, why did I do this? And why was I continuing? All the rationalizations (his bow-leggedness, helmetlessness, etc.) popped right into my mind, along with a new one: I’m going to look like a real ass if I falter now, after my big strut; this skinny little bareheaded Doogie Howser is going to laugh inwardly, or maybe even in my face, as he plucks the baton from my generation and leaves me gasping in his wake. I couldn’t let that happen. Maybe I couldn’t prevent that from happening, but I wasn’t going to sit up and welcome it. So I pressed on, absolutely murdering myself.

Then, I had the epiphany. Not “an epiphany,” which is normally how these go, but the same epiphany I have—and then forget—time after time in such situations. The realization is this: though I convince myself that I quit racing because of the time commitment involved, the traveling, the cost, the overall lifestyle and the impact that would have on my family, the truth of the matter is that I’ve had enough of this kind of suffering. Riding is fun, and riding hard is fun but hurts, and riding really hard is fun but really hurts, but racing—officially or in these desperate ego-driven throw-downs—is pure agony. There’s just this huge chasm between anything you can inflict upon yourself in the name of fitness, and this kind of searing, overwhelming pain, a thousand nerve endings crying out at once to try to get the brain to do something, anything, to rescue the organism.

I’d gone past the fine edge of what is tolerable, and every shove on the pedals increased my abject misery. “I don’t want to be here,” I thought. “I don’t want to be doing this. This sucks. Nothing is worse than this.” And yet I kept on, because I’d written a check I could not afford to bounce, because a skinny, duck-footed, helmetless Riccò-type was probably sitting right on me, or hanging just back, deciding how to best punish me for my foolish audacity.

One of the rules of these “pick-up races” (to coin a term) is that you don’t look back at your opponent. I didn’t hear him behind me, and eventually a car approached and I had an excuse to look back. He was maybe 150 feet behind. I looked again, a few minutes later, and he was maybe 200 feet back. A third look showed he was gaining. It definitely seemed he was working on catching me—but here I suddenly had some doubt: what if this entire showdown is in my head, and this dude is just pedaling his bike up the hill, oblivious to my challenge? Could I be locked in a struggle against my own shadow, my own delusion? Could it be that I’m scarcely different from those crazy people you occasionally see on the street having a loud, public argument with—nobody? Fortunately, no one would ever know. Just as modern crazies are camouflaged among all the hands-free cell phone users, I must have looked like any joe having a hard time with a tough climb.

Besides, he must have been trying to catch me. I’ve been riding long enough to know when somebody has taken the bait. I figured I’d know for sure soon enough, as soon as he came by me and accelerated. Except that, amazingly, I was going just fast enough to hold him off. Every time I glanced back, he was somewhere between gaining on me and faltering. Eventually I realized he’d run out of time, and I would make it to the top of Claremont ahead of him—that I’d actually managed to turn a clever bluff into desperation-fueled triumph. Chances were that he’d either go straight, down Fish Ranch, or right, along Skyline. He might even turn around and go back down Claremont. But the horrible possibility existed that he’d go left, like me, and drop my ass on Grizzly Peak. I shuddered at the thought, and made sure I lost no time making my left turn, just in case. I kept it floored until the first switchback, when I looked back to make sure that—oh, crap. He was turning, too, and not wasting any time about it. I’d just had a bunch more tacked onto my sentence.

Funny how the mind works. On the brink of despair, I convinced myself of a lie that, in retrospect, seems like a reasonable truth: if this little pocket climber can’t chase me down on Claremont, where the grade is steep enough to put the laws of physics squarely in his favor, he shouldn’t be able to close the gap on the shallower grade of Grizzly Peak. I even told myself that he himself would be painfully aware of this idea, and might just lose all hope. Of course it felt like a lie at the time, because my entire output was really a myth, like Wile E. Coyote running along in mid-air only because he hasn’t yet realized he’s gone off a cliff. But I willed myself to believe it, and kept the hurt on, abusing myself so badly that it almost started to feel normal, and, one pedal stroke at a time, I finally reached the part of the climb, near the steam trains, where it starts to really ease up.

Guido handed me a pistol and said, “Here—finish him.” So I threw her in the big ring. Not because I was going so fast I’d run out of small cogs or anything, but because you can’t have a Big Ring Tale without the big ring, and I was already sensing the first stirrings of this story you’re now reading. Meanwhile, with the end in sight I suddenly felt like I had a little more energy in store than I’d thought. In fact, my full awareness of how badly this had hurt was already beginning to recede, and now it is a feat of imagination for me to remember how very badly I suffered in the pursuit of this minor, possibly delusional, victory over a single nameless foe.

dana albert blog

From the Archives – A Study on Rinsing

,,,,

Introduction

I use a lot of energy drink when cycling. By “use” I generally mean “drink,” but I’m also a true believer in the cutting-edge practice of “rinsing.” I learned about rinsing in February of 2008 from a knowledgeable EBVC teammate of mine who sent around an e-mail describing a study that concludes, “Carbohydrate mouth rinse has a positive effect on 1-hour time trial performance.”

This study was an attempt to understand why, as multiple other studies had shown, sports drinks seem to provide a performance benefit even for short (e.g., one-hour) workouts. You wouldn’t expect the drinks to help for so short an effort, since existing glycogen stores ought to last that long, and turning new carbs into glycogen isn’t an instant process anyway. The results of this study suggest that the benefit derives from something other than the carbs in the energy drink, which is why swishing energy drink around in your mouth and then spitting it out is as good as swallowing it: “The mechanism responsible for the improvement in high-intensity exercise performance with exogenous carbohydrate appears to involve an increase in central drive or motivation rather than having any metabolic cause.”

This report brought about a long and lively discussion among the guys on the bike club, and while I found at all very compelling, I wasn’t inclined to take the scientists’ word for it. Why should I, when I have all the opportunity in the world to test this phenomenon myself? Thus, I ran my own experiment and reported back to my bike club. This post documents those results for my information-hungry albertnet audience. Following the report is a further exploration of this strange topic.

A Small Study About Rinsing – March 7, 2008

Test Objective: To determine if rinsing the mouth with a sweet beverage increases an athlete’s short-term performance.

Test Procedure: There was unfortunately only one test subject available for the study. Thus, he represented both the rinsing group and the ingestion group.

On Wednesday, March 5, subject rode a specific test course, the Hill Climb Extravagaanza, and consumed one gel approximately thirty-five minutes into exercise. His power output, heart rate, and rate of vertical gain were recorded on the three climbs (South Park, Claremont, and Lomas Cantadas) and uploaded to a PC. (Click image to enlarge.)

On Friday, March 7, subject rode the same course, this time rinsing his mouth with energy drink every few minutes beginning ten minutes after completing his warm-up, and drinking without spitting after approximately thirty-five minutes of exercise. Again, his wattage, heart rate, and rate of vertical gain were recorded on the three climbs. The performance data were then compared using a special software application called the Bragulator.

Measures were taken to make sure subject was not influenced unevenly by music. Not only was he not wired with an MP3 player, but was instructed to ride with similar tunes in his head on both days. It is acknowledged that driving rhythms or the repetition of an inspirational phrase like “Blood of a slave ... heart of a king” on one day, but not another, could skew results.

Test Result: The Bragulator tabulated the following statistics for the two rides:

Across the board, performance was better when rinsing with energy drink early in the ride.

In addition to the stats shown above, subject was almost a minute faster on the first climb, South Park, on Ride 2. This further supports the validity of rinsing, as this was the climb during which subject had no sweetness on Ride 1, but did have sweetness—without calories!—during Ride 2.

Caveats:

Naturally, a larger set of subjects would increase the validity of the study, especially since the one test subject is known for either slacking off or getting medieval on his own heinie according to his whim.

It should also be pointed out that the power meter used in this study makes its calculations using barometric pressure, velocity, and the constant of the subject’s weight, and thus has an inferiority complex about the fancier strain-gauge-based power meters. (Meanwhile, the subject’s weight isn’t really a constant.)

Ride 2 took place on a sunnier day, though it is believed there was not enough sunshine on subject’s shoulders to make him high.

Most importantly, the open road cannot be locked down like a true laboratory environment, and the subject’s training diary includes information that may cast some doubt on the validity of the results:

“At the bottom of South Park, just past the gate, I saw that mountain bike dude again. I felt like the guy in ‘Better Off Dead’ when he sees his old nemesis, the paperboy, coming after him for the two dollars.

This was the same mountain bike dude who was responsible for me getting my fastest time on South Park for all of 2007. He looks like a thirty-something Nick Nolte, with a Steven-Seagal ponytail. Running shorts, t-shirt, and worst of all, a total piece of crap bike, I think one of those heinous Raleigh Techniums from the late eighties, the last mass-market bikes ever made in America and a good reason not to feel patriotic. I remember that ride well: it was on 9/11, and the guy hung on for several minutes while I went à bloc to drop him. He did finally blow, but it took all I had, and at the end of that ride my fricking frame broke!

So here he was again, and though I had him in my sights I was barely even gaining on him. How could this be? I have over a decade of racing experience, he has ... talent, I guess. I have an 18-pound bike, he has ... a 30-plus-pound mountain bike, and, I guess, talent. I have all these sophisticated training and nutrition methodologies and he has ... talent. What could I do? I took a big drink of Cytoplasm [Cytomax – Ed.], spat it derisively at the ground like a smoker flicking away a cigarette butt, and dug in. By the time I got to the base of the main climb I’d just barely made contact.

I greeted him and he replied in this big deep manly voice. That’s what he is, just a big strong manly man, a man’s man, and what am I? Lycra, cawbun fibuh [carbon fiber – Ed.], dogged determination, fancy-pants bike computer with heart rate monitor and PC upload, the physique of an Aborigine, and I was still barely able to drop him. At least he helped me find some motivation....”

Conclusion: Further study is needed. Anybody willing to serve as a subject in this study is encouraged to apply to feedback@albertnet.us. Subjects must be in good health, have fancy-pants bike computers, be willing to complete the Hill Climb Extravagaanza at dawn on a regular basis, and must bring their own gel and energy drink.

Further commentary: why rinse?

Once I decided rinsing was legit, I adopted it as standard practice for the first half hour of each ride. Why not just drink, you ask, even if it’s not the calories that are helping? Well, spitting out energy drink saves weight, of course! Why take that heavy beverage into my body, if it’s only the flavor that enhances my performance?

Besides, I am very careful about not fouling up my blood sugar level. It’s well established that during intense exercise you can have all the sugar you want without affecting your insulin and such—the sugar gets used right away. (This phenomenon continues for half an hour or so after the workout ends.) But if you have a bunch of sugar before the workout, you’ll have a nice sugar high followed by a serious slump. Not knowing how long I have to exercise before my body can use sugar easily, I’ve long been wary—even superstitious—about it, and avoid drinks and gels until about half an hour in. But I’ll start rinsing after just ten minutes. And so far, so good!

Further reading

More than a year after my small study, another EBVC teammate sent around a more recent report further documenting the benefit of rinsing. This study finds that “the cyclists who had rinsed with the carbohydrate drinks — and spit them out — finished significantly faster than the water group,” and that the rinsers’ “heart rates and power output were also higher.” Again, it is postulated that the phenomenon is a brain thing: “It seems that the brains of the riders getting the carbohydrate-containing drinks sensed that the riders were about to get more fuel (in the form of calories), which appears to have allowed their muscles to work harder even though they never swallowed the liquid.”

This brings the total athletes studied up to eighteen, including me. That’s still not a very large sample, but perhaps this is for the best. If everybody know about rinsing, imagine the number of energy-drink puddles you’d encounter all over the road, especially at a big race! dana albert blog

Fiction - Silent Type

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

Introduction

What follows is a work of fiction. I’m not going to apologize for it, but I should warn you that I’m no expert at this. I’ve dabbled in fiction before but never to great effect. In fact, among the worst grades I ever got in an English class was for a short story I wrote in 9th grade. I got a B-minus—the lowest grade in the class, my teacher told me. (I could whine and say the teacher had it in for me, but she really didn’t; we got on very well and I got good grades on my other stuff.)

Before I get to the story: please note that all the normal disclaimers apply. Everything about this story is pure fiction, and any resemblance of any character to any actual human, living or dead, is purely accidental and coincidental. I am not in the story, and neither are you. So relax.

Silent Type

My friend Lester Steele has a lot to say, but generally says little, at least to us, his friends. I would describe his social style as somewhere between laconic and curt. He can actually be quite the orator when you get him going, and for a long time I assumed this was why he hates to talk—that he fears becoming a blowhard or something. But one time I managed to get him to explain, at some length, his reticence.

What Lester told me is that, as an attorney, he uses words all day long, chiefly to bully people, and when he’s off the clock he abandons words just like a mechanic lets his car fall to ruin, or a career line cook orders take-out when he gets home. Early in Lester’s career he advanced some legal position that, unbeknownst to him, was just flat-out wrong, but he didn’t realize this until later, after nonetheless winning his battle and getting his way. This was formative: it severed forever the link between truth (or even accuracy) and his ability to prevail.

Another time I caught Lester in an expansive mood (more accurately, I induced this mood via hard cider—more on this later), and gained some more insight. He said his rhetorical arsenal was getting more advanced: his non-verbal communication at work—for example, intentional ticks he employs during depositions, like causing his eyelid to twitch, or pulsing out the veins in his neck, or even doing something as blatant as trimming his nails, just to throw off his opponent’s balance—have become so brutally effective, he almost doesn’t need words anymore to bully people. So even when he’s stonily silent, he’s doing it. It’s long been the case that he’s found himself unintentionally practicing his craft on the rest of us, which he hates; now he can do it without words. So it’s to the point that he almost can’t stand our company at all.

I met Lester for a bike ride the other day. When I rolled up to the coffee shop to meet him, we exchanged only the briefest of pleasantries. I apologized for being late; he nodded; and we rolled out. It’s funny riding with this guy: his form is good—he’s obviously a seasoned cyclist—but he still rides 32-spoke wheels and refuses to get a modern helmet. The logos on his leg warmers have mostly peeled off and almost dangle, like skin tags, and I almost can’t resist plucking them off. But he’s oblivious to all matters of gear. It’s not a money thing; he’s presumably loaded. The rest of us have joked about staging an intervention and modernizing all his equipment, somehow at his expense.

We headed off up Claremont Ave, a two-mile climb at a 10% grade. Right near the bottom, while we were still warming up, a black Lexus SUV pulled out from the Claremont Hotel parking lot without looking, and we had to hit the brakes. I was astonished even before the driver, a worn-out Stepford wife with brittle hair and expensive sunglasses, rolled down her window and yelled, “Slow down—this isn’t a bike path!” Now, in a perfect world, Lester would’ve said something pithy that really put her in her place, but he remained completely silent. I had the usual back-and-forth with her, which was about as eloquent as small-market talk radio until, inevitably, I ended the discourse by slapping the back of my neck, twice, with my open palm, while making an “O” with my lips. The gesture is vaguely suggestive—of what, I don’t even know—and it never fails to elicit greater outrage than, say, flipping the bird or pantomiming something explicit. I was actually hoping to get some kind of rise out of Lester, but he looked off up the road and more or less patiently waited for the altercation to be over. Then he clipped back in and continued to pedal his bike.

Lester, at the tail end of a bad cold, was coughing up stuff and spitting it on the road at regular intervals. He really didn’t look so good—and yet, as the climb progressed, he just kept going harder and harder. Normally when a guy throws down the gauntlet, he flashes you a look, but Lester just stared at the road ahead. We left behind the high-end but architecturally challenged homes and followed the winding road up through the Claremont Canyon Regional Preserve. If I were a hiker with a knapsack full of guidebooks I’d cheerfully tell you about the mugwort, foxtail brome, thistles, and coyote bush growing along the road, but I’m a cyclist and wasn’t paying attention to anything like that. I stared at Lester’s back wheel for awhile, dying to keep his pace, and then pulled up next to him. He didn’t look over.

I started half-wheeling him, but this too seemed to escape his notice. Eventually he pulled ahead, but still he didn’t so much as glance at me. I knew he was on the rivet because his form was for crap, his shoulders rocking and his torso bobbing along, which you don’t normally see with Lester. He kept coughing and hawking loogies—and kept hammering. I couldn’t bear to watch: how could he go so hard when he’s not even well? I gazed off into the distance, noting a trio of turkey vultures lazily riding a thermal upward, and chuckled to think perhaps they were waiting for Lester and me to turn ourselves into carrion.

I didn’t feel much better than Lester looked, but if he wanted a battle royal, I thought, he shouldn’t be denied. So I waited until I was really dying—meaning he probably was too—and launched a sudden attack, passing and dropping him. The early evening sun was behind us and sinking, so I looked down to watch for Lester’s shadow, which I figured would be just below me when he got my wheel. Except he didn’t. I realized I had gotten a gap and, without looking back, continued to hammer. Still no shadow. I continued, in agony.

A minute later I couldn’t resist, and looked back. Lester hadn’t lost much ground, and his body hadn’t changed position since I’d attacked. It appeared he hadn’t even gotten out of the saddle. And he still wasn’t looking at me. He was just glaring at the road about ten feet ahead of him, steaming along. I felt kind of silly, like this duel only existed in my own mind. I backed off the pace and fell in behind him again. It just about killed me to stay with him, and there was no compelling reason to do so except morbid curiosity. What was up with this guy? Had I royally pissed him off over the Lexus driver?

He continued to pour it on, all the way to the final stretch, when his pace approached a sprint. I was thrashing ugly out of the saddle just to keep up, and just before the top he did the weirdest thing: he sat up and took his hands off the handlebars, and I thought he was going to throw his arms up in a victory salute, which didn’t make sense given the non-duel we’d just not fought. But instead he flung his hands forward, middle fingers up, flipping off … what? The ride? The road? The panorama unfolding before us? Then he put has hands back on the bars, checked for cars, ran the stop sign at Grizzly Peak Blvd, and started coasting down Fish Ranch Road.

The rest of the ride was uneventful. I continued my half-assed effort to draw him out, chattering away cheerfully and figuring if he didn’t like it he’d just tell me to shut up. Which he didn’t. At the end I asked, “Any chance of a furlough tonight to get a couple beers?” This was a bit of a joke. Lester famously didn’t drink, but we both pretended pear cider was non-alcoholic. Sometimes I could get him to go out. Finally he spoke. “Call me later,” he said.

That was encouraging; after all, he could have easily said nothing at all, the moody prick. Not that phoning him could have accomplished anything. He never answers the phone. It used to be that his wife would answer, and after some painful small talk she’d put him on, but that was before caller ID. Now nobody ever picks up. So I drove over there at about nine, by which time I figured Lester would be done putting his kids to bed. His wife answered the door by her pursed expression I gathered I was slightly less welcome than a charity guy with a clipboard. I don’t think she dislikes me, but seems to regard my bachelorhood with vague suspicion. Who knows, maybe if I conformed to her world better and had a wife and kids, we’d all go out together like forty-year-olds are supposed to.

She invited me in, we endured an awkward half-hug, and then I literally smelled Lester before he rounded the corner into the living room. More precisely, I smelled his jacket, which as always reeks of stale, sour cigarette smoke. I took this as a very good sign. Lester doesn’t smoke, but he has this leather bomber jacket that always stinks like this. I think he must periodically loan it to a friend who smokes, for the sole purpose of keeping the smell from wearing off. He only wears it to bars. I once pestered him about this until he explained, “Until they take the final step and ban third-hand cigarette smoke in bars, I’m going to make the experience as authentic as possible.” His wearing the jacket tonight meant he was actually going to come out with me. His wife said what about their video, but Lester didn’t respond. “Well, we have it for three nights,” she said quietly.

When we go to a bar it’s always the same one. It’s a nice dark place, the walls wood-paneled like a hunting lodge, with pictures of ducks and stuff on the walls, cushy deep leatherette booths, and a fireplace. It is saved from theme park perfection by a few pool tables, always occupied to add the continual clacking of balls to the general din. The music in there is loud enough to give you cover for conversation, but not so loud you have to yell. And of course they have the pear cider that loosens Lester’s tongue without officially violating his alcohol taboo.

For maybe half an hour Lester and I just sat and drank. I’m not really a bar type but it’s not hard to fake it. It was at this very bar that, years ago, I asked for a Fat Tire, and the barmaid said, “A Fat? Comin’ right up.” So now I just ask for a “Fat,” trying to sound casual. I suspect I sound like a self-conscious idiot, but then, how hard can it be to say “Fat” convincingly? It’s pretty sad how I admire the regulars for feeling completely at home here, but the fact is I do admire them.

Halfway through our second round I finally spoke. “So Lester, did I piss you off today over that Lexus driver, or what?” He shook his head (really it was barely more than a bidirectional nudge of his chin). I continued, “And yet you lit it up on Claremont and completely tooled me. What was that about?” He took a big drink of his cider, coughed, and said, “I was just hammering. It had nothing to do with you.” I pondered this a moment. At the time it really had seemed as though I was extraneous to his suffering.

I waited until he’d drained his cider and said, “So what’s with flipping the bird with both hands there at the end? I suppose that wasn’t aimed at me? Were you flipping off that Lexus driver after the fact?” Lester shook his head. “No,” he said, and then, after a pause, “That was just the curling back of the lips of a snarling dog. Those middle fingers were the canines.”

“So what were you snarling at?” I grinned.

“I was just pissed off,” Lester replied.

“At the Lexus woman?”

“No. Just pissed off in general.”

“So why did you even ride with me, if you were so pissed?”

“Okay, you’re right, the Lexus driver set me off.”

“Why didn’t you get up in her face then? Instead of leaving me to bawl her out?”

Lester paused. He stared at the ceiling for a moment. Then he paused some more. I decided he needed another drink. I went to the bar, got another beer and another cider, and sat back down. My second beer wasn’t half gone yet. Lester stared at his cider for a good long while. “Look,” he said finally. “It’s related to my work. Now, don’t worry, I’m not going to blather on about my job or anything, but here’s the problem.”

ooooo“Wait,” I interrupted. “You should talk about your work sometimes. You probably have the highest-powered career of anyone I know but it’s like this taboo subject or something. I’m legitimately interested in it.”

ooooo“You really aren’t. It’s all work. It’s just a big hassle, like all jobs everywhere. I mean, if you work in Hollywood and hang out with big stars or something, that’s going to interest people. Otherwise it’s just somebody’s day to day hassle.”

ooooo“But there’s a lot at stake, right?” I said.

ooooo“Nobody ever dies,” he said. “Listen, when you watched Mr. Rogers or Ernie & Bert as a kid, did you ever wonder what they did for a living? At the beginning of every show, Mr. Rogers was just coming home, changing his shoes, putting on his sweater, glad to be done with his workday. Did you ever once wonder what job he’d just come home from?” Lester gave me a chance to answer, but of course I had nothing to say. “No. Of course not. It’s not interesting. Nobody cares, and nobody should.”

ooooo“Okay, so what were you starting to say? A minute ago?”

Lester took a big drink of cider, licked his lips, and continued. “Well, here’s the thing. All day long at work I fight with people. Not all lawyers do this. Lots of them research stuff, or write stuff. But altercations are my specialty. I’m good at them. My boss throws me into the middle of every altercation he can find. The more he does this, the more we win, the happier our clients are. It’s the point of my existence there. So I get really used to being right all the time. Well, not even necessarily being right, but just seeming right. I almost always prevail, and so I’m used to it. I’m like addicted to it.

ooooo“So whenever some person, or some entity, crosses me outside of work, it’s like when some martial arts type gets jumped in an alley. I just unleash on the bastard. The manufacturer conveniently loses my rebate application, or my insurance short-pays my claim, or my phone company quietly raises my rates. Every day it’s something, some new hassle, all thrown at me by companies who make their money jerking people around, knowing that most people don’t have the stomach for it. Hell, most people aren’t together enough to redeem gift cards, much less mail in rebates or cover the checks they write. And the companies have learned to make money off of exploiting this. So I tell myself it’s a matter of principle to smack these bastards down.”

Lester took another drink. “So every fricking day I spend battling people at work and then battling other people on the phone when I come home. It’s all a battle and each victory seems emptier than the last, because they never add up to anything. All I do is hold even. Life dishes out an inexhaustible supply of crap to deal with, just like no matter how much phlegm you cough up or blow out your nose, your goddamned body just creates more of it. At work I’m a prick all day, and I try to leave that behind when I come home, but it’s just a habit I can’t shed. I do try, but some little life hassle always puts me right back in that mode. So I guess you’re right, that woman in the SUV actually did set me off today. I managed not to engage with her, but of course she’d pissed me off, which flipped that little switch in my brain. Which in turn set me off thinking about this thing that happened the other day.”

Lester drained his cider—boozing-wise he’s a lightweight, but still he’s a really big guy and can just pour it down—and then continued. “So about that Lexus driver. I should explain something. Lots of guys, they lose their temper and do something stupid, mouth off or commit a violent act, and then they regret it later. I’m the other way around. I always manage to rein it in, exercise good judgment and everything, and then I regret that later. Instead of feeling relief that I didn’t take the bait, I start to feel angry at myself, at my own good judgment, I just stew. Like I said, I’m in the habit of prevailing and just can’t shrug shit off.”

I wished the barmaids came around to the booths here. I wanted to get Lester more cider but didn’t want to break the spell. Giving him alcohol is like putting gas in a car. He paused, and I almost got up for another round, but I waited and he started back up.

ooooo“So here’s what happened. I was at the corner grocery the other day with the kids getting a jug of milk, and Magnus begged me to get him a fruit leather. There’s a big display of them right at the checkout. My standard reply is, ‘Sorry, they’re not on sale.’ This time he said, ‘But Dad, they are!’ And in fact they were. Not wanting to destroy my credibility or break the news to such young kids that the world is an awful place with no justice, and because I’m a sucker for a sale price, I relented.

“Of course Alida wanted one too, and it took them a few seconds to pick out what flavor they each wanted, with me urging them to hurry because the cashier was already ringing up our milk. I helped them put their treats on the conveyor belt, and as I stood up this guy who had been behind me in line got right in my face! He was glaring at me, straight into my eyes, seriously like inches away from me, all angry like I’d insulted his mother or something. It was a totally bizarre action, a violation of my space, very threatening. And when something like that happens, I think it’s normal for all the civilization and learned societal decorum to just drop away, preempted by a completely primal response. At least, that’s normal for me. This seemed an act of outright aggression—and for what? Because I delayed him ten seconds at the checkout? I expected that once I’d risen to my full height—a bit taller than him—that he’d back down.

“Nothing about this guy gave him the right to be so bold. He was just a skinny little fuck, about our age, with nerd glasses, a polo shirt, fucking Dockers or something—a real Doogie Howser type. In other words, not nearly a match for a scrapper like myself whose natural pugnacity ought to be completely obvious to anyone who crosses me.” Lester stared into his empty glass, then lifted it and leaned way back to drain the last couple drops into his mouth. Then he just sat there. The pub was completely dead and I managed to signal the barmaid, who was bored enough to bring us out another round. Thank God. If Lester doesn’t drink almost continuously it’s like he just peters out. He sat in silence while the barmaid brought our drinks. She put my beer next to the other full one on the table. I sheepishly drained the last of my second beer and let her take the glass. Lester took a big drink and set his glass back on the table.

“Now, I know what you’re thinking,” Lester went on. “There’s really only one right way for this scenario to end: I stare back at the dweeb, he immediately realizes he’s underestimated me, and he puts his hands up, palms forward, in supplication, and then removes his glasses, drops them at my feet, and with a contrite gesture invites me to step on them. But he didn't do this—he kept right on glaring at me. Any of our primate cousins would have immediately set out to strangle him, and my own brain responded with the non-verbal equivalent of KILL. I stepped forward, forcing him to take a step backward or be knocked over. The fact that he stepped back was good, but it wasn’t enough. Had my children not been there, or had they been trained to respond to ‘Earmuffs!’ I would have said something like, “The fuck you starin’ at!?” If he still stood his ground after that, I’d drag him out of the store and beat his ass. But of course I couldn’t do all this—my kids were there, I’m a responsible family man, I have a lot to lose. So I just glared at him, and at last he flinched.” Lester took another giant drink of his cider.

“I turned to the cashier,” he continued. “I’d been planning to pay in cash, but now I perused my wallet to pick out just the right debit card. I asked very sweetly for $20 cash back. Just then Magnus and Alida, practically in unison, said to the cashier, “May I please have a sticker and a balloon?” Good, children! Yes, let’s have some stickers, and by all means fire up the helium-spewing clown! Of course my kids’ timid little voices weren’t quite loud enough for the cashier to hear, so a fair bit of a dialog was required. The cashier herself was visibly smitten with the kids and in no rush whatsoever, and it took her a good while to summon the manager for balloon duty. Meanwhile, in all the excitement I somehow managed to enter the wrong PIN, and so had to start my debit transaction from scratch. This all took several minutes and a line was forming. I kept waiting for Mr. Hurried In-Your-Face to express himself again, but he didn’t. But you know, this passive-aggressive thing really isn’t my thing. It just doesn’t satisfy. I mean, deliberately inconveniencing the jerk was better than nothing, but frankly my civilized mind was barely winning its internal behavioral battle. I wanted blood.”

As Lester related this, I felt the strangest feeling—a physical sensation of the room gradually turning, with my vision not quite keeping up. I was like when you’ve just spun around a bunch of times in an office chair to get yourself dizzy, or when you’ve drunk too much. The only other times I get this sensation is when somebody has just delivered really bad news. And yet there was no bad news here. Just a tale that I was thoroughly enjoying. The voices in the bar, the music, the clinking of bottles, the clacking of pool balls, had all become slightly muted. It was like a head rush when you stand up too fast.

Lester went on, “So this was what started running through my head after that damn SUV driver cut us off. More to be pissed off about, and here I hadn’t even processed the Doogie Howser motherfucker yet. The dude had not been properly humiliated, and so there I was hanging on to this anger over it, still stewing like two days later. What’s wrong with me? So I started hammering up the hill. I kind of hoped the intensity of my effort would drown out all thought, but it didn’t. If anything it just got my mind racing even faster. I ran my mind back over all the details. What was it the worthless little man was buying? It was something in a little bottle, an herbal supplement, or maybe some amino acid or something. He’s probably a damn vegan, and here he was mixing it up with a guy who’d just eaten a bunch of red meat! The fool! He was so obviously a pussy—where did he get off, trying to stare me down? Is this what he does, goes through life lording his above average height over people, successfully intimidating them with only the slightest provocation? He literally underestimated me. If I hadn’t been kneeling down, he probably wouldn’t have messed with me at all.

ooooo“The more I thought about as I rode up Claremont, the angrier I got, and the higher the gear I shifted into. It really hurt, but that didn’t matter anymore. Surely I was working through other, greater sources of stress, but I found I could easily load all my life frustrations right onto this stupid jerk who thinks his precious time is more important than two little kids getting their fruit leather.” Lester drained his glass.

ooooo“As for you: like I said, my little hammer fest wasn’t about you. You were just collateral damage. In fact, you were less than that. You didn’t even exist. At the top of the climb, I just had this overwhelming anger and found myself flipping the bird to the road, myself, the world in general. A pointless gesture, but it seemed necessary at that moment. And then, just a few seconds later, as soon as I went over the top of the climb and was able to coast, my whole mood went slack and I utterly ceased to care about the stupid little episode at the store. If I saw that guy again now, I’d probably laugh. Unless he got up in my face again, in which case he’d have to hope my kids were there to protect him.”

Lester looked intently at me for a moment. “Tell me what you’re thinking right now,” he said. This caught me off guard. I’d been listening for so long, it was like I forgot how to talk, how to form a sentence of my own. “Well,” I started, hunting for the words, “this is the problem with being too progressive, being the modern man. We start to deny our basic urges. We get all tuned into finessing social situations, reading facial expressions, basically behaving like women, when we want to be Jason Bourne taking in the room and measuring the distance to everybody in it, every possible threat, or like the Daniel Craig James Bond who could figure out how to kill half the people here in like five seconds, blowing up oil drums and everything to make his escape. We modern sensitive types have acclimated to this gentler society but we still have these killer instincts we haven’t evolved out of.”

Lester picked up his glass but there was nothing in it and he set it down again. “That’s not what I see on your face,” he said. “You don’t look like a frustrated man tamping down his aggression. You actually look like you might have almost smirked a minute ago. What are you really thinking right now?”

I was pegged. I hadn’t even realized it until he pointed it out, but I had felt something like a smirk. Something about the end of his story had struck me as a bit … pat. Such an excess of facility in his telling of it. So now I answered, as honestly as I could: “Well, I was just wondering. That story you just told. Have you told it before? Or had you worked it out in your head?” Lester didn’t answer. He just looked at me.

Perhaps ten seconds passed. I couldn’t take the silence. So I went on, “When you have those angry feelings … do you, like, think them through in complete sentences? Or do you narrate them to yourself? The way you told that story was just so … polished, I guess.”

Lester picked up his glass yet again, and slammed it down on the table. Fortunately the coaster had stuck to the bottom, cushioning the blow. “Glib,” he said. “That’s the word you’re looking for. Damn it!” Just as he said “Damn it,” there was a lull in the music and his voice carried a lot further that he’d intended. Several people looked over, including the barmaid. Lester put his elbows on the table and his head in his hands.

Another song started up, a pool ball clicked, and Lester slumped back in his chair and exhaled. “Listen, that’s just the way I talk,” he said. “Even as a little kid I spoke in these perfectly shaped sentences. In my career this is called thinking on my feet, and of course it’s an asset. The rest of the time, it’s pretty much useless. I just hold people captive, for no good reason, a captive audience, like I want to have everybody in my grasp, hanging on my words. Like I did, with you, tonight, which might have swelled me right up, gratified my ego, except you’re inwardly laughing at me like I’m some kind of freak show.” He got up and took his reeking leather jacket from the back of his chair. Without another word he walked out of the bar.

I just sat there, a bit stunned. I wasn’t sure what to do, but I finally decided since I had two untouched beers in front of me, I might as well have a few sips before heading for home. This might give Lester enough time to calm down a bit. He’d be walking straight down San Pablo Ave, and it was cold out there; surely he’d accept a ride home. It’d be an awkward, silent drive—but then, what else is new? dana albert blog