Cycling Smackdown - Small Cog Tale

Introduction

I’m an assistant coach for the Albany High School Cougars mountain biking team. As described in a previous smackdown post, my bike—with its triple crankset—seems, to the Cougars, as antiquated as I am. (More on gearing later—I’ll bet you can’t wait!) Part of my role as coach is to inspire these kids, so I need to convey, through actions alone, that I’m not actually obsolete. This can mean giving them a run for their money which, as you can imagine, gets harder every year. Read on for a white-knuckled (or at least old-knuckled) account of my latest endeavor.

Small cog tale

The weather looked iffy but none of the forecasts matched, so although it had rained all morning, the ride was on. Coach M—, our fastest, was MIA so I got put with the fastest group. As we set out and headed up Thousand Oaks Blvd, I noted that C—, our top rider, was rocking his NorCal League Champion jersey from last season, with the California flag on it. I said to him, “Nice jersey! Where can I get one?”

C— said to S—, “Where’s Coach M—, our fearless leader?”(or something to that effect). S—, who looks like a Pixar superhero, and who almost beat me in two all-out sprints last week, said, “Actually, Coach M— is 0 for 2 this season.” C— asked, “Who’d he lose to?” S— gestured in my direction and said, “Coach Dana.” C— replied, “Oh, shit!” He was surely thinking about the final sprint of the ride, a tradition that, several years ago, was oddly named “VO2.” It’s contested along the final stretch of Wildcat Canyon Road, which descends at 1-2% and winds around like a serpent. The finish line is the intersection with Grizzly Peak Blvd, near the Summit Reservoir where the Cougar ride groups (and those of other teams) tend to congregate before the final (controlled-pace) descent to the high school.

By the end of the first climb a wind had picked up, big dark clouds had rolled in, and the temperature was dropping. We regrouped at the reservoir and then I dragged everyone along Wildcat Canyon Road, heading east. Several times I gestured with a flick of the elbow for somebody to pull through but either I haven’t successfully taught that signal to the riders, or they just didn’t want to help. I was hoping for a team time trial type of group effort, but when I pointedly pulled off and looked at C—, he launched a devastating attack. He totally soloed and S— dropped me too. I overhauled S— on the short downhill toward the Botanical Garden, before the climbing resumed, but never caught C—. We regrouped at Inspiration Point and as the rest of the kids (and the other coach) trickled in, it started to rain.

I decided to lead everyone down Wildcat to where it hits El Toyonal, and back up. Several kids protested but only pro forma … I think we were all electrified by the rain, which increased as I drilled it down Wildcat. Before the ride I’d put a new clear lens in my sunglasses and it worked great deflecting the spray off the road. I could actually (basically) see, though the ridge of hills and all the trees had effectively hastened the sunset. I reached the junction with El Toyonal and turned around. We’d agreed to regroup again at Inspiration Point again after the climb, so I didn’t wait for anyone … they’d be along soon enough.

True to form, C— blew by me with S— dying on his wheel. S— came off and I managed to stay with him to the top. When we arrived C— was jumping up and down to stay warm as he had no jacket and no body fat. Eventually the others arrived, and we turned on our lights and put on all the gear we had as the rain was pounding down now. I loaned C— a spare pair of arm warmers but his arms were too wet and he lost patience pulling them on and chucked them back to me.

A— was still futzing with his gloves when a number of riders rolled out. I yelled at them to hold up. They ignored me—a mutiny!—and ramped up the speed. The cowards! Apparently certain Cougars didn’t want me around to contest VO2. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for cunning tactics, but this didn’t seem very sporting.

Annoyed, I hammered to catch up, moving through our group like in a racecar video game, but it was pretty hopeless. Three of the kids were way off the front, taking turns pulling, fighting the wind together, and I was only one guy. Still, on the downhill toward the Regional Parks Botanical Garden I felt I could close the gap a bit since I’m bigger than these kids and punch through the wind better. But my progress was incremental and not enough.

I was ready to just call it a day—I mean, who cares, really?—when I remembered my mantra: “I … WILL … NOT … LOSE … EVER.” I guess it’s not really my mantra in the sense that I came up with it or anything; I stole it from some rap song. Plus, it’s kind of disingenuous because I actually lose all the time. But “I … LOSE … ALL … THE … TIME” is not a suitable mantra, and when I’m slaying myself on the bike in a dim rainstorm with possibly toxic levels of adrenaline coursing through my system, I sometimes become pleasantly delusional and can pretend I never lose. But how could I possibly manage to prevail now, when already so far off the back?

Ah, I thought. There’s always the “I hate pain” hill.

The “I hate pain” hill is the short, somewhat steep (perhaps 9%) climb between the Botanical Garden and the Brazil Building. My wife gave this hill its name, back when we were first dating. She rode over it and said, “I just learned something about myself. I hate pain!” I can usually do this one in the big ring, after getting up as much speed as possible on the downhill before. For some reason, the mountain bike team always goes around it, via Anza View Road, even though they’re young and strong and fearless. Probably the coaches set the standard ages ago and nobody ever thought to change it up. Well, on a previous showdown, during a ride with my road team that a former Cougar had attended, I’d had a chance to do a little A/B test. He’d dropped our entire group including me and, not knowing any better, went around the hill while I, in desperate pursuit, went over it and discovered that up-and-over is actually faster. So now I figured that maybe, just maybe, I could make up enough time to get back in contention.

Well, it worked perfectly. I came over the top, and as the road dipped down again I could just see the top three riders rejoining the road ahead. I gave it full gas and managed to claw my way across and latch on to the back. I hung out there for a bit, recovering, and before long the last of the three, G—, looked back and saw me there. Haha! Surely they’d looked back several times and confirmed I was nowhere in sight. It must have seemed like I came out of nowhere.

C— was on the front driving a furious pace. I was getting a pretty good draft off G— (who must have grown three inches since last season) but he was dying and letting little gaps open, so riding behind him was unwise, like getting too close to a drowning victim. To G—’s credit, it took me a few tries to take S—’s wheel away from him. As I’ve taught the riders, you look at the wheel you want, not at the rider who’s on it, and you just have to kind of insinuate yourself onto the wheel. Eventually I had S—’s wheel but he’s not such a good draft. I was bent way over the bars, but I’ve got this giant Camelbak stuffed with the tool set, the first aid kit, every size of inner tube, extra clothes, and other bulky stuff so I wasn’t very aero.

The pace was relentless, and pedaling was even harder than usual because my shoes, being absolutely soaked, seemed to weigh about five pounds each. The chamois in my shorts was also sodden and droopy … is this what it’s like having a full diaper? I sensed S— starting to tire … so it was time to move into second. He didn’t seem to mind when I came past him; he knew he’d get a sweet draft off of me and have plenty of time to recover, so he could try to come past at the last second. (He’d come so very close to pulling it off last week, after all.) So now I was right on C—’s wheel and he’s just as lithe and wiry as a greyhound, blocking the wind even less than S—. It was absolutely brutal staying in that draft at that searing pace. C—’s rear tire sprayed up a rooster tail of water right in my face, but my clear goggles protected my eyes, and the water hitting my mouth, though befouled with grit, was almost refreshing. Meanwhile, C—’s unrelenting verve was inspirational, and as I clung to his wheel for dear life I tried to conjure up a plot to defeat him.

This kid had been pulling ever since I’d caught up, and probably almost the whole way from Inspiration Point. Sure, he’s the League Champ, but he’s not invincible … possibly I could come off his wheel with like 100 meters to go and punch his ticket. I was actually more worried about S—, who was just sitting perfectly in position behind me, and who’d have a pretty good idea of when I’d launch my sprint. I decided I had to go early, for the element of surprise.

There’s a spot maybe 300 meters from the end where the road curves around and the downhill gets just a bit steeper, from like 1% to 1.5%. It’s subtle, but the perfect moment to take advantage of my 11-tooth cog. I guess that’s not really such a tiny cog by modern standards—after all, my daughter’s bike has a 10—but that’s because most kids are running the so called “one-by” setup, with only one chainring, which is typically a measly 32-tooth. My triple crankset has a 42-tooth big ring, giving me a 20-30% higher gear than they have, and at a high enough speed, it’s like having nitro or something (if only my legs can manage to push hard enough).

Needless to say what you’re reading here isn’t technically a Big Ring Tale, because we’d all already been in our big rings, and/or our highest gears, for several minutes before the denouement of our battle began. For me, the battle came down to the cog. All last season I couldn’t use my smallest rear cog because it was worn out and skipped like crazy. This season I finally got around to addressing it—but I couldn’t find the new cassette I thought I had somewhere. I ended up finding some random, lone 11-tooth cog floating around in my big bin of extra parts. I had no idea where it came from or what kind of shape it was in, but  to my delight it works great—no skipping at all. So instead of setting up the climax of this yarn with the standard convention of  “I threw ‘er in the big ring,” this is the part of the story where I get to tell you “I dropped ‘er in the small cog.” (Who knows, perhaps with the growing popularity of these one-by setups, and mountain biking vs. road, the term “big ring tale” will become obsolete, and “small cog tale” will take its place.) Now, full disclosure, I might well have already been in the small cog, but that’s immaterial … the point is, now I launched the big move that demanded the 42x11 gear. I was going to spin that gear all the way up or die trying.

Well, the good news is, I did succeed in taking both kids by surprise and quickly got a good gap. The bad news is, with the rain and the dark and my somewhat fogged-up goggles I’d totally misjudged where we were; maybe it was wishful thinking that we were finally close to the end. I’d gone several curves too early! No wonder my sudden move had been so effective: you’d have to be a  fool to go from that far out! O my god, what had I done? But there was no way to change my plan now … if I let up at all, both kids would fly by and that would be the end of me. There was nothing to do but try to make the move stick. I had that 42x11 turning pretty well now. (Having gone back and done the math, I can tell you my cadence was just under 100 rpm, which isn’t so fast for a track racer, but pretty much perfect for a mosher like me.)

I died over and over again with every pedal stroke, and the wimp in my brain was chanting its usual defeatist litany, notions like “It’s over, you went too early, you’re doomed, just sit up, these kids are in their prime, S— looks like a Pixar superhero, C— is the reigning League Champ, there’s no shame, you gave them a good run for it.” Fortunately the song in my head (there’s always a song in my head), which was “King of Pain” by the Police, was drowning out the inner voice. Going early had not been the plan, of course, and yet I seemed to be following a familiar script. There seemed something so inevitable about the excruciating suffering I was going through once again: the blood-taste in my mouth, the turbine-like whoosh-whine of my breathing, the white-hot burn in my legs. It could be no other way and I wasn’t going to let up for a second until I’d won or lost. No looking back, either—I cannot fathom why pro racers in solo breakaways so often look back; it’s like the kiss of death. Just face forward, face the music: “I will always be King of Pain!”

I was around the final curve, out of the saddle now, thrashing, feeling like I had a bear trap clamped to each leg. This twisty road with the tall trees around it, and the dark and gloom, with sometimes even a bat or two, have often made me think of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and now I felt very much like Ichabod Crane dashing madly toward the final bridge, the Headless Horseman hot on my tail. The end in sight, I flogged myself like it mattered, and less than 50 meters from the finish still no kid had flashed by. With 25 meters to go I finally looked back. C— was there, of course, but well behind me, not even in my draft, and S— was nowhere to be seen. I’d pulled it off! Something like a wicked laugh fluttered to life deep within me but couldn’t make it anywhere close to my mouth, not with all that sucking wind and other respiratory havoc. But the feeling that flickered there was real and joyful. Can you imagine it? Actual joy, at my advanced age?

Needless to say my triumph, for all the thrill of the moment, was actually meaningless, a matter of pure trivia, something to be forgotten almost instantly (were it not for the stubborn persistence of this text). Surely C— didn’t much care. It’s just one more sprint of many, and like every coach I’m just a stepping stone on the kid’s way to greater things, if even that. But hey, that’s what I’m here for … my glory days were over thirty years ago and the point here is the current crop, the Cougars. When, some weeks from now, an actual race—a sanctioned NorCal mountain bike race—comes down to a final sprint, and C— wins it through timing, tactics, and grit, I will be stoked to have played any role at all in helping him reach that level. As for myself, I’m just glad to still be in the mix.

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Epic France Trans Alps Cycling Trip - Part I

Introduction

I did a week-long fully-supported bike trip through the French Alps with three friends. We hopscotched from one fancy hotel to another, with a full staff in vans supporting us the whole way. The trip was called the Epic France Trans Alps, and basically took us over every major Alpine mountain pass featured in the Tour de France. Not just this year’s Tour, but all of them. That’s 18 categorized climbs, half of them “Hors Categorie,” aka HC, which means “so difficult they cannot be classified.”

If you think this sounds hard, you’re right, though I’m suffering worse now that I’m on an airplane, in coach, headed back to my worldly responsibilities, and the person in the seat next to me has really bad breath. I’m about to start looking for a parachute…

This ride report will dispense with my usual formula of recounting the food and then the riding. There’s just too much to report, and I doubt you overmuch care what order we did anything in. This is just a highlights reel, and every couple thousand words I’ll cut it off and call it a post. (Readers complain I go on too long….)

Rental bike

The airlines are apparently cooler these days about not charging for bicycles, but they don’t take liability for any damage. Plus, I’m lazy, so I rented a bike. On the first day, we supplied the staff mechanic with pedals, saddles, bike computers, etc. and made sure the fit was right. We’d sent in our measurements in advance, and sure enough, the bike fit me pretty darn well. The tires looked really fat, and seemed awfully soft, but I’m told that’s the modern style. I asked three different randos if the tires felt too squishy to them, and they all said naw, it’s fine.

In case you’re a tech weenie, here’s the bike. I’m not going to geek out on the details other than to say it has a carbon frame, hella aero wheels, disc brakes, 12 cogs in the back, a compact double up front, and SRAM electronic shifting. The shifting hasn’t changed much since I first reported on it, here. Over the course of the week, I threw my chain three times, but in each case I was able to shift it back on via lever-taps, without needing to stop. (I did have to restart my heart each time.)

Wine with lunch?!

Since the first ride would just be an hour or so (to shake down the bikes), we had lunch in the hotel restaurant instead of having a picnic on the road. I’ve never done one of these supported tours before, so I kind of go with the flow and just play along like I know the drill. (I know—story of my life, right?) So when the waitress opened a bottle of wine for the table, and my pals elected to partake (“We wouldn’t want to waste it,” Ian said), I went along. I know drinking before hard exercise is absurd (even a small amount that wouldn’t affect motor skills), but I figured what the hell, I’m eating all this great bread anyway, it’ll sop it up. I was a couple sips in when we noticed waitresses rushing around removing wine bottles from the tables. “A mistake was made,” one explained to us, though she stopped short of removing our bottle since we’d started in on it. I guess the wine was only for the staff, not the riders. Oops.

When dessert arrived—crème brûlée—the others turned it down, not wanting to still be digesting as we tackled the Montée d’Avoriaz. I said screw it—I paid for this dessert, and it’s gonna be tasty. I’d muddle through the ride somehow, I figured.

Col des Égos

I knew this first ride would bring out the egos. There were two week-long tours running simultaneously, with the same staff and hotels, but different routes. The Epic one I signed up for has longer days and more climbs than the Trans group would do. Then, within each tour there was an A group and a B group. (My old scoutmaster would have called them “the kickass group and the pick-ass group,” bless his twisted, deeply suspect heart.) I was surprised that fully 15 of the Epic riders declared themselves Group A. Some of these guys looked a little old to me. Sure, they were fit and trim, but come on … it won’t be long before they’ll be offered wheelchairs at airports. I’d assumed going into this tour that I’d be bringing up the rear, hopefully not making everyone wait too long, but now I wasn’t so sure. One thing I did know: everyone was going to go super hard on this opening ride, to strut their stuff. It’s just how the male ego works. Except mine: I vowed (silently) to behave.

In the event, there was little temptation for me to hammer. My (albeit world class) stomach was working pretty hard on all that bread and crème brûlée, and surely the wine didn’t help. Meanwhile, I’d discovered that riding out of the saddle was tricky because my tires were, I now realized, severely underinflated. As I rocked the bike, there was a slight handling latency, the front tire buckling just a bit. It was like trying to sleep on a downy airbed, one of those weirdly thick ones, that when they invariably lose air start to sway a bit, like you’re onboard ship. In fact, my bike and I both felt a bit woozy in general. It was like some foggy, slow-motion dream, rider after rider rolling by me. This one guy passed me in a switchback and said, in a Mr. Rogers voice, “Coming through!” There was something so politely triumphant about it, it kind of rankled, especially since he was so damn old. He looked like he could be 40-something from the neck down, though looking at his face you’d think late sixties at least. But I wasn’t about to mount any resistance to his bold move. I just watched him pedal away and thought: enjoy yourself. Enjoy stomping me. Enjoy your $9K bike. I’ll be back here practicing my resignation skills, being the shit one once again.

As slow as I was going, continental drift was in my favor and I eventually made the summit. Here we are doing a photo op: the East Bay Velo Club 4, plus a couple of new pals, both (conveniently) named Michael. (I thought of not using any names here, but everyone is on Strava and if some serial killer wants to stalk wealthy cyclists he could easily do it without this blog.)

See the Michael on the right, in the neon? We chatted with him at lunch. He’s recently retired, does a fair number of these tours, and rides an old bike with a steel frame that can be disassembled like a sniper’s rifle. He was nipping at my heels all the way up the climb. I figured him for about 60 but came to learn he’s 71 years old, and still tough as nails.

I figured if I tried to descend back to the hotel with such squishy tires I’d probably roll one, so I found the van and asked the mechanic to take a look. Each tire had just 40 PSI! Boy did I feel like an idiot. Once I got those bad boys topped up at 80, my rented Felt felt like an actual road bike, no longer like a beach cruiser. The descent was glorious. Smooth, flow-y road, amazing scenery, an expert guide with perfect lines to follow. Comparing notes, Craig and I were just giddy.

Dinner

The format of this tour makes a lot of sense, for the ride and my report: if you’re sick of cycling, either because you’re knackered from a hard day in the saddle or from reading too much tedious text on the topic, suddenly there’s this great meal in front of you. We started with this:

France has clearly not (okay, has only recently) gotten the memo about cured meats being carcinogenic. (Then again, they’ve never taken the tobacco threat seriously either.) We ate cured meats roughly three times a day throughout the week, even K who is otherwise a vegetarian. It’s just so good, you never say no to all manner of charcuterie, ham, bacon, you name it. Perhaps it’s a regional specialty. That’s what I decided, anyway; I can’t be bothered to look it up now.

Here is the entrée, some kind of amazing roast pork. I must confess I’ll probably never feel perfectly natural sitting at a table and having something like this set in front of me. That’s just not how I was raised. Don’t get me wrong, my mom is an amazing cook, but our pantry always had different stuff. When was a kid, Mom would use oatmeal to stretch a pound of ground turkey to make burgers for six. Once my patty squirted out of the back of the bun and I didn’t even notice. The only beef we ever got was liver because serving it was considered a mother’s duty back in those days. We got pretty cool cheeses from some co-op, but they were all the melting, cooking kind—not like these soft French ones. Hell, we grew up drinking powdered milk. So when I had this incredible roast pork dish on my plate there was a small part of me that feared someone would suddenly rush out from the kitchen and say, “Stop! A mistake has been made! You must give that back!”

Here’s the dessert, a little cake doodad, possibly flourless, with flawless ice cream. Since we’re on the topic, here is my recipe for flourless chocolate cake.

Breakfast

Wait, you’re thinking: this report has so far delivered only 16 miles of actual cycling action, but at least 6,000 calories of food lore, and now you’re gonna talk about breakfast? Seriously?

Well, yeah. This is kind of what travel is for. As different as the Alps are from the Sierra Nevadas and the Rockies (and don’t worry, I will eventually get into these differences), the French terrain is far more similar to the American than their food is to ours. I can only imagine that a European traveler to the U.S. would be endlessly appalled by the garbage we serve up. A grocery store baguette? Forget it, it’d go straight into the garbage. And a croissant? Spongy, insipid, indestructible, ageless. Eat an American motel breakfast pastry and you’ll end up with a gross film on the roof of your mouth. And don’t you dare eat scrambled eggs from a steam tray … they’ll be soggy or dried-out or somehow both, and won’t taste a thing like an egg, which they’re not—they’re surely poured from a carton. That’s the US hospitality industry for you. Meanwhile, I stayed at an airport Holiday Inn Express in Geneva and had an entirely serviceable continental breakfast. Sure, the croissant wasn’t brilliant, but on the balance was quite worth eating. So I’m going to spend some time on the food in these posts.

This is the croissant I had at my first official tour hotel breakfast. Light, airy, buttery, and flaky enough to make a mess on my plate.

Bread in general can be intolerable in the U.S. Anything you’d get with a so-called continental breakfast in most places would just make you want to cry. Sure, we have great one-off bakeries in the Bay Area, but the quality control if you randomly toured the country would be abysmal. In contrast, you really can’t go wrong in Europe, in my experience. I fearlessly had a pre-made sandwich at the Geneva airport and another at the Zurich airport, both on rather good bread. And it wasn’t just the bread: one of these sandwiches was a Caprese. Can you imagine ordering a Caprese sandwich at an airport in America? The tomatoes would be pink and mushy, the bread like cardboard, the basil flavorless, the fresh Mozzarella soggy and limp. You’d probably start crying. I certainly would.

On the flip side, my pals and I observed something really bizarre at every French hotel we ate at: as good as the bread was, there was never any butter. WTF? Doesn’t everybody love good butter for their great bread? (Exception: I did find one little block of Président brand butter at one breakfast, which I’d thought was cheese. Maybe the hotel did, too.) Even olive oil was never offered, and if the bread hadn’t been so good we’d surely have complained (I mean, other than to each other). At our last dinner there was one little oil/vinegar dispenser going around, but literally just one, and the absolutely world class waitstaff seemed really flummoxed: perhaps not by not having more of these dispensers, but by this one having shown up out of nowhere seeding discontent at neighboring tables.

Meanwhile, I cannot understand the French hotel industry’s inability to cater to Americans’ coffee tastes. Every coffee shop in America has some version of a basic house coffee. Isn’t Starbucks showcasing this globally now? Plus, the archetypal large mug of coffee is featured in countless Hollywood movies that are exported around the world. The concept is not complicated: we drink a dark brown beverage, brewed from coffee beans, in quantities of 12 to 24 ounces, and we call it, simply, “coffee.” It is not cappuccino or espresso or any other kid-size micro-beverage that you drink like it’s a shot of booze. I thought we had this coffee mismatch solved after World War II when Europeans saw our American soldiers watering down their dinky coffee-bean-freebasing drinks and took to calling this larger beverage an Americano, but nobody in the Rhône-Alpes region seems to have heard of this. The machines have all these buttons with weird names like “Café Long” which doesn’t mean anything in any language, or “Café Noisette” which sounds like it would be “noisy” but actually literally translates “hazelnut” which the ensuing beverage did not have the slightest flavor of. Over the course of the trip I tried six or eight different fancy digital coffee machines and a few humans and never did get a normal cup of coffee, not even an Americano. Most of what I drank tasted mainly like foamed milk and at no point did I manage to get the simple black coffee I was looking for. It’s like some vast conspiracy to deliberately fail to understand this simple concept of what non-fussy, non-micro, basic-ground-coffee-bean-based beverages are supposed to be. I never even saw a normal mug, except this one in my hotel room (the purpose of which was not clear, but which I liked due to the cyclist pattern):

To be continued…

Well, I see I’ve pretty much run out of room here, or more to the point you’ve run out of patience. Tune in next time when I promise to get as far as the Col de Joux Plane, the Col de la Columbière, the Col de Croix Fry, and surely another meal or two.

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From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume VII

Introduction

This is the seventh installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. Volume I is here, Volume II is here, Volume III is here, Volume IV is here, Volume V is here and Volume VI is here. (The different volumes have nothing to do with one another.)

Every time I dip into my past essays and letters looking for little nuggets that could entertain or enlighten my albertnet audience, I think I’ll finally come up empty, my archives finally having been exhausted. But recently I found a folder from the mid-’90s with old emails in it, pasted into individual text files. Email was new then and I must have thought I could keep up with the quixotic task of archiving it. Ha! Later I decided I could just trust the email software archive (as this was before anyone realized these programs would go extinct and lock up past emails forever.)

The posts in this installment are from when I lived in San Francisco, post-college.

May 1, 1995

[Email to myself, testing my new address.]

Hey Dana:

Just a quick note to say that you’re really one of the most outstanding individuals I’ve ever come across. Keep up the fine work.

—Dana

[I mean, if I don’t give myself this kind of encouragement, who else is gonna do it?]

August 2, 1995

[To a friend who was dabbling in the new frontier of online quasi-dating, which back then meant meeting people in chat rooms, without any easy way to transmit photos back and forth. My friend had done lots of text-based chatting with his romantic prospect, and they’d even had a couple of long phone calls, but they hadn’t yet FedExed photos to each other.]

The way I see it, you and Cyber-Susan have highly compatible personalities. Keep in mind, however, that “she has a nice personality” is a disparaging remark in most circles. Humans are superficial about things like looks. According to Stephen Dawkins, this is a biological program that cannot be thwarted. (Not that he doesn’t have plenty of fruit-loopy ideas himself.) In any case, I see perhaps three possible scenarios involving your first face-to-face meeting with Susan.

1. She is a miraculous composite of Michelle Pfeiffer, Sandra Bullock, and Nicole Kidman. If ever there was a beauty that you did desire, and got, ‘twas but a dream of Susan. Her beauty sinks you into a swoon. Meanwhile, her voice, now unadulterated by the coarse fiber optics of the phone line, is the sweet singing of sirens. Her personality is sharper and brighter than ever when not dulled by the impersonal nature of the personal computer.

2. She is a hideous composite of a mole rat, a gorgon, and a bat. Her voice, when she gets excited (and I know she will!) loses the careful modulation she managed, through extreme effort, to keep up for six hours on the phone. In moments of passion, her speech sounds like the horrible screeching of two raccoons fornicating. The apparent wit and charm displayed in her e-mail messages turn out to be the result of painstaking labor, and a lot of plagiarism. The phone calls, you learn, were carefully scripted. After your initial, tactful efforts to put the “relationship” to sleep, she pursues you with terrier tenacity.

3. He is the zit-faced, pudgy, bespectacled Far-Side-looking teenage boy we feared all along. His voice is only as pleasant as it is prepubescent. But he’s got a great personality, and at least you have an interesting new pen pal.

But all kidding aside, I hope everything turns out swell. Just remember to use virus protection!

August 16, 1995

[In response to a truncated email.]

Your entire message read, “I am not sensitive about tasteless jokes at all, so give”

There is just trails off. I envision that right after you finished typing “give,” somebody sunk a large bowie knife between your shoulder blades. Then, before you could collapse onto the keyboard and type “67yhnyhhhhhhhhhhhh” with your face, he threw you aside, and, not knowing what else to do, sent the message. Either that, or you indeed did fall forward, and typed “tvgfruuuuuuuuuuuu” with your face, and he deliberately erased that part of the message.

What could the motive have been? Perhaps the perp was somebody who is offended by tasteless jokes.

September 12, 1995

I’m traveling on business with my boss. He has very high standards about the quality of his food and lodgings. We checked into our hotel and he decided the rooms weren’t up to snuff and switched to a neighboring hotel, causing god knows how many complications for those back at the office who think they know how to reach us.

Tonight we went to a restaurant and there was a bit of a wait, so we ordered a beer. Bass on draft. Well, it didn’t taste that good. I didn’t really care, but my boss sent them back. The bartender, who was obviously in training, suggested something else. It proved to be even worse. This time I really found it disgusting. It had the flavor of a sweaty gym sock (many of which I’ve sucked on in my day). Well, again, I wasn’t going to say anything, but we sent them back and decided we couldn’t go wrong with something in a bottle. Well, we ordered two Red Hook ESB’s, and as soon as the bartender set them down, I noticed that on the part of the label that goes around the neck of the bottle were pictured three Washington trolley drivers. I happen to have noticed, over the last month or so, that Red Hook no longer features the trolley drivers. So I checked the freshness date on the bottle, and the beer had expired in July! Sure enough, it too was gross—very flat and just kind of off. By this time we had our table, so we sent the beers back with the waitress, who must’ve told the young bartender, for he came out and apologized in person. A few minutes later the owner came out and also apologized. Then, when we had finally consumed the fourth beers, which were fine, the waitress brought out two more, on the house. Needless to say this was more than I ordinarily drink.

October 26, 1995

Cycling has gotten so hard. I shouldn’t take the bait when these weekend warriors try to school me. In the past I’ve let countless guys drop me since my fitness was not a question, but now that I’m out of shape I feel this need to convince myself of some essential quality that I (hopefully) still have. So I think to myself, “I don’t really want to do this to you—nor to myself—and my ego certainly shouldn’t need this, but it does, so now you must die.” And then we both suffer horribly, needlessly.

I duked it out with some newbie the other day, and it was just brutal. The whole thing lasted like half an hour, and he was like a Weeble Wobble, the little toy dude that weebles and wobbles but won’t fall down. This rider was, in fact, also like that little green goblin-head “stress reliever” toy wherein you deform this goblin’s face with your thumbs, force his eyes up into his sockets, then squeeze its head from the back so its eyes bug out, and this is supposed to relieve stress—except that he always comes back for more. Such dolls represent the futility of life: your foes are never really dead, you never get to relax. At least, not until you finally get out the power tools and make that fucking goblin BLEED. Or you jam the Weeble Wobble beneath the tire of the neighbor’s camper and it’s crushed like a boiled egg by the next time you see it. Victory, yes, but at a price. I finally dropped the newb but my stress wasn’t relieved, since I had to make sure he never caught back up. When will it ever end?

November 16, 1995

I’m so disappointed that the band “Smashing Pumpkins” turns out to be called “The Smashing Pumpkins.” I thought “Smashing Pumpkins” was a verb phrase, along the lines of “Smashing the Pumpkins.” Kind of like the novel Fools Crow: its eponymous hero has the original, humiliating childhood name “White Man’s Dog” until, as a teenager, he fools a band of Crow Indians and gets the better of them (killing several, I believe) and in return for his valor and cunning, is given the new, cool name “Fools Crow.” This name is a verb phrase emphasizing the act of fooling (i.e., “fools the Crows”).

Of course, “Smashing Pumpkins” is problematic anyway because nobody actually smashes pumpkins. They only smash jack-o-lanterns. That act does capture the random, energetic lashing out of a young grunge type, but can you imagine the force required to smash an un-carved pumpkin? It’d be pretty spectacular actually, with the guts and seeds flying everywhere. I think the band should be called Smashes Pumpkins.

December 1, 1995

[To a friend of a friend who was considering buying my used laptop PC, with or without an external monitor.]

No, no, no, heavens no, the built-in monitor doesn’t suck. It’s as good as monochrome LCD displays get. I just tried it out again and it’s fine. You open up the lid, there’s no screen, you pitch it back a bit, it comes on, it’s golden, it’s backlit, white-on-black or black-on-white, brightness control, contrast, wonderful. Better than most. A real selling point, in fact.

It’s just this. You’re working, late into the night, hammering away on that keyboard, and this is after-hours, when you’re working on your magnum opus after having stared at a computer screen all day anyway. Your eyes are tired. You’re grumpy. In fact, you’re feeling pretty shitty. And suddenly you don’t see the cursor all that well. You lose sight of where you are. Computer problem? Hell no—it’s a full-blown midlife crisis! You’re just frustrated. So you take it out on the computer. You say, “Dana, that bastard. He sold me a piece of crap. Typical of the kind of guy who would be friends with D–.” In reality, you’re just coming face-to-face with an awful truth: when the going gets rough, a 14” Sony Trinitron Multiscan HG Super Fine Pitch color monitor is a nice thing to have. You see, people buy color laptops and/or desktop computers for a reason. The monochrome LCD did not make the Sony color monitor a thing of the past. So that’s why I’m offering you the monitor as an optional accessory. It’s a magnanimous gesture, a way to say “Hey buddy, life is harsh. Your computer screen shouldn’t be.”

Look, all this e-mailing back and forth reminds me of a blind date. I’d hate for you to get all amped up creating a mental image of this computer, fantasizing about a sleek, thin, 4-pound gleaming miracle of modern technology but also fearing it’s an old, clunky, barely usable white elephant. The difference between expectation and reality can be a harrowing thing. You need to try before you buy. I don’t want this to end badly, like when I sold a phone answering machine to our friend D—. It was practically brand new when I sold it to him, but it broke almost immediately. I can’t believe it. Its life expectancy was much higher than that. It’s like my Sony TV: I loaned it to a friend while I went on my bike tour, and while he had custody, the picture tube blew out. I couldn’t very well make him pay for it, since I can’t imagine it was his fault; to this day (over a year later) he still has it, and is avoiding me. He’s got my VCR too—not much point bothering to get that back, without a TV to play it on. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not chapped or anything—I broke his CD player and tape deck while he was in Japan, years before, and he was cool about it. Yet we haven’t spoken since I got back from my tour. Meanwhile, over this lousy phone answering machine, D— won’t even e-mail me anymore. The last I heard from him was the message on my voice-mail telling me the answering machine I sold him broke. The failure of that simple appliance, I fear, has ruined our friendship. And what’s worse, I don’t think he even paid me for the damn thing. If he had, I could just refund his money and all would be forgiven.

June 25, 1996

Regarding your question about bottom brackets, and whether a fixed cup is threaded backwards (i.e., has a “left-hand thread”): well, here’s how it works. You have to find out what market the bicycle was intended for. No matter where it’s made, the thread orientation is determined by the location where the bike will be used. For example, Phil Anderson’s bottom bracket is a left-hand thread, because he lives in Australia. Just as the water spins the opposite way as it goes down the drain in the Southern Hemisphere, bottom bracket fixed cups are threaded backwards there. This is why most successful racers tend to be from northern countries: the southern ones have all kinds of bottom bracket trouble when they race up here.

I guess you’re probably not buying that. The rule actually goes like this: there are three different standards for threads on bicycle parts: English, Italian, and French. An English standard bottom bracket shell has a cup that is 1.37 inches in diameter, with 24 TPI (threads per inch), left-hand (backwards) threaded. (This is what you have.) An Italian standard BB shell has a cup 36 mm in diameter, with 24 TPI, right-hand threaded. (This is what I have.) If your BB shell were French standard, it would be stripped, frozen, cross-threaded, and utterly worthless.

October 28, 1996

[Email to a friend far better connected in cycling than I.]

Man, that sucks about Lance [Armstrong] having cancer. If it’s really spread to his brain, you’re right, that sure as hell doesn’t look good. I mean, you can’t exactly amputate a brain…

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From the Archives - Punish Me, Young Man!

Introduction

Today’s post is a story I originally wrote for Daily Peloton. (Their servers crashed a couple years ago and all their content was lost, so I’m gradually re-posting my dp articles here.) Enjoy please enjoy.

Punish Me, Young Man – October 14, 2007

On my ride today I got crushed by a guy whose bike had a front reflector. And yet, it was a glorious ride. (If that grabs your attention, read on, but if you’re looking for pro race results, you won’t find them in this story.)

I got off to a late start on my ride this morning, tired and feeling vaguely demoralized. I’d been caught in the rain on the previous day’s ride and was having that standard existential crisis of “Why do I train so much, and so hard, in October no less, when I don’t even race anymore?” So I was dragging to begin with, and then on my second climb, South Park Road, I really started to bog down. I was not feeling any of those “positive sensations” the pro racers are always talking about. And I kept seeing these squashed newts on the road.

These endangered newts are protected half the year by a road closure, but it doesn’t begin until November and I guess they got a head start on their seasonal migration because of the early rain. It was depressing: I saw like two dozen of them, smashed completely flat. Okay, this really shouldn’t have affected my morale, but that’s the kind of morning I was having. I almost turned around and went home.

Fortunately, the night before I’d watched the violent Western “3:10 to Yuma” and was still feeling the effects of second-hand testosterone on the baser part of my nature—the lizard brain that doesn’t make excuses. I decided to push on, taking the steep, long descent of Claremont Road so I could drag myself back up it. Toward the bottom I saw this guy coming up. He waved, and I gave a little nod before realizing, wait, that was a really big wave, maybe he needs some help. I sat up, looked back, and (being basically at the bottom already) turned around and rode toward him. He slowed down so I could ride up alongside him. “Hi, I’m new here and don’t know any rides,” he said.

Now, before I commit to sharing my ride with a stranger, especially if I’m grumpy, I’ll usually try to figure out what kind of rider he is. You can’t really go by how nice his bike is, at least in the Bay Area, where a newcomer to the sport will happily drop three or four grand on a bike. But you can get clues: how well does the bike fit him? Double or triple crankset? And does his gear look suspiciously new, or well used?

This guy was on a spanking new ride, an Ultegra-equipped LeMond, with not only a triple crankset but a front reflector. I think I first recognized the stigma of a front reflector when I was about eleven. In all the shops I’ve worked at, that was the one reflector we always left off on new bikes, even the cheap ones. Getting the risk-averse shop management to approve this was never hard: front reflectors only serve those who ride on the wrong side of the road at night without a light.

And yet, this guy somehow didn’t seem like a novice. (I used to hear the term “Fred” applied to beginners, but one of our local heroes, Fred Rodriguez, has pretty much put that name to rest.) This guy’s position was good—he didn’t have his handlebars jacked up Mary Poppins style, which seems an epidemic among novice cyclists. And he was lean. He also had this European accent, which I couldn’t place. He was medium height, with very dark skin. His clothing looked great (but of course this is something money can buy). I asked him how long he was looking to go, and he said four hours. Four hours!

I told him I wasn’t going that long, but if he wanted I’d take him up the steepest climb in the area. I’m always trying get my friends to do this climb, called Lomas Cantadas, which gains 1,240 feet in about 2½ miles at an average grade of 11%. My friends’ responses usually range from “Yeah, right” to “I did that once and I’ll never do it again as long as I live.” How refreshing that this guy was so willing. Of course, he not only had no idea where else to ride, but didn’t know what he was getting into.

But first there was Claremont to get over. We began the climb—about 1.5 miles averaging 10%—and he started half-wheeling me right away. That can be annoying, but then I know how instinctive this is when you’re riding with someone you don’t know and want to make a good impression. But man, the harder I went, the faster he went, without ever seeming to strain. “New bike?” I asked him. He told me he was borrowing it from a local shop: he’d just moved here from Austria and would be trying out for the Health Net team on Monday. Had I heard of Health Net? Uh … yeah. Wow. Suddenly I realized that, as ambassador for Bay Area cycling to a serious European racer, I was going to have to dig deep to make sure this ride wasn’t a total waste of his time.

Dang, he was strong. Had this climb gotten steeper? I’m known on my bike club for having the strange (and annoying) ability to chatter away merrily right up to my anaerobic threshold, but here I found myself gasping for breath. I asked him how old he was: twenty. I’d been thinking we were more or less the same age, but only because I always forget how damn old I am. He asked, and I admitted I’m thirty-eight. (Going on fifty, I didn’t add.) I asked what his specialty was, and he said he’s an all-rounder. Yeah, he looked it, but he could sure climb. Toward the top of Claremont, he said, “Hey, you ride good.” He paused, then continued, “For thirty-eight.”

I rested a bit descending to Orinda and along the flat section before the dreaded Lomas Cantadas. As soon as we hit the climb I felt its wrath. (At least there’s no traffic—the narrow road winds around through a sparse residential area that eventually gives way to ranchland at the summit.) Within a quarter mile I was in my lowest gear and bogging down, but the Austrian never slowed. I dug deeper and deeper, looking for some sign that he was feeling anything. No sign. I asked him if he raced pro or amateur. “Professional,” said, and quickly added, “but only on a Continental team.” He pointed at his jersey: this past season he raced for Swiag Pro Cycling Team, and for the Austrian national team. I asked if he got to ride Worlds, and he said that the federation screwed up and didn’t submit their results to the UCI, and ended up only getting to send one rider instead of three. He’d been among the original three, but wasn’t the one guy who got to go.

So here I was, riding with an honest-to-God European pro! I wished I’d had better legs, though the difference between my best and worst day probably wouldn’t have been perceptible to him. Boy did I suffer. Somewhere along the line I hit my highest heart rate of the year, 181. I asked him at one point what his was: 150. 150! When I was his age, I would hit 150 riding to class … he must have really been loafing. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the difference between a local boy and a real pro. He’s basically a different species.

On the hardest part of the climb, a couple miles in, I came completely apart. I was fricking rendered. The center could not hold. The infrastructure was crumbling. The fountains no longer worked in my plazas. Goats grazed in the shell of my capitol building. I weaved, my form was shot, my legs howled (albeit silently) like spoiled children, I wheezed like a leaf stuck in the blower. And yet, it was fun! I was taking on all comers: Man Against Man, Man Against Nature, Man Against Himself. I way dying, yes, but I had that wimp in my brain up against the turnbuckles at last. Oh yeah? Feeling lousy? Feeling weak and worthless? Well, let’s head out with this guy, lets offer him up my skinny legs to snap like twigs, let’s let my male ego trounce the rational mind once and for all, let’s see just how low I can go, how much pain I can pile on. I doubted the pro even noticed what I was going through, as he always stayed half a bike length ahead.

Ages ago, when my brother Geoff was an up-and-coming eighteen-year-old racer, he often rode with a thirty-something ex-racer named Bob, a crusty old veteran who’d been pretty good in his day. One day, as they duked it out on an epic Colorado climb, Geoff tried to keep a poker-face despite terrible, terrible suffering. Finally, he sneaked a glance at his opponent. Bob turned to him, grinned, and said, “Punish me, young man!” Ever since I heard that story, I’ve longed to use that line, and this here was almost the perfect opportunity. But the Austrian pro’s English wasn’t perfect, and I’d hate for the language barrier to distort the joke into something embarrassing. I was sure thinking it, though.

My motor control gone, I fumbled and dropped my water bottle. “Oh, I’ll get it,” the pro said. Normally I’d have tried to impress him by circling back and snatching it up without stopping, but I was in no condition to do it, and welcomed a brief respite. Besides, I wanted to see how long it took him to catch back up. He took his time circling back, stopped, stashed the bottle in his jersey pocket, and then smoothly but unhurriedly cruised back up as I kept myself redlined. I was reminded of the time I watched piranhas hunting goldfish in an aquarium: they’re so much faster than their prey, they simply don’t have to hurry. “No rush, I’ll take out the fish whenever I feel like it … okay—now.”

Finally the awful, beautiful climb was over, and we cruised the rest of my ride (he still had two and a half hours to go), chatting. He told me his name, Robel Tedros, and I figured out how to remember the name of his team, Swiag (“I will get lots of swag”). I gave him the URL of the bike club I’m on, and he said he might look me up. He described his plan: if his audition with Health Net goes well and he gets a good offer, he’ll race in the U.S.; otherwise he’ll move to Italy and race there. (I’m not sure why he’s leaving Austria, though he did mention the weather is lousy there.) I described some other roads he could check out, wished him luck on Monday, and we parted ways. I can’t imagine he won’t shred the Health Net boys, but who am I to say?

When I got home I googled his name and found him all over the race results websites, lots of top twenties. His profile on his team’s website, roughly translated by my browser (I don’t speak a word of German), reads thus: “Successes: winner total valuation of the UNIQA junior Trophy 2006, 6 victories in the junior class 2006, 6 further Top three placements in the junior class 2006, Viennese master in the junior class/road 2006, summoning into the Austrian junior national team 2006, 1 victory in the junior class 2005, 3 further Top three placements in the junior class 2005. Qualities: very good mountain driver, good individual time driver, good Sprinter, very good Allrounder, my nerve strength, openness, tolerance, loyalty, ambition.”

[Here’s a photo of Robel from around the time I encountered him.]

So, next time you see a guy with a front reflector on his bike, don’t jump to any hasty conclusions. He might be one of those mountain drivers!

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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.

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Big Ring Tale - Cycling “Hail Mary”

Introduction

I am old. Fifty, and that’s mighty old, especially to try to be an athlete. But to paraphrase Faulkner, age “might have kilt me but it ain’t whupped me yit.” I still try to duke it out from time to time with the high school kids whom I coach mountain biking. These kids, if they did nothing, would continually improve just by getting older (and thus bigger and stronger). When they train regularly, their progress is stunning. Thus we coaches enjoy watching kid after kid go from learning the ropes to whupping us, often within the span of a single season.

This tale concerns a quixotic effort to beat L—, my team’s star rider, in a drag-out sprint recently on Wildcat Canyon Road toward the end of a team practice. If the outcome was “He kicked my ass and I never had a chance,” there wouldn’t be a story. Trust me, it’s a bit more complicated than that. My tale involves verve, poor fitness, equipment, tactics, politics, shame, equipment, tactics, suffering, equipment, luck, tactics, and luck. In that order.

Verve

Who am I to be going up against our fastest rider in a slightly downhill sprint? This kid has been on the podium in every race he’s done, except the State Championships and Nationals (where he was top ten in both). When he first joined the team I was expecting a very stocky kid because we inherited him from the football team (which had such a weak bench, they had to cancel their season when concussions claimed too many players to continue fielding a team). Instead, his physique is perfect for bike racing. He could have been a transfer from Team Ineos.

So yeah, why would I even try? Well, I always try. This is because cycling is such a complicated sport … crazy things happen that can suddenly put an otherwise non-competitive rider into contention (say, a giant crash in the final corner of a criterium that squirts a single lucky rider through). Moreover, I like taking on ridiculous odds just for the lunatic thrill of it. In a sprint you always end up going fast, and if you’re on the right wheel you go really fast, and speed feels great even when you lose.

But that’s still not the source of my foolish verve. Ultimately, if I don’t always try, no matter how doomed I am, I’ll become one of those guys who doesn’t try. That leads eventually to the being guy who never goes hard at all, and then to the guy who only rides to the bakery, and finally to being the guy who stops riding altogether.

Poor fitness

Am I going to say my opponent lacked fitness, this being February? Ha. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha. He’s young—he never lacks fitness. Aware of his own talent, L— always has ample motivation to train, and even his light off-season training has a dramatic result, meaning that the normal sine curve of seasonal fitness doesn’t apply to him. His graph is a constant upward trajectory, albeit with a steeper slope during the racing season.

Of course it is I who had the poor fitness. This is actually a strength for me when it comes to sprinting. Because my training is almost all in the hills, getting fit means climbing (marginally) better at the expense of my (already spotty) sprinting ability. If I’m ever going to finish fast on a flat road, it’s going to be in the early season.

Equipment

I was late to the party, about halfway through the group when I saw the contenders boiling at the front. This might seem like poor tactics on my part, to be caught napping like that. Actually, it was a timeworn strategy to protect my ego: I had an excuse, I was out of position! Of course, this is a bad strategy because the relief I feel at having an excuse is itself shameful, so my ego comes out the worse for wear.

Fortunately, even as L— began to pull away from the other riders, like a running back shrugging off defenders, he suffered an equipment problem—his chain wouldn’t go into the highest gear. This slowed him slightly, giving me hope of making it onto his wheel. Suddenly he had one foot out of the pedal and was swiping at his rear derailleur with his foot. By the time he kicked it just right and got into his highest gear, I was halfway across to him with a good head of steam.

Tactics, politics, and shame

So, the perfect tactic might seem to suck L—’s wheel until the very last second, and then sprint around him. But this would be problematic. It’s long run-up to the finish, along the twisty, slightly downhill road, and that’s a long time to suck anybody’s wheel. If we were professionals and the sprint actually mattered in the slightest, we might get into one of those deadlocks like you see on the velodrome, where riders slow to a crawl, neither willing to lead out the sprint. But this was just for glory, and there’s nothing glorious about sitting in your opponent’s draft for such a long stretch.

So, to work things right politically, I’d need to take a turn at the front, and the sooner I started, the better. The smart move is to pull good and hard and long so that the stronger rider will eventually see you dying up there and decide it would be equally shabby to suck your wheel the rest of the way … so he finds himself taking the final pull, essentially leading out the sprint. He won’t like it, but he’ll be honor-bound to do it.  That was my plan, anyway. I went to the front and started slaying myself. I drilled it for a good while, and then started to slow down, very gradually, as if running out of steam—but I was faking it. Sure enough, L— eventually went to the front and I tucked in behind him. NOOICE!

Equipment

My mountain bike, though it sports a carbon fiber frame and modern brakes etc., is old-school in that it has a triple chainwheel. In the realm of mountain bike culture, this is as lame as, well, being fifty years old. A double chainwheel is much more current, and all the best cross country bikes have just one chainwheel (a “one-by”). I’ve often mused that if the one-by came first, and then the industry added a second and later a third chainwheel, that would be considered rad. Yeah, my drivetrain doesn’t look as clean, and there’s more room for shifting failures, but that third chainwheel gives me a higher gear. At the speed we were going, L— was fairly wound out in his highest gear and spinning really fast, which wasn’t as efficient as my cadence. Plus, knowing my top gear was higher than his stoked my mojo.

Tactics – Part II

As much as I longed to shelter myself in L—’s draft for as long as possible, I realized the chief problem with this strategy: I don’t have a lot of fast-twitch muscles, and it’s possible that at the very end, once I swung out to the side out of L—’s draft, he might have enough punch to hold me off. It’s never a good idea to underestimate the sheer power of a young, faster rider and I’ve been burned this way before. It’s also the saddest way to go out: you suck the guy’s wheel to the very end but still lose. So I decided I had to use the element of surprise and launch my sprint far sooner than he would ever expect. If I gave it everything, I figured it was just barely possible he’d fail to get my wheel. So, marveling at how stupid it felt to try this, I attacked L— as hard as I could, well before the end.

Suffering

Well, it worked … sort of. Truly caught out by my seemingly suicidal move, L— failed to catch my wheel. Now I was fully committed and just hammered my brains out. This is where experience can really help: part of what holds a rider back is fear of acute pain, but I’ve suffered too badly, too many times, to succumb. Resignation is a skill that can be refined and polished. I’ve learned how to distract myself slightly from the agony by stepping back to look at it, to marvel at it. Wow, it’s just searing pain! It’s amazing! The legs don’t want to turn anymore, but they do! Look at ‘em go! What a bizarre behavior, all this self-abuse just for the chance at a tiny dollop of glory I’ll almost certainly be denied in the end anyway! What a fool! Let’s see how far we can extend this!

Equipment

Every second L— failed to get my wheel increased my chances of success, so I was pedaling harder than ever and my chain started skipping. I guess I kind of knew my 11-tooth cog was worn out, but had forgotten because honestly, how often do I pedal this hard in that gear? The skipping reduced my efficiency, of course; not a lot, but I needed all the planets to line up here. This. Was. Not. Good. I looked over my shoulder and L— was not far behind. I still had a long way to go. It didn’t seem possible for me to hold him off. Ah, well … there were a dozen ways to fail at this, and going too early was one of them.

Luck

                                      

Suddenly I came around a bend and saw a car up the road, not so far ahead, that had passed us earlier when we weren’t going so fast. It was going just a tiny bit slower than I, and I figured if I could close the gap to it, I’d benefit from the large slipstream a car produces. If I got into that draft, and not L—, maybe I could maintain my lead.

Tactics – Part III

The problem with giving it everything to catch the car is that if I did, but it wasn’t going fast enough to keep me ahead of L—, I’d have expended all that energy for nothing … I’d be stuck behind it as L— caught up. Then, when the road flattened and straightened out, and the car pulled away, L— would leave me in the dust. What I really needed was for the car to speed up a bit once I caught its draft. I figured the chances of this scenario were 50/50 … a lot better than just holding my own. So I went all-in, going almost anaerobic to close the gap. (Don’t worry, I’m not an idiot … I kept plenty of distance between me and the car, so I could react in time if it did something erratic ... about as far back as another  motorist would stay.)

Luck – Part II

As I approached the car, I was close enough to see, through the rear window, that the driver was male. Ka-ching! If you wondered earlier how I’d reckoned my odds were 50/50, here’s your answer: a male, observing any kind of challenge from another male, will generally be provoked to take action. Sure enough, this guy’s ego couldn’t handle the idea that a bicyclist—that is, a nerdy person using a child’s toy as though it were a vehicle—could match his speed. Naturally, he accelerated. Even at the higher speed, my workload was much reduced. I had a free ride, and unless L— had also closed the gap (I dared not look back to see), I was home free. In the event, he hadn’t … he never got my wheel.

So … yeah, man! I took the sprint! I fricking won!

Epilogue … so what?

Needless to say, though his tiny victory meant something to me (at least in the moment), it meant nothing to L—. It was just another day, another ride, another sprint. “That was fun,” was all he said later. And he was right.

So … is there anything to take away from this little tale? I think so. When I decided to rise to the occasion and contest the sprint, I figured my chances of prevailing were very, very small. And yet I took my shot anyway, because you just never know. Moreover, there would be no downside to losing, as that was practically inevitable to begin with. To succeed was a nice reminder that throwing everything you have at a challenge is actually sometimes enough.

And when we compare cycling to life, that’s where the real lesson is. Life is often (usually?) harder than sport, and in so much human endeavor we face terrible odds. I don’t know about you, but I seem to be blocked continually by obstacles that, in aggregate, can produce an overarching feeling of futility. But by continuing to show up, by continuing to dig deep into our personal grab bag of parlor tricks, lessons learned, and arcane capabilities, we can sometimes prevail. You never know when you might have a breakthrough … all you need is the right chain reaction of verve, tools, tactics, politics, shame, suffering, and a little luck.

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