Old Yarn - The Enemy Coach

Vlog

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Introduction

This is the third “old yarn” installment on albertnet (inspired by my pioneering effort “The Cinelli Jumpsuit” and the subsequent post “Bike Crash on Golden Gate Bridge”). This is the kind of story that would normally be a “From the Archives” item, except I’ve never before written it down.

(Here’s what I looked like around the time this story takes place. You can see how scrawny, goofy, and yet somehow self-possessed I was.)

The Enemy Coach - Spring 1988

I realized the other day that I’m in my tenth year of coaching high school mountain bike racers. I had no idea, when I started out, that I would stick with it this long, but it’s been a blast so why stop? Something my student athletes don’t know (and there’s no real point in telling them) is that before becoming a NICA coach in NorCal, I already had experience coaching.

Decades ago, after high school, I took a gap year and moved to California to get residency, to lower my future college tuition costs. During that time I had several jobs, including a gig canning underwear, another answering phones at a radio station (yes, that was me taking the 9th caller who won the free passes), and a third working in a bike shop. On the side, I coached a team of junior road cyclists. There were eight or ten of them, and they were part of a larger team, the San Luis [Obispo] Cycling Club, SLCC, which also had something like forty adults. This was in fall of 1987 through the summer of 1988.

The coaching was supposed to be a paid gig, something like $7/hour, but I don’t think I ever got paid. That was fine … my love of the sport was enough incentive. In general my role was to ride with the juniors, show them the ropes, drive them to races, console them after the races, and try to keep them from quitting. That last bit might seem uncharitable but it was in fact a real struggle, because bike racing is a very, very hard sport and as you can read here, here, here, here, and here, it can take a long time to get good at it.

It was kind of hard for me to build cred with these juniors because (as you’ve probably already grasped) I was scarcely older than they were. I considered but rejected the strategy of briefing them on my own (albeit modest) success as a junior road cyclist, because it would have sounded like (and, well, would have been) bragging, and after all talk is cheap. So I just did my best to explain and model the right technique. To the extent I talked about my own racing it was to describe how frustrating the sport was for me starting out, to impress upon them how normal that is.

Well, one early spring day, in March or April of 1988, our team director decided, as a treat, to bring in a big, fancy USCF-certified coach to run a one-day clinic. (The USCF was the United States Cycling Federation and was the governing body of road cycling; it’s now known as USA Cycling, or USAC.) We all met up at the bike shop that sponsored the team. I knew nothing about the USCF coach certification process but could only assume it was a complete joke, because from the very beginning this guy struck me as a clown.

Yeah, I know what you’re thinking … of course I would have it in for this guy, since here he was stealing my thunder. And sure, that’s part of it, but it’s not like I was immune to being impressed myself, and of course I was interested in getting whatever knowledge and insight I could from the guy. But right off the bat he showed his true colors by showing up on a bike with upturned, sawed-off handlebars. This was a somewhat fashionable fad among douchebags of that period. It was supposed to be aerodynamic and tell the world how fast you were on the flats. Here’s what that setup looked like:

Of course it defeated the purpose of the drop handlebar, an excellent design that remains the standard today because it gives the rider so many different ways to hold the bars over varied terrain. I scoffed at sawed-off bars even at the time, and in fact doubted it was actually more aero, based on the result of the Colorado state time trial championship the previous year.

(Quick aside on that. In 1987 my friends P— and J— were both on the 7-Eleven junior team, which gave the riders all free road bikes but had only one time trial bike to go around. The TT bike had a smaller front wheel, a down-sloping top tube, and upturned “bullhorn” style handlebars—the non-DIY version of what you see above. There was a bit of a debate over who got to use the TT bike for the state championship time trial. J— pushed his case harder, P— shrugged it off, and guess who ended up winning the race? P—, on his bog-standard road bike, and by a significant margin. Years after this, wind tunnel tests confirmed that the bullhorn bars are no more aero; only the hoop-shaped “clip-on” bars give an advantage.)

The other thing about this fancy certified coach is that, despite the temperature being in the lower- to mid-50s, he had bare legs. I’d spent all winter trying to teach my juniors to wear leg warmers when it’s cool, and maybe half of them had actually listened, but now that was out the window. The coach’s goal in eschewing leg warmers was obvious: he was showing off his big, shaved thighs. He was a sprinter, in fact more of a track rider than a roadie, and it showed. Of course there were stars in the kids’ eyes, which the guy’s swagger only increased. He talked constantly, and so much of what came out of his mouth was malarkey.

For example, he told the riders not to try to do two races on consecutive days: “Your body needs to recover. Target just one of the weekend’s races.” This flew in the face of what I’d been saying, which is that if we’re attending a race weekend, and are at the venue both days anyway, everyone should do both races, and that’s the best way to improve your day-to-day recovery. This blowhard also instructed the kids to figure out what they’re good at and focus on that instead of trying to do everything well … which is ridiculous because stage races require the full range of capabilities, and it’s fun to ride in the mountains even if you’re better at sprinting. I feared that my juniors would note the discrepancies between what I, their almost-peer coach, was saying vs. this big-thighed, USCF-certified, grown-up coach, and systematically un-learn everything I had tried to teach them.

My own coaching style was (and remains) just to ride, not talk too much, answer questions, and only provide tips during an obvious teachable moment. But this dude just loved to hold forth, and during our training ride kept up a steady stream of do this, don’t do that, etc. At no point did he acknowledge that I was even a coach, much less ask me if he was teaching something (e.g., a rotating paceline) that I’d already covered (which I had). I was just another kid to him, which—I will freely confess—caused a quiet animosity to mount in me. But what could I do? I just silently went along, wondering if this one clinic could effectively end my coaching gig by stripping away all the scraps of cred I’d managed to stitch together over the preceding months.

At the far point of our ride, before heading back toward the bike shop, the coach stopped us at a city park and said, “We’re going to do a drill here. It’s very important, in bike racing, to be able to jostle with other riders and not be afraid of some contact, of bouncing off each other. You also need to know the proper way to fall.” (I’m quoting this as though verbatim; obviously I’m paraphrasing from memory as best I can, but you catch the drift.) So he instructed the riders to ride around on the grass and bump into each other, to get a feel for that. I wasn’t so sure this was a good idea, since several of these kids were pretty new to the sport and might be a little freaked out, but what could I say? I stayed on the sideline and watched.

To my horror, this big stupid thick coach started riding around among the juniors like a big cat selecting his prey, and then knocking over one rider after another. What a dick! Just a big freaking bully, showing off by terrorizing my poor juniors! That was one of the thoughts racing through my mind. The other thought was: oh, good. This is gonna be AWESOME. Because this coach didn’t know about Road Warrior.

Road Warrior was a game my brothers and friends and I had invented and played at since we were like 12 or 13. It consisted of biking around on residential streets and trying to run each other into curbs, parked cars, and/or each other. It was not so different from what this douchey coach was doing, except it was on asphalt and was a more level playing field, our skill levels being similar. For the most part it was a game of chicken, though we did occasionally hit a car or the ground. Minor scrapes suffered in the process were as natural and expected as messing up the kitchen when you cook. The most important thing I learned from Road Warrior is the importance of staying low and getting underneath your opponent’s body. I noted the effectiveness of this when playing against the neighbor kid, a pretty tough hard-knocks type who had lived with various foster families and kept all their names, such that we referred to him as J— L— R— R— H-N—. (By protecting his privacy with initials I’ve ruined the almost poetic sound of all those two-syllable names strung together, but so be it). J— L— R— R— H-N— had street cred because was almost the only kid in Boulder, it seemed, who wasn’t completely white (nobody, not even he, knew what all ethnicities he had), plus he’d cut off half his thumb in shop class. Still, I’d naturally assumed I’d get the better of him, being a) bigger, and b) already a somewhat seasoned cyclist … but he was really, really good at Road Warrior, despite being on a BMX bike which we assumed would somehow be a disadvantage. From him I learned about coming in low.

(I was also no slouch at jostling in an actual race. In Colorado they’d often mix the already large junior field with the senior Category 3s, resulting in a peloton of well over a hundred riders. This photo is from just such a race, the 1987 Rocky Mountain News Criterium in Denver, snapped not long before I was taken out in a massive pileup.)

I didn’t do anything right away. Instead I waited a bit, savoring my anticipation of this coach’s comeuppance, letting him bully my juniors some more until I was sure at least a couple of them were fighting back tears. Then I casually rode over to the douchebag and took him out. He was absolutely astonished. I’m quite sure he’d never even considered this possible, and probably wasn’t even expecting anyone to challenge him. His dominance was of the untested Mike Tyson variety: run roughshod over your opponent because he’s too terrified to respond. Well, now he was on the ground.

He immediately leapt to his feet, climbed back on his stupid bike with its upturned bars, and came at me, certain that it was only the element of surprise that had allowed me to take him down. Wrong! I knocked him over like a damn bowling pin. Then I circled around to set up for the next bout, looking across my juniors to see their reaction. (You getting this, guys?) Another clash and the certified dumbass was on the ground again. He got angrier and angrier and his efforts got more forceful, but he just lacked the skill to accomplish anything. Eventually the juniors put their bikes down and just sat on the grass on the gentle hill at the edge of the park, watching and enjoying the spectacle. Finally, after I’d gone at least 8-0 in takedowns, the humiliated coach realized he wasn’t going to achieve anything except maybe a heart attack, and ended the drill.

The ride back to the shop was very quiet. And oddly, on my subsequent rides with the juniors, there was no trash talk about how badly I’d schooled the big bad USCF-certified coach (which trash talk I’ll confess I’d kind of been hoping to hear). In fact the enemy coach was never mentioned again; it was like he’d never existed. Which was, needless to say, totally fine with me.

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From the Archives - Fiction - Roommate

Introduction

It being a slow news day, here’s a bit of short fiction from my archives. Enjoy please enjoy.

Roommate – June 1, 1989

It was an art, really. Nobody cooked ramen‑spaghetti like Nick did (albeit because nobody cooked it at all). The process gave him solace. No matter what was going wrong with his day, he could always count on his keenly precise cooking techniques to assure him that all was not lost. He would think, “Well, the ramen’s perfect anyway. At least there’s one thing in my life I haven’t screwed up yet.”

But today, Nick knew something was wrong as soon as he stepped into the kitchen. His demon roommate had stunk the place up. Scott, whose entire diet consisted of beans and brown rice, was sick again and thought he could cure himself by drinking gallons of tea infused with garlic. Scott wasn’t the first one to try this delusional home remedy. Nick’s own brother had tried it, too … when he was eight.

The smell itself wasn’t the only problem. Beyond this, Scott had used Nick’s pot. Nick was used to his roommates using his kitchenware, but not this pot. It was a gift, like almost everything else, from a friend who had used it all through college. “If you can handle not having a handle, it’s a great pot,” she had said. She was referring to the steel stub that had once supported a wooden handle. The stub never heated up too much, since almost all Nick cooked in the pot was ramen. And it was the perfect ramen pot, being the perfect size for two packages.

Nick’s routine was like clockwork. While the water heated up, he would pour spaghetti sauce into his special bowl. He used to have an even better bowl, with a fill line for the sauce, but Scott had broken it. Sure, Nick couldn’t prove that Scott broke it; somebody started a crack and one day the bowl finally split in half. But Scott was his scapegoat. Every household needs one, he mused, and this demon roommate had earned the title. The bowl Nick used now was less handy, but cool anyway: a white china bowl with a blue Japanese‑looking fish on the bottom. One of Scott’s former roommates had left it behind when he abruptly dropped out of college, having gone crazy. As in, he was literally in a mental hospital.

Nick would put the bowl of spaghetti sauce in the microwave, but he wouldn’t start it right away. Once the water was boiling and the noodles were all separated, he would reduce the heat and then start the microwave. The sauce didn’t need to be very hot; cooking it served as a timer more than anything. On half power, the microwave would warm the sauce just enough. When the microwave timer showed one minute, he would turn the stove off completely. With the lid on, it would keep cooking. He doubted—no, he knew—that Scott never took this energy-saving step; Scott looked at conservation only from a financial standpoint, and therefore acquainted it with being cheap. As if he wasn’t a low-class, low-rent, low-tier guy to begin with. He might as well admit it.

As soon as the timer rang, Nick would test one noodle. If it was done, he would pour the noodles in the waiting colander, then slide them into the bowl atop the sauce. The warm sauce cooled the noodles just enough to eat immediately once stirred, with a good shake of powdered parmesan from the green cardboard shaker.

But today his pot was dirty. Scott had used it to boil his smelly tea. Scott stubbornly insisted on brewing the tea several times a day. He couldn’t make a whole pot in advance and reheat mugs of it throughout the day, because he couldn’t figure out the microwave oven. It was an old-dog-new-tricks situation (Scott was thirty-fricking-three). Nick tried to show him how the microwave worked, but Scott just refused to learn. All manner of electronics mystified him, which was ironic since he was getting his Master’s in computer science.

Scott never figured out how to use his digital watch, either. When Nick realized this, he played a trick: he set alarm to go off at 2:00 am every night, just to see if the demon roommate would finally sit down and figure out how to disable it. Amazingly, not only did Scott fail to learn this, but couldn’t even figure out how to silence the alarm mid-ring. It was as though he was afraid to push a single button on the watch. Instead he made a habit of putting the watch in his sock drawer every night so it wouldn’t wake him up.

How would this guy, upon finishing grad school, find a job in the computer industry? Rely on his good looks? Hardly. Okay, he wasn’t a bad-looking guy, but also wasn’t nearly as handsome as he himself believed. He was so damn proud of his highway‑patrolman mustache, he would just sit in front of the mirror admiring it, like Narcissus. Nick, laboring to suppress a sneer nearby, would eventually give himself away. Then Scott would say, “Yeah, you could never grow one of these, could you? That’s a shame. Man, I used to have a full beard. Looked damn good too. Did I ever show you the picture of that?” Nick would roll his eyes. Only about a thousand times. Scott would reiterate, “You never could grow one of these. It’s not in your genes. Guess you’re outta luck.” Nothing Nick could say would deter him. Scott would continue admiring his reflection, and Nick would just stand there wishing he had a gun.

Normally Nick didn’t have to worry about Scott using his special ramen‑pot, because it was steel. Scott, like a lot of paranoid people, equated aluminum pots with Alzheimer’s disease. But he took it a step further, avoiding steel as well. He had one stovetop-safe glass pot, but today it was covered in burnt rice, and the dirtbag had resorted to borrowing the ramen pot.

This was a guy who took liberties. He left messes, he borrowed your stuff, you might even find him in your own bedroom sitting in your chair listening to your stereo. He had an entitled air about him, like Goldilocks. He had even discarded his given name and rechristened himself Scott. He probably chose this just so he could nickname himself “the Scotsman,” despite being the farthest thing from Scottish. He loved to refer to himself in the third person. As in, “I met a young woman at the gym today and got her number. Looks like the Scotsman’s gonna get laid!”

Now Nick was in a rush—to zip home between classes and have a ramen spaghetti meal before rushing back for his next class required clockwork precision. Now his whole system was thrown off. When the microwave beeped he hastily pulled one long noodle from the pot, let it cool for a few seconds, and tested it. It was perfect—the gears in his machine seemed to be meshing again. He signed contentedly—and poured the noodles down the garbage disposal. The colander! He had completely forgotten it! And it was all because of the Scotsman throwing him off his game!

He was furious. His lunch—gone. No time to start over—he’d have to go hungry. Nick’s mind raced. Scott and that damn tea, he thought. I’ll get him for this. I’ll kill him! But how? Suddenly, he remembered the Winchester 30.06. He knew just how to get it, too. It was in his neighbor’s glass display case, and the neighbor’s eight-year-old kid had the key on a string around his neck. But that was the neighbor in his hometown, more than a thousand miles away, and that little eight‑year‑old was probably in high school by now. What could Nick do? There was always the chef’s knife . . . but he probably didn’t have the nerve. He didn’t doubt that he could overpower his roommate—he could envision the old dude’s brittle bones snapping like twigs. But there couldn’t be blood—then he would lose the damage deposit on the apartment. No, it would have to be clean—the perfect crime.

He didn’t have much time to hatch a revenge plot—Scott would be home by about five. He checked his watch, and was suddenly overcome with inspiration. Of course! The watch! As Nick watched the liquid crystal digits rolling over precisely, the seconds changing like magic, a plan unfolded before his eyes. The Scotsman had been talking nonstop about a meeting he was to have with the one professor on campus who still respected him. Scott freely—almost proudly—admitted that his flamboyant personality had irritated all the other professors to the point of complete alienation. And Nick knew a bit more than Scott had let on, since he had friends in the Computer Science department. Many people knew that Scott had virtually no hands‑on computer experience. Sure, he could write decent programs on paper, but that wouldn’t make him a real programmer. The ones who spent their entire lives in front of the computer—they would be competing for the jobs. For them, school was just a side‑show; they had been dominating the keyboards since they were teenagers. Scott, meanwhile, had spent ten years working at a factory after washing out in the white-collar world. Grad school was his second chance, but he needed to find a thesis advisor before he could finish his Master’s—and he had only one prospect left. Whether or not he could make a good impression at Friday’s meeting was up to him—until he decided not to wash that pot. Now, his fate was in Nick’s hands.

It was almost too simple. Nick would swipe Scott’s watch that night and change the alarm. The meeting was at 2:00 p.m.—he would set the alarm for 2:15. He envisioned the result: as the ignorant fool chatted with the professor, desperate to make a good impression, the watch would suddenly start beeping. The Scotsman, as shocked as the professor, would be powerless to stop the shrill “BEEP-BEEP-BEEP-BEEP! BEEP-BEEP-BEEP-BEEP!” For maybe five seconds, he would just listen to it, his face turning red, the professor becoming increasingly irritated by the unpleasant noise. Then, Scott would try in vain to muffle it with his hand. After about ten seconds, the professor would stare in disbelief as the computer science major clumsily fumbled with the band, finally stripping the delinquent watch from his wrist and shoving it in his pocket. The professor would realize the irony of the situation and burst out laughing. The damage already done, Scott could theoretically laugh with him, or make a futile excuse. But that wasn’t his nature. No, his explosive temper would take over, and he would blurt out something offensive and storm out of the room. He might reach the end of the hall before realizing that he had just ruined his last chance at getting a thesis advisor—and hence at getting his master’s degree in computer science. Once the word got out about his folly with the digital watch, and the ensuing loss of temper, he would be the laughingstock of the entire department.

Would the Scotsman then transfer to another school, to finally complete his degree? No chance. He was a quitter—always had been. A decade earlier, he’d received his first rejection slip from a magazine editor and immediately gave up all hope of becoming a writer, despite having a journalism degree. In like fashion, he would leave the university, unable to complete his goal, and return to the factory, a broken man. Nick’s revenge would be complete. And he couldn’t be punished! Even if he were convicted of tampering with Scott’s watch, was that a crime? In itself, no . . . Nick sat back, chuckling. It would indeed be the perfect crime.

Right around five, Scott arrived at the apartment, and between snorting, wheezing, and hacking up snot in the sink, he told Nick about this certain girl, who was so good looking, and not bitchy at all, but actually really sweet, and how he could tell she liked him, and how he wanted to “treat her to an active sex life.” Scott brushed his teeth, admired his reflection for a while, then continued his bedtime ritual by stashing his watch in the sock drawer. He was asleep within the hour, whereupon Nick retrieved the watch, put it in alarm set mode, expertly marched the digits across the screen until the alarm was set for 2:15 p.m., and returned the watch to its drawer. He had launched his magnificent plan and Scott would handle the rest, the mechanism of his own humiliation and rage set into motion like clockwork.

At precisely 2:28 the next afternoon, Nick looked up from his ramen to see the Scotsman crash through the front door in a blind rage. He crossed the room and began smashing his already bloody fist into the fridge. He spouted profanities, mingled with “professor” and “watch,” until he glanced over at Nick and fell silent. Nick, wiping tomato sauce from his chin, innocently asked, “What’s the matter?”

Then, as he locked eyes with the demon roommate, he found he was no longer able to keep a poker face. He jumped up, anticipating the attack, and when the Scotsman reached him, Nick let him have it.

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