040118
It might as well be lobsters crawling out of my ears…. What is this place? Where are we? It is April 1 and I am watching it snow balls deep outside and NO ONE IS DOING ANYTHING ABOUT IT. Why is this happening to me? 2018 is meant to be the year of Richter’s Redemption, after all. I am gordram feggin pissed off about this weather and no amount of watching Return of the Jedi whilst riding the trainer will ease my suffering! Can anyone help? To whom must we petition regarding this awful misery? Zeus? Achilles? Shiva? Jesus? Siddharta Gautama? Captain Picard? I AM SERIOUSLY GOING BERSERKER RIGHT NOW and I need to be riding my bike in the sunshine and heat and doing intervals and whatnot but I can’t because of this shite weather and so Bri and I are reduced to riding the Breakfast of Chicapmions Loop at 7AM because that is the only window in the day when it isn’t pissing down rain or snow or hail or the wind isn’t blasting us at 30mph. And that is no way to build race fitness, no sireeeeeee…..
The REAL way to build fitness is to go down to Chattanooga and try and keep up with Rachel on those horrible long hills! WAIT WAIT Wait wait wait wait…just a minute now and slow down and explain yourself, Christopher. Right. On we go. So…I have long wanted to go to Chatt with Bri and Harry and Rachel and the crew and experience this magical mystery tour that they have been hounding me about for years and now I can proudly say that I have properly experienced this very Voluptuous piece of earth and I pronounce it goodeegumdrops. I rode for three days with the Gray Goat-Bullseye gals and if I thought beforehand that they wouldn’t challenge me enough to get my engine firing, I was very, very wrong. This is a legitimate, hard-working, dedicated, professional outfit and these girls are fast. Much power was on display and a whole shitload of twisty, long, grinding, forever going forward and up, up, up and over the horizon black tarmac lent itself to us for the purpose of simple pedaling and paradigm-changing pain.
Ask Rachel what I mean about that last sentence. We all rode together down in Chatt. Myself, Bri, Rachel, Harry, Tom, Betsy, and Lil’ Bit (Faith). Jenette had to stay home for work, unfortunately, but I am told that she can rip legs off with the best of them. Tom and I drove down after I got off work at 7pm on Thursday. I picked he and his giant veins up in B-town and we drove at a speed that I calculated would get us there very, very quickly with only a slight risk of a reckless driving conviction. I drive fast. I cannot help this. I will forever drive fast and none of you can convince me that driving at a moderate speed is better. The left lane is MINE. The Toyota Prius is a moving speed bump and should you feel the need to nudge one out of your way while driving to work, I think that is acceptable.
This makes me think of the topic of odds and risk. Risk is a thing which I have played with all of my life. The word itself is a very brittle thing. Risk. It sounds like it’s made of a bunch of little dry sticks. Easy to crunch into bits and whisk away into the ether or use as kindling or something. I will expound upon the topic of risk in another piece, perhaps. It is worth exploring. It has colored my life in many deep and fascinating ways and I owe much of my current state of mind, that is to say, a fair bit of peace and happiness, to risk, the teacher.
So anyway I picked up Tom and we drove at top speed down the highway and into the city streets and then into county roads and smaller and smaller roads that turned into a goat-trail or something…I don’t really know how to properly describe the workmanship of the pavement down in those hollers. it’s like they just skipped the first three steps of road-building (earth-moving, compacting, leveling - (I really don’t know the first three steps of road building but I assume those three things are usually necessary)) and went straight to dropping hot asphalt on said goat trails just to get the damn job done quicker. Harry drove us all to get dinner in the Sleek Black Minivan and I almost threw up due to the twists and turns and tree stumps that we had to drive over and my inner ear fluid all sloshing around. Three pieces of hastily-swallowed pizza later and I was in bed and out like a light in a bunk bed in a dungeon basement underneath Tom and his veins which I was sure would burst at any moment and it was so dark that you just knew that if you had to go pee during the night you would bash your knee on some cabinet or bed frame and that was night one.
The next three days were filled with riding up very long, winding hills chasing Rachel and Faith and Bri as they were doing serious training trying to take Strava segments every chance they got and I was honestly surprised at how fit they all were. Betsy was nursing an injury but rode like a trooper until her recently-stitched leg wound started ripping open and the blood loss became a very real issue. Oh the things you have to deal with on training camps… So uphill forever and ever and I pretty much rode tempo up the hills and went hard when I felt like it and ended up setting a PR for 10-minute power so that was pretty cool. I enjoyed watching Faith do her best to keep up with Rachel as she was ripping up the steep sections out of the saddle. Faith is basically like a tiny but very powerful battery that is either on full-blast or shut down completely. She can fly uphill and does not like it when Rachel drops her on the steepest sections. Definitely one to watch this year and for years to come. When the rides were over she was asleep within minutes of reaching home base in her blanket tents. Fun stuff. It’s interesting getting beat by girls on those long climbs. Harry, Tom, and I took it in stride, I think, because we are old and wise and very aware that we may have a heart attack trying to keep up with people who put out almost as much power as us but who weigh half as much. Getting old sucks. But we’re not that old. And we may still have a few wins betwixt us yet to come. It’s a solid bet.
THE LAST DAY: The last day was meant to be a quick couple of climbs over maybe 40 miles or so and then blast off back home. And that is definitely what we set out to do. But then climb number three became a topic of choppy-sounding discussion as we pedaled along numbly in the mist. Suck Creek? Yeah……..why not we said and don’t worry, Chris, it’s right here! ….see? Why do I never know when a climb is about to start? I hate that shit. But we started climblng straight away and straight away Rachel attacked out of the saddle and I almost stayed with the rest of the bunch and rode tempo but then something made me jump up and dance on up with the Flying Limey. Rachel and I rode two-up up that hill and I am not joking when I tell you that it was a transformative experience. We started out at a good tempo…she probably has a fairly close w/kg to me actually. No joke. I am a fairly decent masters crit racer and she is a very good national-caliber road and crit racer and I think we were just by chance evenly matched as far as uphill speed was concerned that day.
The weather on the hill was that sort of eerily still misty-thick air where you can actually see the water vapor whirling around you and sticking itself to every thread of clothing and every hair on your body. The sides of the road were heaving, puffing grey shrouds and you had to be very careful not to run over a squirrel or a blacksnake darting out of that thick nebula in which we found ourselves. And on and on we rode up and up and I was out of the saddle half the time, which is how I usually climb hills, and Rachel was smooth in the saddle and we were in a good rhythm up until about the halfway point, which is when Adversity decided to join us in our fun little ride and then I heard Rachel make a sound like a pissed off jackrabbit with one foot caught in a trap. Was I cracking her? I certainly didn’t mean to. I just suddenly had good legs and she just suddenly found herself on the fast train to Deadwood without a ticket.
At this point in the story, our hero, Rachel Langdon, found herself presented with a distressing situation and a choice to make. We (all of us bike riders) all have experienced the sensation of knowing we can perform at a certain level on a certain piece of road at a given point in time but at that particular time found ourselves with legs that said “maybe” and a mind that said “I don’t want to.” This is a very crucial moment in life. I imagine that most people have been presented with a similar-feeling choice at some point in their lives and it doesn’t necessarily have to do with a sport like cycling. It could be a business decision, or a move in a game of chess, or even deciding whether or not to put down the wheels on a 747 while landing a redeye flight into JFK. The point is… did Rachel choose to flail and bail like a loser or did she choose to buck up and follow me as I “encouraged” her up the hill by shouting insults at her in a harsh but loving sort of way and with a very good East End British accent. Thankfully she chose the latter. We rode very hard the rest of the way up the hill…very quietly, me leading when necessary and she leading when she got in a good rhythm. It is quite a nice thing to suffer side by side with someone who knows exactly how you are feeling at that moment and who is also relying on you to be there as a form of psychological aid in their time of pain…and hesitation….and doubt. And that is how the psychology of that hill played out that day. Rachel made the correct decision and stomped on the pedals and we went full gas up that damned hill and I think she got the QOM (and I was probably 733rd or so for the segment). But I know that it took a good deal of guts to make that decision to finish that hill strong with me and I know that that sort of experience shapes and polishes a person’s mind and constitution and both of us left Chatt a little bit stronger, in those regards, than when we got there.
And that’s just about enough, I think. It is now around midnight and a Harry Potter movie is playing on the TV and that sounds like a good way to fall asleep. I will go to Chatt again and I will be more prepared for the hills. I think I could do some good times up those big brutes if I knew more than ten seconds beforehand that they were starting. And so I will close by saying these things: Drive fast enough to truly scare yourself…at least once in your life. It is so fun. When faced with a difficult choice involving high risk with potentially high reward, GO FOR IT! Life is short but it can be very fun if you just take off the blinders and hit the gas every now and then. Oh and be nice to animals. You can tell a lot about a person by the way they treat living things that are a bit lower on the evolutionary scale.
I’m out………..snore.
-C
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