Touché
As I coast to a stop at a red light in downtown Baltimore fully kitted up, a group of black teens standing on the corner decked in hip-hop gear see me and sense an opportunity. “Yo, you know Lance Armstrong?” “No,” I reply. “You guys know Jay-Z?” “Awwww, shit,” they retort with laughter and wry smiles. I’ve passed their test. We’re cool.
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The point of no return
I was talking with a good bike racer friend not long ago. We’d come up through the ranks together, familiar fixtures on and off the front of lower category races, great rivals, and just about absolutely equal in all respects. If you were given both our power profiles, they’d be indistinguishable. Though we’d sportingly crossed swords more than once this spring, he had been absent from the peloton since late May. His job had him swamped, robbing him of both the time and energy to...
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On form. And letting it go.
“Is that all you want me to do?” was the question I posed skeptically to my coach after reviewing the next block of training he had prescribed. I should know better. Throughout the season we become accustomed to small cycles, three weeks of hard work followed by a week of diminished volume to allow ourselves to rest, recover, and regenerate so we might continue our ascent, pushing our boundaries toward uncharted levels of strength. But somehow the long arc, and especially its inevitable but imperative...
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Beginners Mind
How many great ideas have passed through my head while training? I really can’t say. Used to be that when a stroke of brilliance announced itself mid-ride I’d hit the brakes, straddle my bike on the side of the road, whip out my iPhone, remove it from its protective baggie, and record a voice memo, archiving the idea that was sure to float away into the ether had I kept pedaling. There was also a time when I’d fill my iPod with playlists carefully designed...
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The Rider
I believed that, while cycling, I would come up with thoughts and ideas for the stories I’d be writing the rest of the time. Fat chance. The rest of my time I spent jotting in my cycling logbook and keeping statistics on my distances and times, and while cycling I thought of nothing at all. On a bike your consciousness is small. The harder you work, the smaller it gets. Every thought that arises is immediately and utterly true, every unexpected event is something you’d...
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